What types of lesson resources is ChatGPT best at creating?
“I’d like to get started using ChatGPT to create lesson resources, but I don’t know what it can make for me.”
“I’ve heard of ChatGPT, but I don’t understand what it is.”
“I’m interested in using ChatGPT to help plan my lessons, but my school bans the site so I haven’t had a chance to try it!”
These are just some of the reasons we have heard teachers given for not having used ChatGPT or other AI tools for lesson planning. However, we have found that with a little bit of simple advice absolutely any teacher can get started with using AI to save time with lesson planning and upgrade their teaching.
Often the single most important piece of guidance that a teacher can receive when starting to use AI tools is a suggestion of what ChatGPT can and cannot do well. Trying to get AI to do things it isn’t good at is a recipe for frustration at best, and inaccurate or poor quality lesson resources at worst. With that in mind, here are a few pointers for what ChatGPT is best suited for - and what it very much is not. (We’re focusing on ChatGPT here because it is the model that the general public is most familiar with, but there are other models out there that we will discuss in future posts.)
How ChatGPT works - and why that matters
To start, it’s useful to understand what ChatGPT is and how it works. ChatGPT is a Large Language Model (LLM), which means it is a series of complex algorithms that have been fed literally trillions of bits of textual data - words, sentences, and whole websites - to train it on which words tend to be closely related.
Because of that, ChatGPT is able to predict what word ought to come next with a decent level of accuracy. If somebody says, “The Sun is a…” then ChatGPT is likely to finish that sentence with “…star”, because that is probably the most common answer in its massive database of word associations. It might instead finish that same sentence with “…large ball of gas,” but it is unlikely to finish it with “tomato” or “small family car”!
This means that when you create a lesson resource (or anything else) with ChatGPT, what it is doing is reading your instructions and then making a best guess of what you want. The more guesses you ask it to make, the lower the quality of the created resource is likely to be: Specific instructions and a clear idea of the outcome you would like are essential for creating something that is good enough to take away and use in the classroom with only minimal tweaking.
The resource types that ChatGPT is best at creating
In our experience, ChatGPT excels at lesson resource types that rely heavily on the written word. This includes writing quizzes and matching answers, generating text for reading comprehension activities, providing outlines for lesson slide content, and even writing full lesson plans. All of these are formats that the database that ChatGPT was trained on included in abundance (because they are all over the internet), so it does a good job of predicting what you want - as long as you are specific. Some other resource types that it is particularly useful for are:
Clear instructions for students of a certain age or ability for how to complete a specific task
Suggestions for how to structure a lesson, apply an educational theory, or add a link to careers to your lesson
Messages to parents, or reports on how a particular student is progressing
What is ChatGPT bad at creating?
First off, most users report that ChatGPT is bad at anything involving math. This makes it a no-go for teachers of many subjects, when it comes to creating things like worksheets and tasks for students. However, those teachers may still find that they want some of the other resource types or inspirations for lesson planning that are listed in the section above! We are looking into using a more appropriate AI tool for math-based subjects, to ensure that all teachers can access this powerful technology for their lessons.
Secondly, ChatGPT tends to do a bad job at creating things that are specific to your course or your exam board. This is something we are working on including in the next version of Teaching AI, so that teachers can apply preferences in their user area to ensure that resources are more closely tailored to what they need.
Finally, ChatGPT doesn’t always format things in the way you might expect. There are some AI tools out there that use ChatGPT to create worksheets in specific formats, but in our experience most teachers value flexibility and adaptability when it comes to lesson resources. We’re working to add worksheet creation to Teaching AI in a flexible way, so that teachers can format their worksheets in whatever way they like while using ChatGPT as an AI helper.
Will any of this ever change?
Absolutely! ChatGPT burst onto the scene in a very public way only a few months ago, and educators around the world are collaborating to work out the best way to use it to enhance their teaching. Teaching AI is committed to keeping our basic lesson resource generator - including some of the resource types discussed above - totally free to use for all teachers, forever. Please try the Teaching AI lesson planner if you haven’t already - and sign up as a Paid Tier member if you value what we are doing, so we can continue developing the project.
