Graham Clay isn't just excited about the potential that ai has for education in the future: he's excited about how it has helped him save time as a teacher and improved students' experience in his classes.
Clay, a philosopher and Ph.D., has taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Fort Lewis College in Colorado. Also write the Automated newsletterwhich offers advice on how teachers can incorporate ai into their teaching.
Clay regularly trains his fellow instructors to better use ai in their classrooms. Here are some of their favorite ways to use ai to help save time, ranging from simple-to-implement ideas to more complex strategies that require a little extra work up front but pay dividends down the road.
<h2 id="1-using-ai-to-teach-quizzes-tests-and-other-content-3″>1. Using ai to teach: quizzes, tests and other content
ai can be really good at generating classroom content, such as quizzes and slideshows based on notes and lecture recordings from educators. Clay recommends Gemini 1.5 Pro, which anyone can access for free Google ai Study, because it allows indications that are very long.
“Maybe you record yourself using only the microphone at the front of the class so they can only hear you,” he says, avoiding any concerns about student privacy. You then put that recording into Gemini 1.5 pro and ask it to create a 10-question quiz based on it.
“I start each next day with a quiz about what happened the day before,” Clay says. “Normally, that's quite a lot of work, because you have to remember everything you said, because maybe you deviated from your class notes because students ask questions, etc.” Using ai in this way eliminates most of that work.
2. Writing letters of recommendation
Most college professors are asked to write recommendation letters regularly and have a template they already use, Clay says, either putting positive information first, then their grades and their relationship with the student.
To have ai help craft these letters, Clay recommends creating a message that describes that framework rather than adding an example of a previous letter without any identity. “That shows the large language model exactly what you meant with your description,” he says.
The last step is to add a section of the message in which you use your favorite speech-to-text software to describe the individual student you are writing about in a stream-of-consciousness manner. Clay did this while walking around his neighborhood with his dog. Then, enter the individualized message and edit the final letter of recommendation as necessary.
3. Qualification
Grade with ai It's potentially a huge time saver, but also presents challenges when it comes to grading papers, etc.
Clay has a solution for this. He still completes all the grading himself, but then uses ai to save by creating a stream-of-consciousness response to each student's work and then having an ai review it. For these, you prefer to type it rather than use speech-to-text, but either approach can work.
“So it's basically like having a TA sitting there who understands some of the assignment and what the rubric looks like,” Clay says. “And this is what you have to say about a given article, and your job is to turn that content into something that a beginning student can understand and benefit from, and that is professional and grammatical. This can save 10 to 15 minutes per item. Half the time you know exactly what the problem is and you just have to present it for this particular student. ai can help you with that packaging.”
4. A ChatBot trained for your class
For the more advanced ai teacher, Clay recommends creating a chatbot that's trained on data specific to your class and can help students when you're not there.
Uses of clay Custom GPT, which allows users to create their own custom ChatGPT style chatbots. Users can provide specific training data as well as set their own barriers; For example, Clay trains his team not to give the students the answer, but to act as tutors. This does not require any technical or coding skills; However, getting the chatbot to work correctly requires some adjustments. Clay has written detailed instructions for doing this..
Despite the initial work required, he says this can really help students once it is implemented. Students can ask questions day or night and it can be helpful during group work sessions during class. “Sometimes I have 40 students who are quite needy,” he says. “They are all beginners. Everyone asks a lot of questions. “They are not sure how to proceed and CustomGPT can keep them active in class when I try to move from one group to another.”
He adds that, as with many ai use cases, a personalized chatbot helps an individual instructor increase the impact they have on students. “In higher education today, there aren't many of us who have TAs or much support from TAs and other instructors,” Clay says. “So being able to multiply yourself in some way through a CustomGPT is very attractive.”
