ChatGPT is Freaking Me Out: Teacher Edition

ChatGPT is one of the biggest technology revelations we have seen in recent times, and we are all wondering how this will impact us. From students and school teachers to businesses and writers, everyone is finding a good use for ChatGPT.

 Our UTB team love new and exciting tech, and we are using ChatGPT in many different ways – and along with this, we have found specific questions that need to be answered for our educators. We’ve put together some of the most pressing questions and answers you might have about ChatGPT – because you NEED to know about this new technology!

We post every week and would love to have you keep up with us. If you know someone who would get value from these episodes, hit the share button and let them know. Lastly, if you have questions or anything to share with us, email us at team@usingtechnologybetter.com or follow us on Instagram at @usingtechnologybetter or on youtube.com/@utb

We’d love to hear from you! See you next week.

Podcast Transcript Below

Adrian Francis: 0:00
while we’re doing the Saturday Night Live, or whatever show we’re at the moment, the ethical side of it. So you’re getting responses that have been written in a certain way, especially when you have a conversation about what cultural and ethical background has been used to generate those responses. And that’d be a great thing for a philosophy class for an ethical class at the high level in education, to kick around who’s making these decisions to give you those responses?

Mark Herring: 0:32
Well, hey, everybody, welcome to our recorded conversation called GPT is Freaking Me Out: Teacher Edition. Did you like that, everybody that was my little title, we have got four of our UTB team members on the call, and we’re exploring what chatGPT or the future of AI could mean for us and education. Now, it’s worth mentioning that none of us are AI experts. Definitely not. But we’re all experienced educators and teachers, just like most of you, and we’re really interested today, to have a look into what the opportunities could be for us in our schools and classrooms. And on the call, we’ve got Bex, Paul and Adrian. Hey, everybody. I was just wondering, everybody, if we could start with a quick explanation of what GPT is. And I know, Adrian, you’ve done a little bit of research, and you’ve actually got jet chatGPT to tell us what what it actually is itself. So how about you start with that give us a basic layman’s terms, remember, we’re all educators coming from a non technical point of view?

Adrian Francis: 1:30
Yes, In a very, very low level entry. So basically, what ChatGPT is, it’s been around for maybe, maybe five couple of months, and it’s just gone live just before Christmas. So people were kind of getting excited about it and have now been jumping in. So you want to send a pop up around social media and things and there’s kind of this idea of Oh, my goodness, what this is gonna do and disrupt where we’re at. So what actually is it it’s actually an AI model that takes the text that you enter them has a look at a whole lot of other text that’s got access to analyzes what you ask them and gives us a response. So it’s actually using computer it’s neuro neurological kind of nerdy stuff in the backend to make those answers come out to you. It’s not a search engine that goes and find something, it goes and looks at everything has been written that’s out there published publicly in the web, and then formulate some answer based on the question that you asked it. So really, in simple terms, it’s a computer program that can understand what you’re typing. And it can respond in a text like manner, like humans, and analyzes a large amount of text to be able to give you that answer, and then generate those responses. And as it goes, it gets better and better because it learns what it’s doing. And behind it, not just the machine was doing, it was engineers in behind it that actually control it, like not controlling it, but actually building the code and helping it learn better, and adding in a whole lot of safeguards and ethics and things like that. So it’s quite an interesting little model. And it’s getting better as it gets older.

Mark Herring: 2:54
So it’s at the moment because I think for a lot of people I’ve been talking to, they’ve been thinking that it’s basically connected to the internet, and it’s kind of like gonna replace Google and it’s this big sort of search engine, that that’s coming through there on the track, isn’t it? Like, that’s not the way it works at the moment, but it might be in the future.

Adrian Francis: 3:10
Ah, I’m not sure I know, that creates when it creates a response. It’s a unique response. So that’s why it’s scaring a few teachers a little bit at the moment because I go, Oh, my goodness, we’re not going to be able to track it. And we can’t check out replay drives. So I did a test where the school last year, where we got six teachers to ask the same question. And we got six completely different answers. So once again, it doesn’t pull up from the same stuff as a search engine would. But I think it’s a nice opportunity for us to reflect on what we do in the classroom.

