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Hello Eddycators!

We hope this newsletter finds you well. This time, we’re talking about ChatGPT - an interactive chatbot, created by OpenAI, that has taken the world by storm. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard about this new tech that has tremendous implications for the way we work, live and play…and teach!

In this newsletter, we want to talk about some trending topics surrounding ChatGPT:

• Is ChatGPT a teacher’s friend or a foe?
• Is there a reason to worry?
• Teaching with ChatGPT and prompt engineering
• Eddy’s ChatGPT approach

A friend or a foe - ChatGPT

• While many school districts are banning the use of ChatGPT in schools for both teachers and students, there have been contradictory views. Some teachers have been supporting the use of this platform.

I’m using ChatGPT to enhance all my lessons. Take any lesson you’re doing and say, ‘Give me a real-world example,’ and you’ll get examples from today — not 20 years ago when the textbooks we’re using were written.

- Texas math teacher Heather Brantley, teacher at White Oak Intermediate

• Brantley added that for a lesson about slope, the chatbot suggested students build ramps out of cardboard and other items found in a classroom, then measure the slope. For teaching about surface area, the chatbot noted that sixth graders would see how the concept applies to real life when wrapping gifts or building a cardboard box.
• Other teachers are more critical. Lorenzo Worster wasn’t impressed with the lesson plan for 6th graders on the causes of climate change.

To be honest, the lesson plan seems pretty outdated…Most science lessons today use the 5E format or start with a phenomena for students to explore and then finish with the instruction after a student grapple.

- Lorenzo Worster, teacher at Sierra Expeditionary Learning School

Note: The 5E model of instruction includes five phases: engage, explore, explain, elaborate, and evaluate.

• To address concerns of plagiarism using ChatGPT, a college student at Princeton created an app called GPTZero that detects plagiarism in the essays using ChatGPT. Commentators worry this might be the start of an AI arms race pitching generative AI tools against plagiarism detectors like GPTZero.

Is there a reason to worry?

• Chris Dede, a researcher on emerging technologies at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, thinks that teachers will need to change the way they teach to adapt to AI. 

Since the AI acts as an assistant that can help students in understanding the content, which is the routine part of a teacher’s job, as a professor, I can, now, focus more on personalization and bringing in cultural dimensions that AI does not understand and cannot possibly help with. The trick about AI is that, we need to change what we're educating people for because if you educate people for what AI does well, you're just preparing them to lose to AI. But if you educate them for what AI can't do, then you've got IA [Intelligence Augmentation].

• But for teachers to do so, we need to understand what ChatGPT can’t do. Here are a few facts that helps us understand its limitations:
• ChatGPT is not always trustworthy. ChatGPT was trained using a massive dataset of text written by humans that was pulled from the Internet. Thus, the responses can reflect the biases of the humans who wrote the text used in the training dataset.
• The data used to train ChatGPT was collected prior to 2021. According to the FAQs, ChatGPT “has limited knowledge of the world and events after 2021 and may also occasionally produce harmful instructions or biased content”
• ChatGPT provides free labor to OpenAI. ChatGPT is in its infancy. It will continue to become a more intelligent form of artificial intelligence…with the help of users who provide feedback to the responses it generates.

What can’t ChatGPT do? (yet…)

• Write a self-reflection (e.g., “describe how the content we covered in class last week shifted your thinking about your role as a current/future teacher”).
• Write about anything that happened after 2021.
• Provide non-text based responses (e.g., “design an infographic, interactive Google map, TikTok-style video, meme, multimodal timeline”).

*Note: ChatGPT can still help with writing a script for a podcast or video or crafting the text to go in an infographic, meme, poster, timeline, etc…

• Make predictions about future events.
• Draw connections between class content and visual materials.

Teaching with ChatGPT and prompt engineering

ChatGPT uses prompt engineering as a powerful technique to support teaching and learning in classrooms. In simple terms, prompt engineering involves crafting specific and targeted prompts that elicit useful responses from ChatGPT. When it comes to teaching & learning, prompt engineering can help teachers get the most out of ChatGPT.

• Writing copilot for students. With a well-placed prompt, can ask ChatGPT for help with writing assignments, and it can provide suggestions for sentence structure, grammar, and word choice. This not only helps students improve their writing skills, but it enables teachers to focus on the substantive issues in their writing.
• Formative assessment rubric for writing. Providing a rubric that specifically asks ChatGPT to provide feedback on the student's use of descriptive language, along with the student’s original work, allows teachers to get targeted feedback on students’ writing.

Generate discussion/writing prompts for students. Students can ask ChatGPT for a topic to discuss, and it can provide a thought-provoking question or statement that can stimulate discussion and critical thinking. It can generate writing prompts for a genre based on the grade level.

• Identifying texts written by AI. Donnie Piercey, from Lexington Kentucky instructed his 23 fifth grade students to try and outwit the “robot” that was churning out writing assignments. One exercise in his class pitted students against the machine in a lively, interactive writing game. Piercey asked students to “Find the Bot:” Each student summarized a text about boxing champion and Kentucky icon Muhammad Ali, then tried to figure out which was written by the chatbot.

Looking for more ways to use ChatGPT? Search no further

If you’re looking for more information on how to use ChatGPT in the classroom, there’s more on Eddy!

• Check out our newest Instructional Strategy articles on specific prompts that teachers can use to generate lesson plans, rubrics, instructional objectives and much more.
• View our webinar with international educators where we share our thoughts on having students use ChatGPT to enhance deep learning.

References

• Twitter thread, Robert Petitto
• Twitter thread, Matt Miller
• Ditch That Textbook article, consolidated by Dr Torrey Trust, Ph.D. College of Education University of Massachusetts Amherst

Additional Resources:

• Listen to this interesting podcast by Chris Mah and Sarah Levine who have been researching about using multiple examples in classroom with the help of ChatGPT 
• Use this resource for more ideas and prompts for teachers. 
• Read about what Sal Khan of Khan Academy has to say about ChatGPT.