How ChatGPT Helps Teachers and School Administrators, Part 1: Saving Teachers' Time
- Cris
- Feb 15, 2023
- 4 min read
Is your district, school, or team interested in learning how ChatGPT can help to solve educational issues? The Mindful Tech Initiative can help. Book time with us today to find out how MTI can meet your needs.
Amid all of the hyperbolic discourse centered on ChatGPT and its role in K-12 education, one important truth is consistently left out of the discussion:
As much of a game-changer as it is for students, it is as or perhaps more pivotal for teachers.
Often, when I talk to school districts, the conversation begins with teachers’ concerns about academic integrity: cheating, originality, plagiarism, et al.
“What can we do,” I’m asked, “about the rampant cheating?”
What’s strange is that, to date, I’ve never been asked:
“How can we, teachers, use ChatGPT to our advantage?”
It's strange because the answers to this question are nearly limitless. So, I’ve decided to break down a few scenarios in which ChatGPT either:
saves teachers a tremendous amount of time, or
offers teachers a usable starting point for instructional tasks, or
offers administrators a usable starting point for administrative tasks.
In today’s blog post, we’re going to focus on #1:
How ChatGPT saves teachers a tremendous amount of time.
Even though I am now a consultant and a school administrator charged with supervising many subjects and many grades, I taught AP Language and Composition to 11th and 12th grade students for a long time. Thus, I still feel as though I primarily perceive the educational experience as a high school English teacher does.
As you might imagine, I graded a lot of papers as an English teacher. I prided myself on leaving high quality, comprehensive, actionable feedback to my students, and—more often than not—I tried to conclude feedback on students' essays with a concluding narrative comment that contextualized the marks that I made on students’ essays in summative fashion. To do this, I’d look back at the little notes I’d jotted down and synthesize a paragraph.
When I was playing around with ChatGPT the other day, I recalled how time-consuming it could be to transcribe those paragraphs. After all, these concluding notes had to be good: You have to remember that—no matter how much time and effort I’d invest in my commentaries throughout the essay—99% of students are going straight to the grade and final explanation.
Cue: ChatGPT.
While I primarily made these marks on students' essays by hand, I also taught through the pandemic when all of our assignments had to be digital. So, I dug out a COVID-era “scratch sheet,” as I called them, and I asked ChatGPT:
Can you combine these comments I made on this student’s essay into a cohesive paragraph?
The answer? Yes. It definitely can, and it definitely did. I made three very minor changes to ChatGPT's paragraph, which was both concise and apt for the task. In fact, it was almost unrecognizably different from what I would have written.
The lesson to be extrapolated here is that there are a lot of modern educational tasks of this nature, and particularly in a clerical sense: synthesize a series of elements to create a product. If nothing else, ChatGPT can save us a ton of time in these capacities.
Here’s another one: I often talk to primary and elementary school teachers who feel as though ChatGPT-centered discussions target older grades and serious issues of academic integrity.
I’m here to tell you that both of these takes are not true.
In fact, elementary school teachers may have more to gain from ChatGPT than anyone.
Let me show you:
Let’s say you’re a kindergarten teacher. Let’s say you are trying to teach your students about rhymes, poems, and having fun with words. Let’s also say that one of your more chatty, perhaps more easily-distracted students walks into your classroom this morning wearing a shirt with ladybugs on it. Well, being the good teacher that you are, you know that this student is at her best when she’s given a responsibility or role to play in classes’ proceedings.
"Let's see," you think to yourself. "What's my entry point to get her involved today?"
Cue: ChatGPT. I asked ChatGPT:
Write me a funny poem (that is appropriate for kindergarten students) that focuses on ladybugs.
ChatGPT’s Answer:
Here's a silly poem about ladybugs that would be appropriate for kindergarten students:
Ladybugs, ladybugs,
Flying in the air,
With their spots so red and black,
They're just too cute to compare!
They land on leaves so green,
And nibble on some lunch,
Then they spread their tiny wings,
And take off with a crunch!
Ladybugs, ladybugs,
They're so small and bright,
With a little "beep beep" and a "buzz",
They take flight in the light.
So if you see a ladybug,
Just give a little cheer,
For these little bugs with big spots,
Bring joy year after year!
Maybe it’s not a perfect poem, maybe you’d tweak it, maybe you’d rather focus on something else. The point is that ChatGPT can give you something when you have nothing.
Regarding this whole "something out of nothing" bit, this educational sleight of hand formerly took years to develop. In fact, whenever I mentored early service teachers, I used to call one's proclivity to pull something from nothing "adding to your bag of tricks." Really, one still develops this breadth over the course of a career: the strategies, go-tos, the activities, the interesting hooks and topics that draw students into a lesson.
However, today's early service teachers—of any grade—now have some semblance of an equalizer in ChatGPT as a transformative instructional tool.
ChatGPT can be the key that unlocks the pedagogical door. Sure, ChatGPT may be somewhat limited in its creative capacities, but think of it like any other fascinating tool for content creation or research: PhotoShop, Zotero, Canva, etc. These tools become transformative when you are creative in your deployment of these programs. Also, in doing so, you demonstrate to your students the worth of bending new and AI-assisted technologies to solve human problems.
That's it for now! In my next post, I’ll cover how ChatGPT offers teachers a usable starting point for instructional tasks.
Is your district, school, or organization interested in how ChatGPT can help to solve educational issues? The Mindful Tech Initiative is here to help. Book time with us today to find out how MTI can meet your needs.
- Cris, 02-15-2023
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