Paul Hamilton: 3:40
Yeah, I was just saying that. For me, the big difference is that it is a chat, it is a conversation. So when you ask it a question, and it spits out a response, then you don’t have to retype the whole question. Again, you could say Hang on, define that bit a little bit more, and it will join in the conversation. So it’s remembering the dialogue that you’re chatting with, and then just building upon it, and you’re saving the chat or the dialogue. And so for a lot of teachers, it’s a lot more natural, and it’s a lot more about a conversation or a little bit more social in its response and how you’re talking to it. And I think that is probably why it’s resonating with people quite a lot. It’s that conversational talk that people are liking.

Adrian Francis: 4:22
Yeah. Okay, now before we jump somewhere else, Mark, so I did one last week for I asked him to write a poem about a friend of mine called Mike who was riding his bike. And it was fairly fairly average Powerball isn’t that great. And then I said, Write me a story about Mike who runs into a bunch of climate change activists, and has a nasty conflict. And so it actually put mike back on a bike having a journey and an experience and then running into these activists as he went through. So it’s actually grabbed what I said before, put it in the context of the next bit and built on it to make this story. Quite good. I thought it was fun. Wow.

Mark Herring: 4:56
What would be some examples of ways that we’ve used it so Finally, things that you’ve played around with that might be quite good because I guess a lot of people listening probably haven’t had to jump in and had a go at it. What would be some more examples of anybody got some

Adrian Francis: 5:10
Can I just crank it back a smidge, Marcus Smith, go talk a little bit about it, in schools and in education, we tend to want to change what we’re doing. But we’re so stuck got stuck, we’re used to doing the things that we normally do. And when something like this comes across and becomes disruptive, we automatically can throw up our arms and do the Henny Penny, oh, my goodness, the world is falling, this is not going to be very good for us. Because of the fact that we went through school and learn a certain way, our parents went through school and in a certain way, and we’ve then gone back to school to teach in that same certain way. And we haven’t really altered or changed much about what we do in education. Now we can talk about Sir Ken Robinson and what he said and that and that was years ago. And we still haven’t modified a lot of what we do based on some of the stuff that he was talking about maybe 1010 years ago. And now we get something like this that could actually disrupt the way in which we work. Now I’m based in Australia. And when COVID hit and we went into lockdown schools, we’re talking a lot about before pre COVID talking a lot about, you know, what are we doing to make education more engaging with the digital world? How can we use this online environment better? How can we create personalized learning, all those kinds of things, but we didn’t didn’t do anything until that impetus came to make us do it. And then when we flicked online, we found that we could actually teach online, we could change the way in which we did stuff to use technology to run, engaging online lessons, we learned a lot about how that works. But now that we’ve slipped back into school, we’ve kind of gone back into those those habits that we did, pre pandemic, if that makes sense. So this thing is a nice opportunity for us to reflect on what we do in schools, what the future is going to be like for our students, and how do we prepare them for that? And how can we use this tool for better learning outcomes. And that’s what I want to kind of come out at rather than the Henny Penny, the sky is falling, all those kinds of things. So I think that’s a really valuable discussion. I don’t think there’s an answer. But I think that’s something to probably kick around a little bit. And we can talk about as we go through market there, how we can use it and what we can use it in the classroom for and what we’ve kicked around. And what we found works well. And what we found doesn’t work. Well.

Mark Herring: 7:08
Going back to my question before, what would be some of the other things that people have, have used or handled looks a little experiment like firsthand experiences that we’ve had, there’s a couple that I’ve got, but I know Paul, you’ve had a play around with it.

