A.I. TIPS: The AI Classroom

It is sweet and fitting that the person who referred me to this amazing, timely book, The AI Classroom: The Ultimate Guide to Artificial Intelligence in Education by Daniel Fitzpatrick, Amanda Fox, and Brad Weinstein, was my amazing, brilliant 5^th grade teacher, Mr. Arthur Wolinsky.  Art “retired” in the way that most insatiably curious educators retire: he continues to work and teach people in other ways.  So it was no surprise to hear that he is currently determined to figure out how we can harness and maximize the potential benefits of artificial intelligence for the good of civilization.

This book, published in April 2023 (a few weeks ago), is as up-to-the-minute as you can get.  It mentions, for example, the “recent” release of Bard and Chat GPT 4.  Although I’m sure we will soon see a deluge of online resources explaining how to use such tools, I must say that for the foreseeable future (if there IS such a thing), this book is money well spent.

I found myself dog-earing so many pages as to be pointless because there are SO MANY practical tips.  Two I will use right away are 1) the PREP strategy, 4 steps for crafting effective prompts to drive Chat GPT to produce what you want, and 2) the EDIT strategy, 4 steps for evaluating the results and ensuring they are accurate.

In addition to two fascinating case studies on how several teachers have already used Chat GPT with their middle school classes for writing instruction and 11^th graders for Digital Marketing classes, this book also explains how you can save time with Chat GPT for 23 different purposes:

1. Questions
2. Lesson Tasks
3. Discussion Prompts
4. Full Lesson
5. Design Thinking Lesson
6. Grading and Feedback
7. WAGOLLS and WABOLLS (What a Good One Looks Like and What a Bad One Looks Like)
8. Creating How-to Guides
9. Reusable Templates
10. Risk Assessments
11. Extract Key Words and Create Definitions
12. Differentiated Tasks
13. Task Rubric
14. Curriculum Intent Document
15. Your Own Teaching Coach
16. Student Report
17. School Assembly
18. Student Debates
19. Because, But, So Tasks
20. Talk to a Historical Figure
21. Anticipate Misconceptions
22. The YouTube Lesson
23. 18 Quick Prompts

Bottom line: If you’re an educator, this book could save you LOTS of time.  PS: Thanks, Art!  For everything!!!

PS: I’m curating resources (videos, articles, books) to answer these questions and more on The Literacy Cookbook Website, on a new page called “A.I. Tips.”

Take a look and see what you think.  Let me know if you have ideas about how to effectively harness the power of these tools (Email: literacycookbook at gmail.com)

PS: The Literacy Cookbook Website offers 2,000-plus teacher-friendly tools.  As a bonus for TLC Blog followers, here is the 50%-off discount code for yearlong access to The Literacy Cookbook Website: TLCBOOK50 (Note: ALL CAPS).