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OpenAI’s GPT Builder for Educators: Introduction to the Bot Teaching Process
Applying Educational Theory to Creating an AI Chatbot Over the past several weeks, as I have been tinkering with using OpenAI’s GPT Builder to design a teacher assistant chatbot, I’ve tried a dozen or so different design approaches and prompting strategies with varying degrees of effectiveness. In all of this experimenting, I’ve had the most…
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How to Use OpenAI’s GPT Builder: A Beginner’s Guide for Educators
In November 2023, OpenAI introduced GPTs–user-created custom versions of ChatGPT. A user with an OpenAI Plus or Enterprise account can customize a GPT by instructing it on how to do a specific function or operate with a specific purpose. Act As A ___ Numerous pieces have been written about tailoring individual conversations with ChatGPT by…
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DE&I Challenges in Generative AI: The LLM Dataset’s Double-Edged Sword
A Review of “DE&I Implications of Generative AI” by Stefan Bauschard, Laura Dumin, and Laura Germinshuys AI text generators will reproduce whatever they learned from their dataset. A recent example of this comes from an archaeology news website. In June 2023, three brothers found a medieval scimitar, or shamshir, in a Kyrgyzstani village. This discovery…
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Mastering Generative AI and ChatGPT: A Practical Guide for Teachers
There’s been a lot of news about the potential of AI to transform education and just as much talk about the potential harms. However, many of those fears aren’t rooted in how ChatGPT and generative AI actually work. Today, we would like to present a practical, teacher-focused roundup that specifically digs into the world of…
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ChatGPT Can’t Grade Your Papers (But It Can Help in Other Ways)
I tried using ChatGPT to grade papers. Here’s why it didn’t work. When I was teaching freshman composition, I had a ritual for the day after students’ final portfolios were due. I would stare at the towering pile of essays on my desk – or, later, at the long list of file submissions in the…
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Pragmatic and Effective Ways to Incorporate ChatGPT into The Writing Process
How can we teach students to use ChatGPT within the writing process? I have struggled with arriving at a clear answer to this question. There’s an inherent tension between the various theories of composition and the actual experience of being an instructor of first-year composition. Many of the theories of composition work only in an…
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Streamline Your Life: 6 Ways To Use ChatGPT to Support Executive Function and Prevent Burnout
If you can’t do your own executive functioning, store-bought is fine. When I’m teaching, I usually hit the wall around week 11 of the 16-week semester. By week 11, I was stressed out, my grading was piling up, I was slow responding to student emails, I was having trouble staying organized, and I still couldn’t…
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Empowering Students to use AI Safely and Ethically Through Critical Thinking
“If you don’t talk to your kids about drugs, who will?” As an Elder Millennial raised on Saturday morning cartoons, I grew up seeing those anti-drug public service announcements that said things like, “Suzy’s parents taught her almost everything. But they never taught her about drugs. So Suzy learned one final lesson on her own.…
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10 Practical Ways to Use ChatGPT to Make Your Teaching Life Easier (Even if You’re Afraid of AI)
You can use ChatGPT to quickly create lesson plans, assignments, discussion questions, learning objectives, powerpoints, grading rubrics, and more, making you a more effective and efficient educator. For many educators, the idea of incorporating AI into their teaching practices might seem daunting and unfamiliar – but it doesn’t have to be. As with any new…
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7 Best Practices to Prevent ChatGPT Plagiarism in the Classroom
Stop playing plagiarism cop. Here are 7 best practices for preventing students from using ChatGPT in their academic work, rather than trying to catch them after the fact. The internet age has made plagiarism easy for the overwhelmed, confused, or unmotivated student. Doing a Google search for a component of their essay and cut-and-pasting it…