Paul Hamilton: 7:20
Yeah. So, I think the two things that I think we can number one, I think is one of the huge pain points in schools is that the admin kind of work that teachers are doing in regard to ticking off boxes and being able to pass into admin and all that kind of paperwork, we used to call it kind of paperwork stuff. So couple of things that it does really well is that when we’re designing tasks, so the other day, I was looking at some augmented reality projects that would use a specific app. And I basically said come up with three creative student projects using this app on augmented reality that were aligned to the Australian curriculum. So automatically, it was spitting out these three kind of project based learnings but was definitely aligned to it. Now, the great thing about that is that saved me a lot of research making sure that it was an authentic task, but also match the curriculum that I had to teach. But the thing that I loved about it is, because I had a really good knowledge of what it spat out, I was then able to enhance it even more and put my flavor on it, because we never outsource work that we don’t fully understand ourself. And that is the big danger. If I was coming into a subject area, and I asked it to spit it out, and I have no knowledge on it, how do I critically analyze whether this is a good task or not. So it’s not taking the teacher out of the equation. In fact, the teacher I think becomes even more important, but what you can then do is refine that task. So I think one of those really effective uses of it, mark would definitely be aligning the research the the kind of the the work, that’s going to take a lot of time, but not a lot of mental kind of energy. It is that kind of way that we can utilize it really effectively.

Mark Herring: 9:11
Yeah, that’s it’s there’s some that’s going to really change like you were saying change the whole process of how a teacher will approach particularly Planning and Assessment and things but it changes the whole role of the teacher and in that example, like you gave when you’re coming up with you know, I know that I’m thinking of an example, one of our trainers Richard has asked it to create a lesson plan for I can’t remember it was some formula, I think some math formula, I might have even been new Adrian, and then it’ll give you all of the bullet points and outline that whole lesson plan but like you’re saying, you can’t just pick that up and then put that into the classroom and then just go straight to the teachers, straight to the learning, you know, with the students, you have to actually be in the editing role, don’t you and you have to take your subject knowledge to that to that piece.

Paul Hamilton: 9:58
I was just gonna say not only But if you can add all of your experience as a teacher and implement effective pedagogy that goes with the content, that’s that’s where I think it’s a really great marriage between the two is taking your experience and everything that you’ve learned face to face with the kids with chat GP TS expert knowledge of finding, you know, the right content, then that’s a beautiful marriage, I think between the two.

Adrian Francis: 10:25
So just a couple of things that I’ve given a crack at. Conscious of I’m talking a lot, so I’ll make sure I’ve stopped talking to you, too. I just wanted it to write some code form, which I’ve already written before, to do with just using Google Apps Script to write some script to grab a date and an event out of a spreadsheet, and then drop it into a calendar, and then send an email reminder to someone and I’ve written all that code before, so I got it to write it for me. Now, it wrote really generally the same kind of structure that I had, I had a couple of different pieces and that I hadn’t thought of. So I went, Okay, let’s have a look at that works. But what it didn’t pick up was a couple of things that you need to set up to make it work in your environment. So you can’t just kind of cut and paste it, you can cut and paste it and build it like exactly what what Paul was saying, use that wisdom to make it stronger. But you’ve still got to know a little bit about it, otherwise, it will fall over and won’t quite work. So when I think about it, it helps teachers do that, as Paul said, the things that kind of drive us nuts. So let’s pretend you’ve got to write an email to a parent that about their student that’s been late to school, and is not really going as well as I could inherit results, and you’re concerned about them. So sometimes those kinds of emails are really hard to write. So if you put that information into design email for me about Brenda, who’s struggling in school, she started off really well, she seems to be mixing with the wrong kind of people, she’s turned up late to school, I’ve noticed that she’s not dressed that nice, all those kinds of things, it will then create an email for you with a nice flavor to it that then you can modify and edit and then send off. So that saves you a bucket of time. And that kind of for me, that’s where I’d be kind of heading down that way just for those envy minutes before we talk about how we use it actually in the classroom for learning.

