How To: Add a Careers link to your lesson with AI
This is the first in a series of posts explaining how the Teaching AI lesson resource generator can be used most effectively. Today, we are focusing on one of the most exciting types of resource we offer: ‘Upgrade Your Lesson’. We particularly like these options because they allow you to enhance your teaching practice even if you already have a bank of quality resources that you use. All teachers can use a hand in things like identifying common misconceptions, adding careers links, and the other ‘Upgrade Your Lesson’ options!
Resource type: ‘Upgrade My Lesson’ —> ‘Add a Link to Careers’
Context: Year 10 Biology group, mixed ability, AQA GCSE Biology specification
Time to create (from login to final product): 3 minutes, 4 seconds
Some of our lesson resource types are more or less self-explanatory: Most teachers will immediately know what to expect when they ask Teaching AI for ‘a set of retrieval questions’, ‘a traditional lesson plan’, or ‘fun facts’. But there is one category of resource that is perhaps less immediately intuitive - and that is our very favourite category, ‘Upgrade Your Lesson’.
This post will show you step by step how to get started upgrading your lesson, taking the example of a Biology lesson on ‘Hormones and the Endocrine System’ and suggesting how to add links to related careers. (I chose this example because I thought it was a particularly tricky one: See what you think of the results in what I consider an especially challenging scenario!)
Step 1: Choose your resource type.
The first step is to choose what you want Teaching AI to create for you. We’re looking at the ‘Upgrade My Lesson’ options today, so we’ll choose that from the first dropdown menu. Then, we’ll select ‘Add a link to Careers’.
Step 2: Set your class context.
Next, tell Teaching AI about your class and our course. In this example, I am using a real lesson I taught recently: A Year 10 lesson for a middle ability group, studying on the AQA GCSE Biology specification.
(Note: One of the highest priority upcoming features on our development roadmap is giving users the ability to save their preferences, so that they don’t have to set class and course contexts every time they create a resource. Thanks very much to our Supporters for helping to fund our server costs and making it possible for us to continue developing the project.)
Step 3: Provide lesson details.
Finally, give Teaching AI the last couple of bits of information it needs to create something that is tailored to your needs. Type in the lesson topic, add any additional instructions for Teaching AI, and upload an existing resource if you have one. In this case, given my knowledge of the interests and ambitions of students in the group, I wanted to illustrate to students that there are plenty of science-related jobs out there that command decent wages without requiring a full undergraduate degree, so I asked for 3 careers that don’t require a university education. I also had an existing Powerpoint for this lesson handy, so I uploaded it to provide additional context.
Step 4: Press ‘Create Resource’, and let Teaching AI work its magic.
Once you are happy with the information you have put into the form, just hit ‘Create Resource’ and let wait for Teaching AI to create your resource! We appreciate this stage can be a bit frustrating, particularly as we are all accustomed to instant gratification on the internet - instant search results, instant information, etc - but in these early days of the AI revolution things do still take time.
We think it’s worth the wait: It took 39 seconds for Teaching AI to create a draft of my Careers link resource and 3 career summaries. See whether you think you could have made something similar in that time, when you see the results below!
Step 5: Review the created resource, and edit it as much or as little as you like.
When your created resource is ready, have a quick read and see what you think. Most resources need a little bit of editing to make them just right for your class and your course. If you are going to use your resource in a program like Microsoft Word, or in an online tool like Google Slides, we suggest that you copy it across before doing any re-formatting so that you can see exactly how it will look - but you can edit the text to your heart’s content in our text editor.
In my case I made a couple of quick changes from the original result, and then copied it into Google Docs for some final formatting. Here are the changes I made:
I changed a couple of spellings from American English to British English. (I had forgotten to specify this in the additional instructions box!)
I moved the paragraph with suggestions for how to incorporate Careers into my lesson from the bottom to the top of the document, so I could refer to it more easily.
In Google Docs, I added a couple of extra line breaks and bullet points for easier readability.
The final product - 3 minutes and 4 seconds after logging onto Teaching AI.
Here is a glimpse of what I ended up with, after hitting ‘Stop’ on my timer! (The third careers suggestion, on the next page, was ‘Dental Hygienist’.)
I hope this quick run-through of the resource creation process has been useful. Keep an eye out for future instalments in the ‘How To’ series, as well as our other blog posts. You can sign up for an account for regular updates and to try the lesson resource generator.
Remember, Teaching AI is still in active development - so you may encounter unexpected behaviour occasionally, and you can expect the quality of generated resources to improve regularly over the next few months. If you can afford to support our continuing development, we would really appreciate it: Keeping our servers online costs money every month, with a small extra cost every time somebody generates a resource.