There has been a rapid proliferation of Generative AI tools such as Chat GPT, Microsoft Copilot, Google Bard and more. There is an emerging market in educational-focused AI tools which claim to be able to plan lessons, write reports and more.  Generative AI refers to technology that creates new content—like images, text, or music—by learning patterns from existing data and generating novel outputs autonomously.

The Department for Education recently published an initial report into the use of AI in UK schools, you can read a summary here.

While it is possible to use AI to plan lessons, student or Early Career teachers need to be very careful not to just take any lesson produced and run with it unchecked. Any plan generated by AI would need proper checking with the benefit of experience. AI has been known to hallucinate and make things up, so don’t rely on it!

Where AI can help you is in kickstarting the creative process. With the right prompts it can generate new content such as text, images, audio and more. Some AI tools are now able to browse the internet, and I’ve been making more use of them as handy research assistants – giving them an outline of a topic I’m interested in and asking them to suggest good articles and websites that I should read.

As a teacher you can use AI for:

• Lesson ideas. Give AI a topic area and it can suggest different ways of teaching it. This post gives some examples of AI tools you can use.
• Image generation:  AI tools such as Adobe Firefly can generate images on the fly. These can be used as visual aids in lessons. I’ve found it can be quicker to generate a picture for a lesson than searching the internet for one, plus you are not (yet) at risk of copyright infringement.
• Question generation: AI tools are good at generating banks of questions. Give it a topic and it’ll do the rest. It can produce multiple choice questions, highlight the correct answer and output it as a table which can be imported directly into quiz sites like Kahoot. This guide explains how to make a Kahoot quiz using AI.
• Explain to me like I’m 8: Paste in a complicated piece of text, or describe a process and ask the AI to explain it like you’re 8 (or 5 or whatever). It’ll have a good go at simplifying it for you. Would be good for creating simple guides for children.
• Summarising documents: Upload a research paper or a report and it can produce bullet-pointed summary of the important facts. Some tools let you interrogate documents; ask it questions about the text and the AI will answer. Very handy for looking at research papers. Use tools such as Claude AI for this.

The prompt you type into Chat GPT is very important. Here’s a guide to getting it right.

AI can seamlessly combine accurate and inaccurate sources making it hard to distinguish truth from false information. It is also prone to basic mathematical errors. With any AI tool you use, there is a need to double check the output to make sure it’s correct and not producing material that’s unsuitable for your class. It doesn’t always pitch the content to the correct age group and may also include content from American curricula that’s not relevant for us. Also check for American spellings!

Try it out and let me know what you think. If you’ve got some great AI prompts of your own, share them in the comments.

For more ideas check out A Teacher’s Guide to ChatGPT.