Mark Herring: 12:07
And you can actually ask it, you can tell it, can you write it in with a friendly tone, you know, as if I know the person reasonably well, you know, you can even give it and then you can just like you were saying before you actually once it gives you the letter or the email, you can ask it to refine this a little bit. I’ve, I’ve done something similar with a story. My wife’s an illustrator, and we’re thinking about writing some stories ourselves. So she would, you know, author the story and then illustrate them. And I added, I’ve got an idea in my head of a story that I’d quite like to write. So I just said to her, Can you write a story about this character who has this problem, and then he solves it at the end by doing x and it wrote for? And I said within 500 words, you know, because it’s a picture book, and it wrote the story. And then I and then I replied to it, I said, Could you change the second scenario? So that it doesn’t do this? But it does that? You know, and it would do that as well. So, wow, it’s a, it’s it’s kind of it’s asking the question, in that scenario, you know, and when you’re writing the letter, or you’re crafting that, are you creating, like, as an author? Have I written that book? Or have I have I had all the inspiration ideas, and I’ve just got someone to put the right words in the right place? I mean, that’s the question that that I think a lot of teachers need to be asking. And yes, two different responses. One is I haven’t written that at all. And the other responses, yeah, you’ve just got someone to do the driving, you’re just you’re driving the car, but the engine is actually pulling you along. I don’t know what you think about that. But

Paul Hamilton: 13:28
this is a really interesting one, because it also rolls over into the AI art, where there’s big discussions about who is the creators when the AI is scraping all the content off the internet, and using people’s work to create those magnificent pieces. And so you know, someone that puts in some of those prompts, and then spits it out. And they’re going to publish that book. And actually say that they are the authors where they haven’t written the test the text itself, that’s the big Well, it’s not ethical, because it’s actually very black and white, you haven’t written that text. So you can’t claim to be the author. But what you can do is obviously modify that to a state where it’s given you an idea and you’ve taken that text and you’ve rewritten it or something like that, that may have some ground there. But simply putting in the prompts is like a art. If you type in what you wanted to create, you can’t claim that art piece is yours. And you can’t copyright it, just like all the artists that put their work out that scrapes their copyright, and take their work and claim it as your own. So we’ve got some lots of lawsuits. There’s lots of civil lawsuits at the moment with the Ayar. It’s really interesting, where artists who have worked produced that’s very similar with the same techniques and styles are actually saying you use my images to recreate that, and therefore that’s against copyrights. So there’s a lot I think, to play out in a legal sense, not so much with chat GPT but definitely the artistic world and producing works in that field.

Bex Rose: 14:58
I’m just wondering, I’m listening To, you know, the kinds of questions that you have been asking and thinking maybe that needs to be the focus for teachers as to those questioning techniques, problem solving, like all those things that have been quite they’ve sort of come to the forefront even just when you’re doing searches and stuff. That’s that’s sort of where the teaching element comes in, and what what the good questions look like? How do you refine a question? How do you read that, and those are the kinds of things that teachers could be working on with their kids as well.

Adrian Francis: 15:33
And I think, that’s also what we tend to do is we tend to mark outcome. So we set a task, like I’m an expense teacher, so I’ve got five equations I need you to solve and solve them. So the students to work out what what variables are missing, and then they punch it into the equation, they get the answer. Now, does that actually assess that they know what they’re doing, or they then assess that they know the process. So cover conversations I’ve had with teachers around this is really let’s have a look at at the moment, we assess outcomes. So let’s have a look at that essay, their written piece, that test or whatever, we marketing gets a rubric or a set of standards. And that gives us our outcome, but maybe we need to start marking process of how they actually get to that spot. And the journey they take to learn which takes a different headset from a teacher. And then maybe just maybe we need to teach wisdom, and maybe problem solving. And then also that whole idea of curating and collecting and refining information, which is a really, it’s a higher level thinking skill than just reading a bit of text. And you know, the dog was around the ball. The question is, you know, what color was the dog, the dog was black, all you’re doing is grabbing information out of it, not really analyzing it. So maybe that gives us a slightly different twist about what we should be assessing, but also what we need to be teaching because it’s a higher level skill than just plopping a number into an equation and getting an answer.

