Stuff I’ve used chat GPT for this week (as a teacher)
Chat GPT has taken the world by storm recently and I for one have been blown away by it’s power and potential. But lots of people are stuck for what to do with it beyond asking it silly questions. I’ve found a few kind of random ways that it’s actually helped me out massively this week.
1) Writing informative/ supplementary articles for class
So, part of my role as 2ic is basically writing fat documents about the curriculum. And they want us to log 2 pieces of ‘academic reading’ per half term per scheme. So that means that if you don’t have academic reading in your scheme, you have to find it or make it before you input it into this document (that’s basically used as a tick box to check that your curriculum is thoughtful etc.)
Upsettingly, I saw a scheme of work that had no ‘academic writing’ in it. So I looked through and saw that there was a lesson around Maya Angelou’s poem ‘Phenomenal Woman’ and one around Rupi Kaur’s poem ‘broken english’.
So I basically asked Chat GPT to write me an article for each. I asked it:
“Hey ChatGPT, please can you write me a 600 word article about The Rise of Insta Poets and include mentions of notable Insta Poets such as Rupi Kaur and a focus about the future implications.”
And it gave me a fairly good article that I then edited and used in class.
For the Maya Angelou one, it gave me a good first draft but then I wanted it to be more child friendly (less explicit) and more celebratory of this legend. So I asked ChatGPT to rewrite the article trying to be exactly those things and it did.
Again, I edited what it gave me, but in 15 minutes I had two articles that might have taken me 30 minutes to find or even an hour to write myself.
So that was pretty cool.
2) Writing some of the school website.
Don’t tell anyone this one, but I actually wrote part of the school website page that I’m responsible for using ChatGPT.
Sometimes you know exactly what you want to write and how you want to write it, but for some reason, that makes it less motivating to do because you already feel like it’s completed in your head.
Anyway I told it very specifically what to say, what style to use, what details to include, and how to structure different paragraphs and then used what it gave me as a first draft to edit and then publish.
Unethical?
Maybe. I’m not convinced it is though and I don’t know why.
3) To find some new music artists.
I’m unfamiliar with electronic music, but sometimes I put it on when I want to go into a deep work flow.
I start to recognise some bigger names on the Spotify pre-made electronic music playlists.
So I know that I quite like Lane 8, Bicep, and a bit of Grum (loosely). I know that I’m a noob.
Anyway, I asked ChatGPT for suggestions based on those artists, but something to have in the background whilst working.
It suggested to me a list of artists who were quite good, but a bit too ‘poppy’, ‘upbeat’, and ‘lyrical’ so I asked it to try again, but to suggest some less ‘popular’, and ‘lyrical’ suggestions citing that ‘techno esque’, ‘minimalist’, and ‘deep house esque’ suggestions might be better.
So I’ve now been listening to ‘Kiasmos’ for the last hour and the suggestion was just perfect for what I’m after!
Take away message:
Use this powerful machine whilst it’s still free. It’s amazing what it can do.
I’ll take opinions on whether it was ethical to write a paragraph for my school website in the comments. Please bear in mind that I did edit the work after and wrote the rest of the web page myself!
