Post and discuss your response to the reflection question - What was one challenge and one success you had when using a LLM to support your work as an educator.
I was able to use the tools to get a new idea for a lesson plan. I did have trouble with the LLM not really understanding what I was asking, but clarifying and prompting again did help.
I was successfully able to generate a formative assessment and a project assessment. I felt sucessful in being able to continually prompt ChaptGPT until it was something I could use. I will be teaching a unit on AI. I think my biggest challenge is that I didn’t feel comfortable enough with the content. I didn’t feel I could judge the assessment because I didn’t have a good understanding of the material. I redid the activity again with a topic I felt I could judge the response of ChaptGPT and was very happy with the result.
I asked ChatGPT to create a lesson plan for a professional development session on the Nevada School Performance Framework and provide opportunities for participants to reflect on how they can contribute to the growth of scores on the NSPF for their school. I then was able to successfully have ChatGPT create a handout for teachers to record their own school’s data and record actionable steps they will take to support the school’s work in each of the 5 areas. A challenge I had was getting ChatGPT to come up with a description and scoring criteria for the indicators and measures that was accurate for the current scoring system that is being used.
I had ChatGPT write a formative assessment based on some digital citizenship lesson plans from a website. It gave me some good questions, but it didn’t quite cover every topic. I then prompted it to add a few questions about the topic it had missed and it was able to update the assessment. I then asked it to round out the assessment so that the total number of points equaled 30, which it was able to do and assigned each questions points and added a few questions. Overall, I’m pleasantly surprised at the results.
I had ChatGPT construct an email to a parent regarding a reluctant reader, much like in the video example, but I narrowed the criteria further and added both positives about the student and suggestions for ways the parents could support the student at home. The final message was clear and professional. It didn’t have many specifics about the child, of course, but those could be manually added and aren’t always needed. The message was successful overall, but for me, it would have probably been faster to write the email than to have AI write it for me, especially after adding refining criteria. Every teacher and situation is different though.
I asked ChatGPT to help write an email to the parent of a disruptive student. I tried adding more details about the type of disruption, but I struggled with this part. It seemed when I added a specific detail, it kind of replaced another detail I wanted to keep. I have to figure out how to be specific enough in my prompting without sacrificing things that had already been good in the original email. I did like the way the AI worded things–I found that this was better than I often do myself, and it had a more pleasant tone overall.
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I chose to have it create a formative assessment. One challenge is that it had very specific items on it that may or may not have even been taught when I taught the unit. Which just means I would have to just make sure I started with the formative assessment on AI, then made sure to include all information on those specific items to make sure the kids were assessed fairly. But the entire thing was a success - it generating multiple choice questions and even going into detail about difficulties on certain questions the kids might have is really cool to know. I can easily plan to fill in those knowledge gaps this way.
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I used Magic School first to create a lesson plan and the challenge was it was not detailed enough. I used the same criteria of creating an engineering notebook lesson plan and decided to make an engineering notebook standards assessment. The success was the assessment was the exact information we covered in class and I plan to use it next school year.
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The option I chose was to use ChatGPT for writing a parent email. One success I have is learning how to “trick” the AI into providing better responses by including empathetic language (like “please,” “thanks,” and “do your best because this is really important to me”), which might be a result of human bias. I also asked ChatGPT to rate itself and list potential improvements. Overall, the email it generated was decent!
One challenge is that the context of the email I asked ChatGPT to write was to address student behavior in a class I had today. Obviously, ChatGPT has no context of myself as an educator, my class, the student in question, or the student’s family. Thus, the email reads pretty coldly and generically. Personalizing the message through the potential improvement areas and personalization definitely makes a better message!
One challenge that I found was that some of the questions generated by ChatGBT were at a higher level than the course I picked, Also in on prompt the results came back in a coding language my students are not used to so I had to add in what coding language I wanted to use on the assessment. Even when I did add in to use the Blockly language some of the questions used the Javascript still. One success was that I was able to create a formative assessment with multiple choice, short answer, practical test and a reflection, I was also able to make a formative assessment over the same topic in a game format that included multiple choice, a debugging challenge, short project, scenarios and even some bonus rounds very quickly.