Mark Herring: 16:55
And that’s been the big debate, I think over over the sort of the last 50 years has been this whole, you know, we’re talking about future now skills and future ready skills. There’s there’s been something that’s been going on since 2000s. You know, I first heard Mark Tribble talk about that years ago, in the 2000. Space, he was talking about the need for for transitionary skills for a modern world. So really, you reduce it down to its bare bones, it’s about moving from memorization to skills and processes and understandings, really, that’s what we’re trying to do. And for a lot of current developing countries, that’s what they’re trying to do in terms of the shift of education, they’re trying to shift their education from a memorization base to a skill base, that’s what they’re trying to do this part of their development. And it’s almost like this AI tool is coming along is going to almost in one sense force teachers to make that shift. It’s not an option anymore. It’s a necessity, because otherwise, all of your students, if you’re testing, memorization, and even some of those basic skills, how do I write an essay? They gotta we all be coming out with a pluses. Right? So I think that’s one of the stresses at the moment for people who see this coming. And, you know, like, like we’ve seen before, I think, for a lot of us in the education sector, we’re probably a little bit unaware and a bit naive of what’s coming down the track. But for people who are looking at it, they are slightly freaking out. And there is that concern, because they’re going to be forced, and they don’t quite know what that looks like. So there’s that uncertainty. What do you think about that? Is that, is that going to continue to grow? Do you think as a sector, we’re going to the fear is just going to keep compounding? Or do you like, I know that we want to have this conversation about the opportunities, and we want to kind of dive into that and look at that. But where’s your sense of where their sector overall is going to go? As the year starts to unfold and the ripple effects of this start to spread through teaching?

Paul Hamilton: 18:47
I’ll jump in first, if I could. So I think one of the one of the things that has become really evident this week is that it is a tool that is a technical tool that can go down and not be available, and it’s not there for our beck and call. So we know that because everyone’s using it, it’s crashed, it has been unavailable, looks like it’s going to go behind a paywall looks like some companies might acquire it and build it into their tools, which is really, really interesting. So when we become quite reliant, and I’m sure that people that have jumped in and abused that over the last couple of months, like Adrian have said, have become quite reliant on it, it’s almost become part of their daily usage. So that’s one thing is to say, what if the tool is not available anymore? What if it kind of goes in a different direction? How does that actually work? Going forward? So I think that’s really clear for me, as an educator, and I don’t know, I was spoken to my wife who’s also a secondary teacher at the moment. One of the first thing she’s going to do when they start back at school in a week or so is have a discussion with the kid especially the year 12 and not make it a secret and actually have this discussion to say it’s it’s there. Let’s talk about it. Let’s think about set some guide guidelines down some rules down, but I think when it becomes a secret when it becomes this, I don’t want to know about it. And when it when it doesn’t become part of your discussion as an educator, that’s when it could become problematic, right is when you don’t open up the discussion and, and have your students in on the conversation and talking about it. Because I think for primary school, it’s not so much an issue, I think the way that we do things in primary school very much is maybe a higher focus on formative assessment. We know what our children are kind of creating towards that summary phase. But I think with secondary where we go more project based and assignments and things where the kind of end product is the one that gets marked, and there’s not as much time to do that back and forth, with with drafts and so forth, that it’s going to become the real issue. So I guess my takeaway would be open the discussion, certainly with your staff and principals, when you go back have a really good robust discussion about it. Because you don’t want it to be this secret that sitting behind because it is the most transformative Tech, I think I’ve seen in the last 10 to 15 years. So it’s a Yeah, to have that discussion.

