Champlain Saint-Lambert English teacher Stéphane Paquet published an article in Eductive this month aimed at giving teachers the tools to understand and interact with the AI software ChatGPT.
Find below an excerpt from the article:
“In creating the ChatGPT toolkit, my objective was to make teachers feel empowered, to make them feel that they could understand and control the tool. My goal was not to have a conversation about whether we should use it or not in our teaching. I wanted teachers to develop practical knowledge of the tool and to accelerate their learning process with a hands-on guide. There are plenty of resources on integrating ChatGPT into our teaching practices, but few on how to use the tool and how to write an effective prompt.
The toolkit allows teachers to directly explore the capabilities and limitations of ChatGPT. Indeed, it can perform amazingly for difficult tasks and fail completely at others, which is referred to as the “jagged frontier” phenomenon. The only way to truly understand where the tool performs and where it fails is by exploring it, which is why encouraging teachers to spend time with ChatGPT was a priority.
Another objective of the toolkit is to guide teachers in understanding the concept of a prompt, which is completely different from using a search engine. In addition, the toolkit provides the proper vocabulary and terms, such as “delimiters” and “two-shot prompting,” that are needed to become efficient AI users as well as to discuss these tools with colleagues and students.
Essentially, the toolkit serves as an empowering guide where the teacher becomes the expert, and the AI tool is the assistant. Teachers will learn to instruct and program ChatGPT with words to make it perform a specific task adapted to their specific context.”
Find the link to the toolkit here and read the rest of the article here.