12 Leveraging ChatGPT as a Teacher and Student Resource

ChatGPT has been a controversial tool for both education and businesses. As a comprehensive input and output AI, it is a modern form of Pandora’s Box that significantly impacts the day-to-day of many. Just as the internet, google, smartphones, social media, and other technological tools have impacted education, so too will ChatGPT. Now that the box has been opened, it is the responsibility of educators to emulate responsible and respectful use of the tool.

Saskatchewan secondary English Language Arts (ELA) curriculum directly states that “[ELA is about] using contemporary technologies to learn and to document understanding.” Even at the twelfth-grade level of ELA, the curriculums states that students shall “use a variety of technologies to facilitate and enhance representation including computer software and multimedia technology” and “Use technology as a tool to research, organize, evaluate, and communicate information, and demonstrate a fundamental understanding of the ethical and legal issues surrounding the access and use of information” (Saskatchewan Ministry of Education, 2013).

Even at the elementary level, it is expected that students will “need to consider the role of communication in their lives and the technologies and strategies that help people become effective communicators.” All curriculum within Saskatchewan contains three broad areas of learning that reflects Saskatchewan’s goals of education. All three can be supported directly through various activities using ChatGPT or other AI conversation devices. The three broad areas of learning are:

1. To become lifelong learners
2. To gain a sense of self, community, and place
3. To become an engaged citizen

Figure 3 “Opening Pandora’s Box” by Midjourney AI – Generated August 21, 2023

One of the many concerns through academia, especially in the post-secondary level, is that of using these tools to cheat, plagiarize, and violate ethical standards. ChatGPT is not the first website on the internet to cause difficulties for these institutions. Websites such as Chegg, SparkNotes, Wikipedia, essay-writing services, and Course Hero are all examples of previous resources that students have abused in the past. And in all cases, precautions have been put in place to limit their impact to academic standards.

While AI with free services such as ChatGPT cause large concerns, institutions are now taking steps to limit the impact of such abuses. Recall that ChatGPT is at the simplest form, and input and output advice. It cannot make new and original pieces of content. Rather, it scours its database – namely, the internet – and combines pieces from several sources. As such, it is relatively easy to detect through plagiarism detectors such as Grammarly, plagiarismdetector,  duplichecker, and many more.

Figure 4 “GPTZero” logo

Another flaw with ChatGPT’s writing is that unless the cheater completes a comprehensive re-write of the material output, the essay will simply not flow well and will provide several unnatural sentences or phrases. A new tool, GPTZero, is an app designed to detect whether an essay in written by ChatGPT or by a human. Taking the output of ChatGPT from Figure 2, for example, will indicate a 52% probability that the text was entirely written by AI (which in this case, it was).

When ChatGPT was asked the following prompt about George Orwell’s Animal Farm:

“Some critics believe that, at the end of the book, Orwell suggests that the pigs and human political leaders are interchangeable. Do you think most government rulers are interchangeable? How might power change those who have it? Explain.”

The outputted essay was found to be 74% written entirely by AI. The only non-plagiarized section was the first paragraph, which simply re-worded the prompt.

Pandora’s box has opened. The New York Times headlines an article with the same logic that the world of education should have today: “Don’t Ban ChatGPT in Schools. Teach With It” (2023).

Possibilities of ChatGPT in Education

Teacher uses:

One of the foundational elements of undergoing teacher training programs within Saskatchewan is reflecting on practice, sharing resources, professional development, and meeting students where they are. In an ever-increasing landscape of large class sizes, wide teacher portfolios, heavy workloads, and in some cases teaching unfamiliar subjects, chat GPT becomes a useful tool for teachers.

An immediate use for the tool is to simply generate ideas or resources for the classroom. Whether it’s brainstorming ideas and creating lesson plans, suggesting teaching strategies, or giving prompts for lesson/unit goals.

Example teacher prompts:

• Make a unit plan for teaching Romeo and Juliet to grade nine students.
• Generate 20-word problems that require factorizing binomials for grade ten students.
• Give me ten grade-twelve essay prompts for Lord of the Flies?
• What are some ways I can teach grade five students about conflict resolution?
  • Can you make me a 1-page reading for grade four students about this?
• Provide me a list of teacher professional development resources to help me better teach struggling students.
• Give me the five best resources about the dangers of TikTok. They should be age-appropriate for grade six students.
  • Provide three important questions that my students need to answer while they read one of these articles.
  • Generate an answer key on these three questions.
• Create a grade-nine level sample of a short response about the responsibilities of the government.
• How can I professionally state in an email that your son is causing inappropriate distractions that are hindering the rest of the learners from accomplishing the goals of our lessons?
• Provide me a grading rubric for a group PowerPoint presentation. The presentations involve three grade-six students researching and presenting on different plants that are indigenous to central Canada.
  • The language in the rubric is too complicated for sixth graders. Please simplify it.
• Generate a sample five-page essay on hurricanes that have some grammatical errors.
  • Show me the answer key.

Student-uses:
If one was to question any current teacher of middle/secondary students about their thoughts of how students interact with search engines such as Google, they would probably be met with dismay. A common theme tends to be a blind trust regarding the first option that Google spits out, with no deeper research into whether the information is accurate or investigation into the context of the answer. Inputting the same prompt into ChatGPT may offer a more substantial reasoning behind the question and allows the student to offer follow-up questions and prompts.

Students can benefit from using ChatGPT individually as a study-tool and in-class. It can offer immediate assistance with coursework or assignments, it can give them ideas for essays or presentations, it can help them translate text, provide explanation for how-to-do tasks, improve writing skills, create flashcards, proof-read text, and correct grammar.

Example student-prompts:

• Explain the concept of photosynthesis in simple terms.
• Help me with my social studies paper on the Canadian confederacy.
  • What are some topics I can write on?
  • What are some authentic sources I can start with?
• Can you pretend to be Hamlet for the conversation? I need to interview you.
• I need ideas for my science assignment on renewable energy.
• Here is my current essay. What are some ways I can improve it?
• Help me solve the following math problem. Give me a step-by-step solution and explanation.
• “Find the equation of the line that passes through the points (-1 , -1) and (-1 , 2).”
• How do I put a YouTube video into my PowerPoint? I want it to autoplay.
  • Give me flashcards for my health studies test. It needs to be about human anatomy.
• Give me more and make them harder.
• Make a step-by-step guide for creating a simple website.
• Explain the supply and demand with real-world examples.
• How can I ask my teacher for an extension?
• How do I source a YouTube video?