My challenge was narrowing down what I wanted to have AI create for me. I chose to have ChatGPS generate a quiz from TedED on Sarah Parcak and Egyptian archeology. It told me it couldn’t access that specific TedEd Talk, but gave me one on the contect. So that confused me a little. I then asked it to create a lesson plan using the same website. It gave me one that included interactive activities and critical thinking.
I asked it to write me a lesson plan on how technology has changed over the years at an elementary level. The ideas were great! I like how it broke it down into sections for me. I have a limited amount of time as a specialist and this makes it very easy for me to see how I can cut it short if I need to, or draw it out as needed. I think that next time I would copy the exact standard that I want to use into the text box to see if it would make it more precise in the lesson itself.
I used Magic School at first then went to ChatGPT to do the same lesson. They were similar but different once I started asking the same questions to clarify certain areas of the lesson plan.
Using AI to write a parent email, I was able to successfully create a professional, concise email and I appreciated that the AI gave me some suggestions and ideas that I had not initially thought of. The challenge for me was editing this email so that it had more of my voice in the tone and I had to add personal details pertinent to the situation that the AI would not know, to give the communication a more personal feel.
I had ChatGPT write a parent letter about a failing student with 3 suggested improvements as I read them. I think if you have not read a lot of these this is really good, but it definitely feels … scripted. I am not sure if that was just the questions and suggestions I made so I even went back and tried to get rid of this feeling but I was unable to remove it entirely.
I used ChatGPT to write an email for a disruptive student. The starting email was good - it didn’t have my voice but it was informative and professional sounding. I had to rework it several times to get it to include the specifics and school wide consequences. It is hard to say if I could have done it as fast without the AI. This experience was hypothetical for me; I could see the benefit of using ChatGPT when I’m sending an email the day of as an easy way to filter out my own emotions.
My challenge at first was thinking about what I wanted to even use AI for. The video was a great resource as I watched the teacher create a parent email and that got me thinking about messages I could post on my class dojo page. Once I had an idea, it was actually really easy and once I learned to ask ChatGPT to write an enthusiastic message I was hooked. I had a moment of wait, when did I write this? 
because some of the phrases are the ones I use with my students so it didn’t feel like AI wrote it. For example, I call my kindergarten students little mathematicians when I write anything about math and they also add emoji’s in the class message which is also another thing I do as well. So the message feels like it came right out of my head in less than ten seconds. I also liked how it worded a sentence that I would have spent at least 20 minutes trying to make positive. I asked chatGPT if they could add ways for students to practice at home if they did not reach their goals, but word it in a growth mindset kind of way. This is what they came up with: “If your child hasn’t quite reached their addition goals yet, no worries! Every child learns at their own pace, and a little extra practice at home can go a long way. Here are a few fun ways to support their learning:” I was really impressed with this and at first I was hesitant on using ChatGPT because I wanted to ensure that my voice would come through. However, I really love how it took a sentence that I would have spent 20 minutes on and worded in a way that promotes growth mindset and actually matches my voice and word choices I have used in previous messages before I learned about AI.
**It took several attempts/providing feedback to ChatGPT for it to write a lesson that was “teachable” based on the standard that was input, but it came up with a relatively decent lesson. It produced an age appropriate science lesson that had a warm up, closure, mini-lab/hands-on activity, and including the reading I wanted the students to complete. I could revise it further to probably provide specific questions for the reading if I input the reading or have them produce a product from the reading (such as a concept map) rather than just answering questions, which could be interesting to try if it were for a class I was teaching. I like that it provided me with appropriate group sizes, time frames, and ways to engage the groups during their hands-on activity that could be done instead of just reading about radioactive decay. I started with simply saying I have these pages in the book about radioactive decay, but I like the students to have an engaging lesson. Ultimately, AI produced a full lesson with students “doing” rather than just reading.
I decided to use it to help generate an email to parents with an update on what we did in class last week. The success I had with it was that it was very professionally written and looked good enough to send out at the first go around. However, the challenge I had was that I wanted more detail on how students can turn in work through our LMS and it gave directions on how to do that instead of just telling them to upload their work on the LMS. I think remembering to be specific with what I am looking for helps a lot with these AI programs.