I’m sure none of us can escape the term ‘AI’ (artificial intelligence) these days. Whether it’s seeking assistance in composing a tricky email or generating avatars for our social media profiles on platforms like TikTok or Lensa (guilty as charged!), AI seems to be everywhere.

While we often hear about the impending AI revolution and its potential to reshape our world, we don’t always hear about its direct link to the classroom and how teachers can harness its power to bring out the best in their students. In a thought-provoking article for The Atlantic, Stephen Marche stated, “The college essay is dead,” highlighting how AI, such as ChatGPT, has the potential to revolutionize education- from its foundations all the way to graduation. While it’s true that ChatGPT can produce vast amounts of information within minutes when given a well-written prompt, this presents educators with a unique opportunity to reshape their teaching methods and assessment approaches.

So, in the spirit of “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em,” I’m here to share some exciting ways of incorporating AI into your teaching toolkit. These methods are safe, engaging, and suitable for teachers of all ages and styles. After all, the children we educate are growing up in a world where AI is more commonplace than ever, so why not lead by example?

Worksheets

If we’re honest, how often do we create our own worksheets completely from scratch? In most cases, we either follow a scheme that our school provides, or we scour the internet to find something that is “close enough” to what we’re looking for. But there’s no need to settle anymore; you can ensure that your worksheets are always exactly what you’re looking for whilst sitting back and sipping your 4th coffee of the morning.

Using ChatGPT ensures that your worksheet is bespoke to your classes’ needs, addresses any specific skills they struggle with and directly links with that year group’s age-related expectations. It can also differentiate the worksheet as many ways as needed to ensure each child’s ability is appropriately pushed and supported. Not only this, but you can ask ChatGPT to produce resources that specifically link to your humanities topic or to the current time of year, for example Autumn, Halloween, Christmas…

For example, whilst writing this blog, I tried a simple prompt to do just that:
‘I would like a worksheet that is Autumn themed for Year three (UK National Curriculum Expectations) on similes. I want the first challenge to be completing the sentence, then the second challenge to give them an object to create a simile about. Then, I would like a difficult bonus challenge at the end to push their learning.’

The chatbot then produced the worksheet’s content, which I could then copy and paste into Word and print ready for my lesson! Not only can this help classroom-based teachers, but TAs for intervention work, home-schooling educators and tutors alike! The best thing about ChatGPT is that its only limitation is its users’ imagination.

Bringing Historical Figures to Life

When it’s time to dive into history, or even an artist or author you’re studying, why not bring important figures to life? With ChatGPT, children can have their own personal time-traveling companion who can roleplay as any legend you desire. Whether it’s King Henry VIII or Leonardo da Vinci, ChatGPT is your backstage pass to their lives, dreams, and accomplishments.

For the purposes of writing this blog, I asked ChatGPT to take on the role of Queen Victoria. It was able to tell me many aspects of her life, such as her hobbies, her family and the key legislation she brought into being during her reign. By using this capability, children are gaining valuable reading skills in asking questions, comprehension and summarising when turning the output into a non-chronological report, newspaper article or diary entry! If I know the kids that have been in my class at all, I can say that the minute they have ownership of their own research or learning outcomes, their engagement skyrockets.

Guided Reading

Linking on from the reading skills mentioned in the previous section, ChatGPT is also able to write guided reading questions within seconds that focus on different aspects of learning- it can even tailor directly to VIPERS if you ask it to!

If you’re reading a class text, as long as it was written before 2021 (the current version of ChatGPT was only allowed access to the internet until that point), you can ask for questions to test comprehension, retrieval, inference, questioning and summary! Not just this, but it can generate chapter specific glossaries if you feed it the key vocabulary. This is amazing for pre-teaching, for creating vocabulary mats for EAL children and to ensure children are grasping the words that they’re reading.

Writing Stimuli

Searching for an exciting and relevant writing prompt for children, whether for assessment or to aid thematic learning, can be problematic. There are plenty of free-to-use image generating AI bots out there, from the super easy-to-use Imagine to the more robust and powerful (albeit complex) Midjourney. You can input anything into them and get out a completely bespoke image that slots right into your planning.

Let’s use Imagine as an example and say you’re studying the Egyptians right now. If you type in a simple command for an image (see what I wrote below!) and wait for up to 60 seconds, out pops an image that you can insert straight into your teaching slides for your Year 3 class, or perhaps for the children who still require visual prompts in higher year groups.

Just make sure to check the background of your images too… sometimes
it gets a little confused. Here’s another image it created where I’m not too
sure what the second carving’s getting up to…

Emulating Artists

When looking at a particular artist throughout both the primary and secondary curriculum, a way to shake up your teaching is to use Midjourney to allow children to explore their style. By adding ‘in the style of X’ to the end of your Midjourney or Imagine prompts, you can (with a little tinkering!) obtain images of virtually anything you desire. See below for some of my examples, including ‘a fashionable frog in the style of Claude Monet’, and a ‘Halloween painting in the style of Keith Haring.’

So, with the AI revolution knocking at our classroom doors, there’s no time like the start of a new academic year to welcome in the digital renaissance and its bag of magic tricks for the benefit of our own teaching practice. However, if you’re anything like me, I can do little else other than apologise for the hours you’ll inevitably spend producing ridiculous images on Midjourney and Imagine…

For advice on what to do with the images and worksheets you produce with the help of AI, and how to turn them into a second stream of income, look out for next month’s blog, ‘Money for Old Hat’. As a seller of teaching resources on various marketplaces online, I’ll be sharing some tips for how to get started and what sells!

For now, feel free to peruse the link below to familiarise yourself with what an online store for resources might look like!

Lauren Austin ????✏️

https://tinyurl.com/lostinlearningtpt