To Teach With or Without ChatGPT?

ChatGPT

One of the biggest conundrums in the education world today is to decide whether or not to integrate AI with education. After ChatGPT was released in November 2022, many schools, colleges and universities jumped to action and decided to ban it in different parts of the world including India, France and USA. AI tools such as ChatGPT and plenty of others have acquired a controversial position in the education community.

Some educators feel they would be replaced by AI. Some feel students could misuse AI to complete their coursework. Some feel AI could be a powerful source that can aid teaching-learning process and help us accomplish the things that were humanly not possible.

So, here’s the thing about AI – it is not going anywhere. And neither are teachers.

We already have driverless cars, robotic surgeries, personalized shopping recommendations, voice assistants and so many other AI use cases that have been around for quite some time now. With time, the penetration of AI will increase in every aspect of our life. Therefore, depriving students of AI during their academic years would be akin to shielding them from reality.

As educators, we have a great opportunity to guide students on the right and effective use of AI with self-regulation as this will be one of the most preferred skills in the near future. After all, our role is to prepare students for life. Right?

In this article, we will explore how to use ChatGPT to make our teaching more efficient and effective. Before we get started, here’s one thing that we need to understand as educators – Al will change how we teach in many significant ways.

Adapting to it sooner can catapult you ahead of your peers, enabling you to accomplish your goals faster and better than ever. You could also become a mentor or guide for your peers who might be slow to adapt to it.

So, here are some fundamental ways of using ChatGPT as teachers.

Delegate Admin Tasks

According to a McKinsey survey, globally teachers work on an average of 50 hours a week. In the same survey, they found that teachers were spending about 20-40% of their time on administrative tasks. As a result, they spend less time in direct teaching tasks such as lesson planning, lesson delivery, engaging with students, guiding and mentoring.

ChatGPT is like a free assistant that every teacher can use to get their work done faster without comprising on the quality. Writing general announcement emails to parents could be delegated to it. With the right prompts and briefs, the AI tool is capable of creating highly professional emails. If you want to add personal touch to your emails, you can do so by editing ChatGPT’s draft and still end up saving a lot of time. Other repetitive tasks such as creation of reports and work summaries as well as grading and evaluation could be taken up by ChatGPT saving considerable amounts of time and efforts which could be used in more effective ways.

Break Language Barriers

Many teachers struggle to teach students coming different cultural and linguistic backgrounds due to language barriers. Students often are not as fluent in the medium of instruction practiced by an institute. Such students suffer huge learning losses diminishing the overall impact of education. With ChatGPT, teachers could impart multi-lingual teaching. You can easily translate any piece of text in different languages based on the needs of your students. The tool gives immense power to teachers to break the language barriers and impart equitable education to every student in the class.

Check Language Correctness

ChatGPT can easily correct a chunk of text or paragraphs in any language. Not just that, it also shows the number of errors in a particular paragraph and the nature of those errors. This helps teachers evaluate essays and assignments better and faster. The AI-powered chat bot lists down each error, even unintelligible sentences that make no sense, and explains the mistake to the user. This feedback could be a great for students to avoid making mistakes and get better at any particular language. It also makes it easy to compare two pieces of texts and their correctness. The result can enable teachers to track the progress made by a student — see if the errors are repeated, reduced in numbers and so on.

Create tests, assessments, assignments and more

Many teachers around the world have realized the power of ChatGPT in creating activities, assessments and tests for students. With simple prompts, the tool can generate True/False, Fill in the blanks, Multiple Choice Questions, Quizzes etc. for any given text or collection of paragraphs. All you have to do is use a prompt such as Create 10 True/False questions from the given text, and in seconds you have your questions ready. In fact, teachers can also create classroom activities and exercises pertaining to any lesson and generate application-oriented assignments using the tool. ChatGPT is already proving to be a game-changer for educators in this area.

Get additional recommendations

As ChatGPT is trained on extremely large datasets including web pages, books, sites, and more, recommendations and references is one area where it can outsmart any teacher. It can do a great job in searching the web to find additional learning material in the desired format when requested by the teacher. The teacher can directly ask the tool to give references of books or URLs through which students could access more information about any topic. They could also get custom results for different kinds of learners — auditory, visual, kinesthetic etc.

Right Time to Lead the Way

Many teachers are still being apprehensive of using ChatGPT to perform their professional activities. While they are figuring it out, you could take the lead and put their concerns to rest. You could try the tool, develop different use cases for teachers of your institute and train them to use it in effective ways. You could also train them on how to train their students on self-regulation and ethical guidelines around using this tool. We should be using technology to accomplish our real goals as teachers — to build positive learning environments, establish collaboration and connection among students, identify individual strengths and encourage students to nurture them, become a moral guide, develop their emotional intelligence and be a mentor to them. None of these tasks could be delegated to robots and therefore, our jobs are safe and secure. Also, it’s worth mentioning that AI is still in its infancy and we don’t quite know its full scope or how the future will look like. ChatGPT is just an aid and it should be treated as such. Yes, it gives us a lot of power but it also gives our students a lot of power and leeways to tweak the system to their immediate advantage. However, these benefits are short-lived leading to wider knowledge gaps. As teachers, the onus is on us to build a robust education system without loopholes using technology. To do that, we have to constantly upgrade the way we teach, give out assignments and grade our students. With better technological infrastructure, we should be building better, not weaker systems of learning. Do let us know in comments how you use ChatGPT as a teacher. TeachPro+ is a community portal dedicated to the growth and development of teachers. We have recently launched our Teacher’s program called iTeach 101 which an increasing number of professional educators, trainers and coaches are benefiting from. If you’re interested to know more about it, you can check it out here.
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