Time. The most valuable asset of any teacher. Teachers have been asked to do more and more over the years, but the schedules have never allowed for more time. Added bus duty, recess duty, aftercare duty, etc. All of these take time away from all of the other little things that teachers need to do to do their job effectively. All this really means is that the time do these things gets moved to personal time. Longer days in the classroom or longer nights before bed are needed to complete many of these tasks. Worse yet, the stress of coming up with new lesson idea, assignments, projects, etc, can make it hard to create on the spot before tackling the numerous other responsibilities we have as adults. I wasn't sure what role AI was going to play in my life as a teacher, but when I opened the door to the possibility of AI helping me with the little things, I found myself reclaiming my time.
One of my biggest issues when it came to lesson planning was Lesson Block. A cousin of Writer's Block, Lesson Block is when a teacher has some sort of idea, but they just can't put it into words or the format needed to roll out in class. Too often, seemingly awesome ideas would never fully develop because I could not get over Lesson Block. Sometimes the idea would finally fully form, but after that part of the unit has passed. I used to be able to pop into another teacher's classroom and bounce ideas off of them to help flesh out the lesson, but those windows of time are few and far between because all of us are so busy. I needed a thought partner and one that could be there for me when I needed to explore an idea. I turned to ChatGPT to see if it can help me.
I first explored the free version of ChatGPT and then eventually turned to the paid version. I started with a casual conversation exploring what it knew about lesson plans, education, state standards, etc. I was impressed by what it knew and understood with my various prompts. I decided to give it a broad idea of what I was thinking for a lesson and I wanted to see what it would do. Well, it gave me a lesson that was amazing...for someone else's class. The lesson would not work for the students I had in the class and rolling that out would have been trouble. But, that failure of a lesson was helpful to me in the long run. It gave me a starting point for exploring a similar type of lesson that would work best for my class. So, similar to how I might go to my teaching partner and ask for their thoughts on my ideas, they might not have an idea that would work, but it could lead me to the idea that works for me. This conversation with ChatGPT was great in its failure to understand my class dynamic and that back and forth and the creation of the lesson took less than 10 minutes!
After exploring multiple school specific AI tools because I was concerned about data security and model training, I settled on SchoolAI because it was fully COPPA and FERPA compliant and I just loved the UX more than the others. I can be a bit of snob about those things. Anyway, SchoolAI has an assistant called Coteacher that functioned in a similar fashion as ChatGPT, but it was designed to better understand classroom dynamics and the things that a teacher might need when requesting different solutions. It became one of my go-to tools to help me work through ideas quickly. There was even a time when I had an idea mid class that I was trying to articulate and I dropped it into Coteacher and it was able to put into works my jumbled idea to use in class and it worked! When I started to explore Spaces and how I can prompt a chatbot to support the students in class, that was a game changer.
One of the first things I did with SchoolAI Spaces was to build a Space to help students building in Minecraft. The Minecraft House Builder Space was designed to help students with varied experience with Minecraft to build a house using the Design Thinking approach we covered in class. The common issue with this lesson was that the class has a wide range of experience with Minecraft. I had students who have never played Minecraft and some students that kill the Ender Dragon for fun on a Saturday night. I am somewhere in the middle of those two groups. I am either spending lots of time with the first time users or I am struggling to help the advanced student figure out how to do something beyond my experience. Either way, I am spending too much time on one type of student. What the Space does is support all students based on their skill level. It will help newbies explore Minecraft with basic steps on getting started and it will also help students use redstone in wildly creative ways. That frees me to engage more fully with the whole class and observe how all of the students are doing, not just the top and bottom of the experience ladder. That reclaimed time allows me to connect with more students.
Being able to connect with students with the reclaimed time is a huge part of using AI correctly and effectively. By creating that Space to support students, I was able to focus on the thing that makes teaching so amazing; connecting with students and helping them 1-on-1. That is my hot take when it comes to AI. Using AI effectively can lead to more human moments, not fewer. Reclaiming 5 minutes here and there might not seem like much, but that student that you connected with during that time felt seen and heard for the first time all day, week, or month. Teaching is all about the moments. If AI can help create more opportunities to have those moments with students, then it is worth every bit of time spent learning how to utilize it in the classroom for yourself and for students.
I'd love to hear how you are using AI in your class to create more moments with your students.
Hugs and high fives,
Nerdy
Note: All images are AI Generated using SchoolAI and do it that way saved me tons of time!
