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35.
Generative AI for the Classroom,
part 2
Some ideas for activities using generative AI
1. Use generative AI for course and lesson planning and design
Would you like new ideas on redesigning some of your courses, introducing new topics,
activities to include and rubric on how to evaluate the results of these activities1,2? Would you
like to try a new pedagogical approach, using new technology and materials3? Chatbots could
potentially help with all of the above. You could direct the software to write out the first draft
for lesson plans, learning objectives, directions for activities, projects and scientific experiments
and discussion prompts4
.
Tip:
Tip: It is a good idea to specify beforehand what topics and approaches to cover and what the
course or lesson would achieve – whether it is a concept or a procedure you are targeting and
what kind of teaching you want to apply
2
.
Example
Example
Source: Source: Examining Science Education in ChatGPT: An Exploratory Study of Generative Artificial Intelligence5
Activity:
Activity: Creating a teaching unit
Gen AI tool : Gen AI tool : ChatGPT
Prompt used:
Prompt used: Create a teaching unit using the 5Es model that is challenging for students who have a strong
understanding of renewable and non‐renewable energy sources at a year 7 level. Also provide support and
scaffolding for students who are struggling with the material.
Reflection:
Reflection: As a starting point, the author found the ChatGPT response useful. It had to be adjusted in order
to cater to students’ needs, the curriculum and to access resources. He suggests that educators should delete
unhelpful parts and build on parts that are helpful. Though the output needs refining, he suspects many teachers
will find it useful, especially those who are just starting their careers, as they may not have yet built extensive
resources.
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“I was particularly impressed by its capacity to generate a science unit underpinned by the 5Es model, even if some of the
output seemed a little generic and in need of further refinement.”
2. Use generative AI for preparing engaging, multimodal and
inclusive content on a topic
You could use a generative AI application to:
• Add content related to local phenomena, language and culture;
• Insert explanatory and attractive images and videos3;
• Create and include stories that reinforce textual content;
• Build concept maps;
• Highlight, paraphrase and summarise relevant portions of the lesson, and clarify
vocabulary
6
;
• Make maths and science less abstract by showing simulations and including examples
from other subjects. This could also be used in craft education where visualisation can
help with developing and exploring ideas7;
• Provide translations to help learners who use minority languages
2
.
Tip:
Tip: Midjourney and other image-creation tools often have dedicated forums where people post
their work, advice, prompts and prompt-crafting hints7. They are helpful for teachers who are
just starting to explore this technology.
3. Use Generative AI to create examples, practice exercises and
quizzes
Generative AI can
• Generate tabular and other forms of data to use in examples and exercises;
• Create practice exercises and solutions, especially to reinforce foundational skills and
low-knowledge components8. These can serve as a reference for students who are
struggling to solve assignment problems9;
• Generate explanations for solutions. This seems to work well, especially for
generating explanations of programming codes9;
• Generate multiple solutions for the same problem in maths or in programming. This
helps students to learn different approaches and perspectives, and to analyse different
methods, their advantages and disadvantages9. This could even help when the
provided solutions are incorrect, when clearly marked so.
Example
Example
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Source: Source: Examining Science Education in ChatGPT: An Exploratory Study of Generative Artificial
Intelligence5
.
Activity:
Activity: Creating a quiz.
Gen AI tool: Gen AI tool: ChatGPT.
Prompt used:
Prompt used: Generate a Quiz on the concept of renewable and non‐renewable energy sources at a year 7 level
and include answer key.
Reflection:
Reflection: The author found that the ChatGPT-generated multiple-choice questions assessed students’
understanding of the topic. He said, “educators need to critically evaluate any resources… Teachers’ expertise,
experience, and understanding of their students remain key to making sound pedagogical decisions.”
Example
Example
Source: Source: Examining Science Education in ChatGPT: An Exploratory Study of Generative Artificial
Intelligence5
.
Activity:
Activity: Creating a rubric for grading.
Gen AI tool: Gen AI tool: ChatGPT.
Prompt used:
Prompt used: Create a rubric that year 7 students can use to self‐assess their learning about renewable and
non‐renewable energy sources (with the follow‐up formatting request: make this rubric easier to copy to Word in
a tidy format).
Output: Output:
Rubric output generated by ChatGPT, from Examining Science Education in ChatGPT: An Exploratory Study of Generative Artificial
Intelligence
Reflection:
Reflection: The author found that ChatGPT was able to create a rubric with its own criteria – understanding,
research, critical thinking and participation. Levels were marked for each, but the indicators were too vague for
each criterion.
Example
Example
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Source: Source: The Robots Are Coming: Exploring the Implications of OpenAI Codex on Introductory
Programming
10
.
Activity:
Activity: Generating multiple solutions for a question.
