>Content Generation
I'm working on AI tools for teachers and I can confidently say that GPT is just unbelievably good at generating explanations, exercises, quizes etc. The onus to review the output is on the teacher obviously, but given they're the subject matter experts, a review is quick and takes a fraction of the time that it would take to otherwise create this content from scratch.
Which all takes valuable time us teachers are extremely short on.
I've been a classroom teacher for more than 20 years, I know how painful it is to piece together a hodge podge of resourecs to put together lessons. Yes the information is out there, but a one click option to gather this into a cohesive unit for me saves me valuable time.
>95% of my time an mental capacity in this situation goes for deciding what makes sense in my particular pedagogical context? What wording works best for my particular students?
Which is exactly what GPT is amazing at.Brainstorming, rewriting, suggesting new angles of approach is GPTs main stength!
>Explanations are even harder.
Prompting GPT to give useful answers is part of the art of using these new tools. Ask GPT to speak in a different voice, take on a persona or target a differnt age group and you'll be amazed at what it can output.
> I find out almost daily that explanations which worked fine in last year, don't work any more
Exactly! Reframing your own point of view is hard work, GPT can be an invaluable assistant in this area.
No, it isn't. It just increases noise. I don't need any more info, I need just to make decisions "how?".
> Prompting GPT to give useful answers is part of the art of using these new tools. Ask GPT to speak in a different voice, take on a persona or target a differnt age group and you'll be amazed at what it can output.
I'm not amazed. At best it sounds like some 60+ year old (like me) trying to be in the "age group" 14 while after only hearing from someone how young people talk. Especially in small cultures like ours here (~1M people).
So sorry, we're back to spam generator. Even if it's "good spam".
a bit dramatic. there has to be an adjustment of teaching/assessing, but nothing that would "ruin" anyone's life.
>So sorry, we're back to spam generator. Even if it's "good spam".
is it spam if it's useful and solves a problem? I don't agree it fits the definition any more.
Teachers are under immense pressure, GPT allows a teacher to generate extension questions for gifted students or differentiate for less capable students, all on the fly. It can create CBT material tailored to a class or even an individual student. It's an extremely useful tool for capable teachers.
Every year there are thousands of graduate teacher looking for tools to help them teach better.
>good teachers I know can generate them on the spot
Even the best teacher can't create an interactive multiple choice quiz with automatic marking, tailored to a specific class (or even a specific student) on the spot.
I've been teaching for 20+ years, I have a solid grasp of the pain points.
here's an example of a question and explanation which aligns to Australian Curriculum elaboration AC9M9A01_E4 explaining why frac{3^4}{3^4}=1, and 3^{4-4}=3^0
https://chatgpt.com/share/89c26d4f-2d8f-4043-acd7-f1c2be48c2...
to further elaborate why 3^0=1 https://chatgpt.com/share/9ca34c7f-49df-40ba-a9ef-cd21286392...
This is a relatively high level explanation. With proper prompting (which, sorry I don't have on hand right now) the explanation can be tailored to the target year level (Year 9 in this case) with exercises, additional examples and a quiz to test knowledge.
This is just the first example I have on hand and is just barely scratching the surface of what can be done.
The tools I'm building are aligned to the Austrlian Curriculum and as someone with a lot of classroom experience I can tell you that this kind of tailored content, explanations, exercises etc are a literal godsend for teachers regardless of experience level.
Bear in mind that the teacher with a 4 year undergrad in their specialist area and a Masters in teaching can use these initial explanations as a launching pad for generating tailored content for their class and even tailored content for individual students (either higher or lower level depending on student needs). The reason I mention this is because there is a lot of hand-wringing about hallucinations. To which my response is:
- After spending a lot of effort vetting the correctness of responses for a K-12 context hallucinations are not an issue. The training corpus is so saturated with correct data that this is not an issue in practice.
- In the unlikely scenario of hallucination, the response is vetted by a trained teacher who can quickly edit and adjust responses to suit their needs
“Here are some sharepoint locations, site Maps, and wikis. Now regurgitate this info to me as if you are a friendly call center agent.”
Pretty cool but not much more than pushing existing data around. True AI I think is being able to learn some baseline of skills and then through experience and feedback adapt and be able to formulate new thoughts that eventually become part of the learned information. That is what humans excel at and so far something LLMs can’t do. Given the inherent difficulty of the task I think we aren’t much closer to that than before as the problems seem algorithmic and not merely hardware constrained.
Which is extremely valuable!
>Pretty cool but not much more than pushing existing data around.
Don't underestimate how valuable it is for teachers to do exactly that. Taking existing information, making it digestable, presenting it in new and interseting ways is a teacher's bread and butter.
Are you suggesting a chatbot is a suitable replacement for a teacher?
No I'm saying that a chatbot can be a superhuman teacher's assistant.
