I’m an English teacher working in Tohoku. I’ve been following the developments in generative AI closely and recently created two [GPTs](https://openai.com/blog/introducing-gpts) to help with teaching and lesson planning:
I teach at a local junior high school once a week and over the past few years have developed a fairly extensive library of lesson plans. Creating each of those plans was a lot of work so I used them as a base for this GPT to help me speed up the process of making new ones: [ALT Lesson Planner](https://chat.openai.com/g/g-C3Y8LE5rM-alt-lesson-planner)
For my adult students, I’m a firm believer that more exposure to English leads to faster progress. To help with that, I’ve been creating reading texts (which I also use as [dictogloss](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictogloss) activities in class) to assign as homework and use as discussion topics. I’ve used all of the ones I’ve created so far to create: [ESL Reading Tutor](https://chat.openai.com/g/g-vgIn8dB64-esl-reading-tutor)
These are new and not perfect – they are assistants that you work with to come up with a finished product that fits your goals. With that said, I think that they are going to help me create high quality materials much faster than I could otherwise.
Hopefully they can be useful for you as well!
2 comments
Good stuff. I do think these can be a great help to learners. Though I always think these need to ne caveated that a teacher should always go over these with a fine tooth comb before giving them to students. AI is a very confident liar and they can create stuff that looks great on the surface but has issues once you look deeper. Though its not something a decent edit can’t fix.
Though I would be careful using them as editors. I tried using them as a spell checker for my dyslexia and they miss a lot. Though they help in other ways such as offering wording advice, helping expand ideas, and being a staged edit mixed with other techniques.
The important thing to note with AI generated text and lesson plans, for anybody who may try these and isn’t familiar with how the text actually works, is that the AI is incapable of knowing if something is correct or not. It uses massive corpora to statistically judge what words should go together to form sentences. AI flat out makes things up in response to questions because it doesn’t ‘understand’ questions or answers, merely gives what it judges to be an answer that ‘looks’ correct based on the statistical likelihood that the words will appear next to one another in a given context.
So, when people are using AI to create educational materials, it is incredibly important that they proofread everything and double check for accuracy. I have adult students who use AI a lot in their English learning and are constantly bringing completely false or incorrect things.