One simple way to wow your staffroom with AI at the start of next term
Here's a simple way to introduce AI into your school that has a bit of 'wow' factor. I've done this several times and it never fails.
Use ChatGPT to create a scheme of work, first lesson plan, sample resources, student guide, exam questions, exemplar paragraph and assessment of that paragraph… in 10-15 minutes
I find this a good one to start off as it has real wow factor. What you’re doing is taking what would probably be a week or more’s worth of work and compressing it into 10-15 minutes.
The final result won’t be complete and it will likely need to be tidied up, but that’s not the point. What you’re doing is showing time-saving potential. And we all need that in our lives let’s face it.
Just before I start: I would recommend upgrading to the ChatGPT Plus account for $20 a month. The capabilities of ChatGPT are significantly improved if you do so, as well as having access to a web browser function, code interpreter and plugins. However, if you decide not to, you can still get a reasonable response from ChatGPT-3.5, but it won’t have as much of the wow as GPT-4.
Here’s the step by step:
Prepare a Google Doc or Word file with copy pasted information from a syllabus. You’ll want the overview of the syllabus content, breakdown of the examination, assessment objectives, AO weightings and so on. It doesn’t need to be reformatted, just readable and reasonably clearly ordered. ChatGPT will do the rest.
Now, enter the following prompt into ChatGPT: I want you to act as a [insert subject] teacher. I will provide the syllabus details and you will provide me with a scheme of work to cover off all assessment requirements. First of all, tell me what you need to know from me in order to create an excellent, differentiated scheme of work. This is a very useful first prompt for most tasks you want ChatGPT to do. Essentially what you’re doing is asking ChatGPT to tell you what will make its final output most successful. What ChatGPT will then give you is a numbered list of requirements, such as assessment objectives, exam requirements, aims of the course, number of weeks, age group and so on.
Add your response, numbering so your responses match the numbered requests ChatGPT has given you. You’ll be able to copy paste much of this information direct from the Google or Word Doc you’ve already assembled. ChatGPT will then give you an overview syllabus. It won’t be granular at this stage, just week by week. This is good, and what you want. You want to start broad and zoom in. It’s the best way to work with AIs like ChatGPT.
From here you’ll want to show the first week’s lesson outline. Add this prompt: Now, take the first week and create a lesson by lesson plan, for 3 one hour lessons. Present in table format. Include the resources that will be needed and any differentiation strategies. The AI will then give you this table, which you can copy into a document using the clipboard function that appears once the AI has completed its task.
Now you go a little deeper: Now, give me a lesson plan for the first lesson, showing timing. You can see what we’re doing here: start broad, work your way in.
From here you can show staff how this same information can be switched for student benefit: Now, write me the course syllabus guide suitable for a 15 year old student. Ensure the writing is conversational, clear and reassuring. This demonstrates how you can change the tone of the output to make it more student friendly. If you’re in the UK you can add: Ensure you write using UK not US English.
We are now going to write the slide content for the first lesson: Now, give me the slide content for the first powerpoint presentation for lesson 1.
This is where it gets fun. As you’re going to ask ChatGPT to write you prompts that you’ll input into a text to image generator to create images for your presentation: Now, give me the precise descriptions that can be inputted into a text to image generator to create interesting images around the first presentation topic that can be used for the powerpoint. Ensure the description is clear and detailed enough for the text to image generator to create interesting [insert subject title] images.
It will examine the slide content just written and come up with descriptions you can then enter into a text to image generator like Midjourney. You can also add them into Bing Chat (although I don’t find Dall-E, that powers Bing Chat’s image generation, to be as good as Midjourney). By copy pasting these prompts into the text to image generator it will provide you with different ideas for images you can put into your presentation.
From here we focus on assessment. Enter this prompt: Now, give me 3 essay titles to assess learning of this lesson that are suitable for GCSE age students. Ensure each question has bullet points to direct students to how to structure the essay. I have used GCSE as it’s the easiest one to demonstrate, but you can change this to suit.
We then get exemplar paragraphs from one of these essay titles: Now, write me three exemplar paragraphs for question 1. Ensure that the first exemplar is a grade 9, the second is a grade 5, and the third is a grade 2. This is a helpful exercise: because AIs follow rules, it will use its training data to write as closely as possible both the content and style for a top, middle and bottom paragraph.
Finally, you can ask it to assess these paragraphs: Now, assess each of these as if you were an examiner, explaining why they gained this grade.
Remember: this is just a demo to show how quickly a large amount of material can be produced. It’s not going to be perfect and the human will have to be in the loop after this to tidy up, add detail, personalise etc. But it has that initial wow factor to hook teachers into the potential of the tool.
If you’d like any support with your AI integration from September give me a shout out! I’ll be focusing more of my time on helping other schools get up to speed.