Gen AI tool: Gen AI tool: Codex (Codex can generate code in several programming languages in response to prompts).
Prompt used:
Prompt used: Problem description as found in various sources and exam questions on writing code, as given to
students.
Output Output:
Student scores on invigilated tests (Test 1 and Test 2), with performance
of Codex(plotted as red asterisk), from The Robots Are Coming: Exploring
the Implications of OpenAI Codex on Introductory Programming
Reflection:
Reflection: The authors found that Codex gave a range of different codes to the same prompt, “while ultimately
favouring expected methods for each response”
.
4 Increasing accessibility
As a final example, we strongly urge you to explore generative AI to increase accessibility for
students with certain physical or learning disabilities, especially those with hearing or visual
impairments. Generative AI can provide subtitles, captions and audio descriptions2. As per
Unesco’s Guidance for generative AI in education and research, “GenAI models can also convert
text to speech and speech to text, to enable people with visual, hearing, or speech impairments
to access content, ask questions, and communicate with their peers”2. It can also help you verify
that the content you create is inclusive and accessible4
.
Questioning the output
If you do decide to use generative AI, you have to watch out for its failures and shortcomings
and be ready to correct them. These include
• Inaccuracies in the content: The language model is not a knowledge bank or a search
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engine. Even the latest models hallucinate facts and cite fictitious sources. Errors creep
up, especially when using language models for mathematics and quantitative reasoning.
Even when fine-tuned specifically for these subjects, the model can produce incorrect
answers, calculation errors and hallucinate “mathematical facts”11. Even programming
could be tricky, because generated code can have incorrect syntax and security issues9
.
• Biases that creep up because, among other things, the data these models were trained
on was riddled with them. Even EdGPT, which is corrected for this, might still contain
a few of them
2
.
• Performance that can vary highly with the prompt used, user history, and, sometimes,
with no reason at all.
While generative AI can reduce teacher workload and help with certain tasks, it is based on
statistical models that have been constructed from huge amounts of online data. This data
cannot replace the real world, its contexts and relationships. ChatGPT cannot provide context
or explain what is affecting a student’s daily life4. It cannot provide new ideas or solutions to
real-world challenges
2
.
Finally, its performance does not approach the capabilities of the human mind – especially
what it can understand and do with limited data. Generative AI’s “deepest flaw is the absence
of the most critical capacity of any intelligence: to say not only what is the case, what was the
case and what will be the case – that’s description and prediction – but also what is not the case
and what could and could not be the case
12
.”
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1 Tlili, A., Shehata, B., Adarkwah, M.A. et al, What if the devil is my guardian angel: ChatGPT as
a case study of using chatbots in education, Smart Learning Environments, 10, 15 2023.
2 Holmes, W., Miao, F., Guidance for generative AI in education and research, UNESCO, Paris,
2023.
3 Enkelejda, K., et al, Chatgpt for Good? on Opportunities and Challenges of Large Language Models
for Education, EdArXiv, 2023.
4 Trust, T., Whalen, J., & Mouza, C., Editorial: ChatGPT: Challenges, opportunities, and
implications for teacher education, Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher
Education, 23(1), 2023.
5 Cooper, G., Examining Science Education in ChatGPT: An Exploratory Study of Generative
Artificial Intelligence, Journal of Science Education and Technology, 32, 444–452, 2023.
6 Kohnke, L., Moorhouse, B. L., & Zou, D., ChatGPT for Language Teaching and Learning, RELC
Journal, 54(2), 537-550, 2023.
7 Vartiainen, H., Tedre, M., Using artificial intelligence in craft education: crafting with text-to-image
generative models, Digital Creativity, 34:1, 1-21, 2023.
8 Bhat,S., et al, Towards automated generation and evaluation of questions in educational domains,
Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Educational Data Mining, pages 701-
704, Durham, United Kingdom, 2022.
9 Becker, B., et al, Programming Is Hard – Or at Least It Used to Be: Educational Opportunities and
Challenges of AI Code Generation, Proceedings of the 54th ACM Technical Symposium on
Computer Science Education V. 1 (SIGCSE 2023), Association for Computing Machinery,
New York, 500–506, 2023.
10 Finnie-Ansley, J., Denny, P. et al, The Robots Are Coming: Exploring the Implications of OpenAI
Codex on Introductory Programming, Proceedings of the 24th Australasian Computing
Education Conference (ACE ’22), Association for Computing Machinery, New York, 2022.
11 Lewkowycz, A., Andreassen, A., Dohan, D. et al, Solving Quantitative Reasoning Problems with
Language Models, Google Research, 2022.
12 Chomsky, N., Roberts, I., Watumull, J., Noam Chomsky: The False Promise of ChatGPT, The
New York Times, 2023.
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