What can AI do for teachers? We are a long way from having a full answer to that question. But answers and ideas are coming fast and furiously.
My first use of AI generated art this year was to assign it to students. My photoshop class collaboratively created a prompt in Midjourney. Why did they choose the elements of this prompt? It is a mystery, teenagers often are. But “Parents fighting over school closings at a Waffle House in Florida” somehow became our first prompt.
AI understands Waffle House we agreed. Students moved on to test, to find where the edges of AI’s knowledge lay. Looking back, that is exactly what I did when I began experimenting.
Next I used first Midjourny then Stable Diffusion to create posters for our Girls Who Game E-sports league. Stable diffusion did way better.
I asked ChatGPT to write 5 multiple choice exam questions with four answers each on the topic of Adobe Illustrator. They were good, I could have used four of them (the 5th was too easy to guess the answer from context clues). It took seconds for ChatGPT to generate them. I don’t use multiple choice exams any more, my classes are all project based, but if I did I would certainly see what AI could do.
I decided to use both AI art and chatgpt to produce an assignment I give my students: a graphic essay. It’s a shorter version of a graphic novel, typically I give students topic options, they choose one and each student does one page. We combine the pages, voila, class collaborative graphic essay is the result. I’ve been doing this for years, the topic “generation lockdown” has never been defeated.
I’m not finished with this experiment yet, but it’s promising. I’ll post both the AI generated output and the one I did w/o AI here later.
I’ve been listening, hearing all sorts of uses from actual in-the-classroom teachers. Worksheets, study guides, exams.
I did ask ChatGPT to write an essay about how AI could be beneficial in education. Lemme just say: it was trash! It sounded really good, but it was ludicrous, untrue, full of bs fluff but had all the buzzwords. Not so different from a lot of education consultant writing these days.