Have you heard all the hype about ChatGPT and what it may do for education? The application uses artificial intelligence (AI) to write original text, answer questions, and learn as it’s doing it. It may someday become the best teaching assistant for every educator.
ThinkFives asked the application itself to share superlatives that people have been saying about it. Here is the answer ChatGBT software provided:
- Powerful
- Advanced
- Intelligent
- Natural
- Human-like
- Accurate
- Versatile
- State-of-the-art
Imagine if it’s all that? It very well might be. ThinkFives is enthusiastic about the growing use of artificial intelligence apps like ChatGPT and is happy to share why.
What is ChatGPT and Why Should Teachers Get Excited?
ThinkFives asked ChatGPT to describe itself so that a high school student could understand.
“GBT” or “Generative Pre-trained Transformer” is like a robot that is really good at understanding and making up sentences, like a writer robot. It was made by some smart people called researchers, and they taught it how to understand and write sentences by showing it a lot of writing examples. Now it can help teachers and students with writing and language tasks, like writing stories or grading essays. It’s called “Generative” because it can make up new sentences and “Pre-trained” because it was taught before it can be used to help.
How does this apply to education? ChatGPT can perform tasks for teachers in realtime.
Tasks that ChatGBT can perform for teachers include the following:
- Quickly generate lesson plans
- Provide personalized tutoring
- Create quizzes and tests
- Provide feedback on writing submissions
- Generate writing prompts
- Explain complex concepts
- Respond to student questions
- Summarize key information
- Translate text to other languages
- Create interactive activities
What Would be a Cool Example?
ChatGPT generates human-like text. This means that it can write stories, articles, and even poetry that are indistinguishable from those written by a human. Additionally, ChatGPT has been trained on a wide range of topics, so it can write about a variety of subjects with a high level of coherence and fluency.
It can also be fine-tuned for specific tasks, such as writing in a specific style or for a specific audience.
What does that mean? You can tell ChatGPT to:
- Write an original short story or poem.
- Change the grade level and write for young students.
- Give the characters the names of your students.
- Include a place or historical context of choice.
- Rewrite for any length, style, or emotion.
- Include morale for the story of your choice.
- Offer 3 different endings.
And we are just scratching the surface.
How will it Revolutionize Teaching?
ChatGPT has the potential to revolutionize the way we teach and learn. It can assist teachers with tasks such as writing and grading essays, creating lesson plans, and even providing personalized feedback to students. This can save teachers a significant amount of time and effort, allowing them to focus on other important aspects of their job. Additionally, ChatGPT can also help with language translation and accessibility for students with disabilities. This can make the classroom experience more inclusive and equitable for all students.
Another cool example:
ChatGPT can create a reading sample on a topic of your choosing, fiction or nonfiction.
- ChatGPT is capable of customizing the reading sample exactly for your needs.
- ChatGBT can decide the length, grade level, or emotion.
- Rewrite it to change the style to something you like.
- Create multiple-choice or fill-in questions about the main idea, inference, or any of the other combinations of standards you are teaching.
- Create an answer key for you.
- Create a 30-minute lesson plan for you with goals, objectives, resources, and outcomes.
- Provide 3 different activities so you can differentiate learning to your groups.
And it will do all that in under a minute! Write your request well, and you can get it in under 30 seconds!
Are there Concerns with this Technology?
The short answer is: definitely. While ThinkFives is bullish about this technology for teachers, the news is filled with concerns and challenges that the technology raises. We asked ChatGPT to address the concerns about ethics and plagiarism.
“While ChatGPT is incredibly useful, it does raise some ethical questions. One concern is that it could potentially be used to copy and plagiarize work. It is important for teachers to set clear guidelines and expectations for the use of the technology in their classrooms to ensure that it is being used ethically.
Teachers should also educate their students on the proper use of technology, and the importance of original work and academic integrity. Additionally, it is important to ensure that the technology is not used to replace human interaction and instruction, but rather to supplement it.”
We applaud ChatGPT’s sense of self-honesty but the challenges for teachers will be daunting. Teachers and schools need to have open and honest discussions about:
- Student data privacy issues – What can be shared and what shouldn’t be?
- Hallucinations – ChatGPT is not perfect and does at times provide answers that make no sense or are factually wrong. Teachers and students need to be aware of this.
- Bias – OpenAI spent a year working on the bias of its responses but like any site, answers should be read for bias.
- Plagiarism – Schools need to define policies for student use
- Equity – AI is a powerful tool and schools need to make sure all students have equal access.
It may take years to define these issues and evolve with this technology. What’s more, it is likely that once we establish reasonable guidelines, the technology will improve and create even more challenges. Education is at the very earliest stage with this technology.
Can You Show Me More Examples?
If we haven’t whet your appetite with the possibilities that this technology promises, we will use our #1 spot to show you 5 more examples.
Write a Historical Passage
Create a Multiple-Choice Question on a Standard
Provide Feedback on this Writing Sample
Explain a Complex Concept
Summarize a Long Article
Resource
What do you think about this application?
I haven’t checked this out yet. However, I’m very interested in it being able to write tests and quizzes for me as well as being able to differentiate reading passages! Yes please!
Interesting. Challenging. Lots of adjectives to describe this new technology! 🤔😳🤯