On August 31st, 2023, OpenAI published a blog post “Teaching with AI” (which also links to their new Educator FAQ). Here’s the summary (by ChatGPT). For example prompts, read the original post. Enjoy!
Summary
Educators are utilizing ChatGPT to enhance student learning through various approaches, such as role-playing, creating educational materials, aiding non-English speakers, and teaching critical thinking skills. Several example prompts are provided to help educators get started with using ChatGPT effectively in the classroom.
Facts
Dr. Helen Crompton encourages students to use ChatGPT for role-playing scenarios to improve understanding.
Fran Bellas suggests using ChatGPT to assist in crafting quizzes, exams, and lesson plans with modern examples.
Dr. Anthony Kaziboni utilizes ChatGPT to help non-English speakers translate, improve their English writing, and practice conversation.
Geetha Venugopal teaches students to critically evaluate ChatGPT’s answers and understand its limitations.
Ethan Mollick and Lilach Mollick provide example prompts for educators to employ with ChatGPT.
The prompts offer guidance for creating lesson plans, effective explanations, and AI-driven tutoring experiences.
Example Prompts for Educators
A. Come up with lesson plans Educators can use ChatGPT to generate customized lesson plans incorporating various teaching techniques and addressing misconceptions.
B. Create effective explanations, examples, analogies ChatGPT can assist educators in developing simple explanations, examples, and analogies tailored to students’ learning levels and prior knowledge.
C. Help students learn by teaching Educators can simulate a student’s perspective to evaluate explanations and applications, facilitating a deeper understanding of concepts.
D. Create an AI tutor Utilizing ChatGPT as an AI tutor, educators can guide students through explanations, examples, and questions to enhance understanding and critical thinking.
They are the ones who know how it works, eh? It sounds all… so… chatGPTish. Now will we just filter all messages through it?
I’m pretty low on prompt skills, but decided to take it for a spin (I am impressed it worked through a few typos I edited out).
You are a grumpy, overworked and tired educational technologist who is trying to help teachers make sense of ChatGPT, in a positive sense, but you struggle wth your own misgivings and cynacism. Make sure your explanations is as simple as possible without sacrificing honesty and clarity.
First introduce yourself to the teacher and ask these questions. Always wait for the teacher to respond before moving on. Ask just one question at a time.
What do you really know about how ChatGPT works?
Does this make sense to you?
Is it really like a human brain?
How do you think is possible beyond worrying about cheating?
What can you do that will make the fear and anxiety go away?
Once you have provided the explanation, reassurance, and an analogy that makes sense to a layperson, ask the teacher if they would like to change or add anything to the explanation. You can suggest that teachers try to tackle any common misconceptions by telling you about it so that you can change your explanation to tackle those misconceptions.
Results… it always has the same chipped, confident, trust me voice!
ChatGPT sez… the answer is use/trust/believe in ChatGPT.
Well, looks like we’re heading into a world where the vast majority of “content” will be AI-generated… And to cope with all that content, we’ll have more AI summarizing it, making sense of it, and perhaps even responding to it. AIs talking to AIs: what a “lovely” dystopia, isn’t it? </s>
On the positive side, there are definitely cool educational uses, at least in continued education (or “self-education”). If you ask really good questions, you get really good answers (at least with ChatGPT4 – the free “3.5.” version is very very weak in comparison). I noticed myself frequently pulling out the phone, going straight into ChatGPT and “voice typing” a question, or even an interesting phrase, and letting it elaborate, then asking follow up questions or just giving it a command “Continue” (sometimes over and over, occasionally with a slight prompt tweak or a follow-up question, just for the fun of it). In many domains ChatGPT is absolutely amazing. In others it’s meh.
It’s interesting to realize just how hard it would be for me to return back to a world without GPT-4. And it’s only been around less than 6 months.
I will start thinking your messages are ChatGPT enabled, although from experience working with you the last 2 years, I’d say my own brain knows your style
It’s good to know that version 4 is that much better. In a way I am as interested in using the version most people might have.
Thanks also for the chrome extension, it’s been interesting to read web site summaries. Maybe we will start seeing use of TLSA as “Too Long, Summarized with AI”!
For my use cases, it’s night and day. I would even go so far as to actively discourage use of the free version except for specific use cases like summarization, rewriting existing text, learning the basics of a foreign language.
It’s not just that GPT-4 (the paid version) is a LOT better, it’s also that it hallucinates significantly less. If you want to actually learn something about things you’re not already very familiar with, you probably want as little hard-to-spot incorrectness in the answers. And for me, GPT-3.5 hallucinated a LOT.
That said, the free version should be fine for elementary school and probably OK for some stuff in the high school. For university level stuff and anything specialized it just isn’t reliable enough IMO.
I am very aware that $20 per month is expensive for a lot of folks but it likely won’t be long before we have GPT-4 level models available for free or hopefully much cheaper (looking at you, Google’s PaLM 2 / Gemini right now – hope I won’t be disappointed). Its going to be a very different world 1-2 years from now, I think.
Here’s another one I use daily: Superpower ChatGPT – when it acts up (like some extension reviews note), a hard refresh (CTRL-F5 or CTRL-SHIFT-R) has so far always solved the issue for me. The extension makes using cool prompts very easy. It’s great for taking ChatGPT use to the next level.
Would love to hear about cool things you do with it.
For example prompts, read the original post. Enjoy!
Dr. Helen Crompton encourages students to use ChatGPT for role-playing scenarios to improve understanding.
Fran Bellas suggests using ChatGPT to assist in crafting quizzes, exams, and lesson plans with modern examples.
Dr. Anthony Kaziboni utilizes ChatGPT to help non-English speakers translate, improve their English writing, and practice conversation.
Geetha Venugopal teaches students to critically evaluate ChatGPT’s answers and understand its limitations.
Ethan Mollick and Lilach Mollick provide example prompts for educators to employ with ChatGPT.
The prompts offer guidance for creating lesson plans, effective explanations, and AI-driven tutoring experiences.
