chatgpt, an AI-based chatbot, rocked the world toward the end of 2022. The platform attracted a million users in just 5 days! That’s faster than Instagram and Netflix! I instantaneously fell in awe of its functionality and decided to try it with teachers.
The subsequent week, while in India, I got a chance to conduct a teacher workshop and knew what I wanted it to be. I asked a teacher to connect his computer screen to the big projector screen. Now, we could see the magic of #chatgpt on the big screen.
We began by giving chatgpt some ingredients and asking what we could make for dinner that night. Click! The smart software provided a couple of recipes. We asked it for an Indian variation, and it flashed another recipe within a second. The teachers could not hide their amusement.
We went on to see if the platform could explain a difficult concept in easy words. We tried a fancy Physics concept, and the teacher approved the accuracy of the description the chatbot produced.
Then we asked chatgpt to create a lesson plan for us. We gave it some details such as topic, grade level, method (e.g., activity-based), and duration. Boom! It created a lesson plan in no time! Wow!
We even asked the chatbot to set a question paper for us. We asked it to create a reading comprehension paragraph. It did. We requested it to modify some parts of the paragraph, and it did! Then we asked it to design some comprehension questions. It, again, did. We finally asked it to generate model answers to those questions. Guess what? It did! Woah!
Finally, we checked if the platform could create an assessment rubric for us. We asked it to first create 4 assessment parameters and then asked it to create a scale (high, mid, low) for each of the parameters. It absolutely worked! We even asked the chatbot to grade our responses based on the rubric, and it did! How cool is that?
chatgpt is amazing! It can write emails. respond to emails, create poems, teach complex concepts in easy language, write reports and speeches, create timelines, design activities, make lesson notes, set question papers, generate ideas, write scenarios, develop assessment rubrics, and even, grade responses!
chatgpt and similar other AI-based applications will soon change the face of education. Google provides thousands of pages of information; chatgpt synthesizes information of that volume and produces sharp summaries within seconds. Not a joke! This technology is truly disruptive, and we educators need to find ways to embrace its powers.
Some teachers were scared to see what chatgpt could do. Won’t blame them. However, not learning about such AI-based tools is as self-harming as refusing to use a computer when it first arrived. Can we imagine a life without computers today? We won’t be soon able to imagine our lives without AI. The future is already here!
Try it: beta.openai.com/playground
#education#technology#teachers#artificialintelligence
Aakash Chowkase 