Adrian Francis: 21:03
I think also, there’s probably two aspects, there’s where this is going to affect what we do in the classroom. That’s probably the first bit so in the classroom when we’re doing our teaching, but also how this is going to affect our teachers workload. So there’s probably those two aspects here. So if we look at the in the classroom thing, I think it can be used in a really beneficial way. Rather than Oh, my goodness, this is the worst thing in the world, we’re going to knock it out and ban it. Because if you think about, say, second language, second language learning so far, Mina, and ESL students, English is my second language, and I’m predominantly in the school that speaks English. For me to get better at conversational English, that’s really hard to do. Because I’ve got to find someone to be able to do that. But with Chapter TBT, you can actually have a typing conversation with this thing that will help you have an understand the way in which nuances work in language to be able to help you with your language skills. So I think that is a really, really good tool. And if you pair that up with reading progress inside Microsoft Teams, you’ve got a great experience for students to be able to increase their learning in terms of the language and the writing skills, and all those kinds of things to up that standard and make it a level playing field. So it’s a really good opportunity to use it for helping students get better at what they do, rather than locking it down and stopping them in that space, which is a scary space to step into. Because as a teacher, you start losing a bit of control about what’s actually happening inside the classroom inside that learning for students. And I think as Paul was saying that drafting process is going to become more and more important, because of the fact that if you only see the piece of work at the end, and you then whack it into a plagiarize checker, this is maybe in the high school area, you’re not going to pick it up in a plagiarism checker because it’s not plagiarized. So you’ll need to have that process of can I see the student’s work as they’re going through? Can I have seen evidence of them working in class. So therefore, teacher is going to be a bit more mobile, seeing what’s going on and touching base with students a bit more. So they can guarantee that that work is this. Now I’m not saying not use chat feature to be, don’t use the chat to get the research and things that you need to write your essay. But then write your essay based on the back of that or write your response on the back of that. I think that’s a really good skill for students to learn as well.

Mark Herring: 23:15

It’s interesting, because there are states like in the US, I know that there are districts in certain states that are banning it, you know, they are blacklisting it off the you know, routers and the Internet filters and things like that, that. And that tends to be sometimes there can be the knee jerk reaction for, educators is to just ban it. I remember, like I think what you’re saying is this is the first major disruption we’ve had for 10 to 15 years. I think the other the other one that we’ve had recently that is on the same kind of level is this move to cloud computing, from keeping things on your server to now you can do it online, because now all of a sudden collaboration turned up. And if you look at the history of how a lot of countries schools teachers responded to that was they said, Well, I don’t want my students using a Google Doc or a Microsoft Word doc to be able to collaborate, I’m just going to it’s pen and paper because I want them to focus on the skill. And one of my concerns is that a lot of teachers, they’re going to do that, that this will be another nail in the coffin for digital tools to because if they’re stuck in this kind of memorization, skill, base, reading, writing, maths kind of approach of what they want their students to achieve, they’ll just say, well, we’re not going to have any digital in our in our classrooms. And we’re going to focus them on this. Now I’m not I’m not putting a value judgment on their, you know, any kind of moralistic judgment on that. I think that that could be one of the one of the outcomes. I think it’s worth thinking about as as a school, like you’re saying, Paul, how are we going to respond to this? Yeah, what’s going to be our response I’m going forward

Paul Hamilton: 24:42
To really foster or encourage some things that send us backwards. So when I’m thinking of banning something, let’s say a school bands it and then let’s say there’s a greatest emphasis on On Demand writing exam type setups, stuff that we know is not in the real world, but only in the education set system that is behind by a fairway. But because the bandit and they’re scared of it, they’ll say, right, you sit down here handwrite, you’ve got 20 minutes to produce something really quickly. So what they’ll do is they’ll look at what’s out there. And then they’ll design some sort of assessment that is actually worse pedagogy that’s worse for the student, and worse for the outcome, to actually get what they want at the end of it. So I think this can actually enhance what we do. But it also could send us backwards quite a long way, if we don’t embrace it, or at least talk about the benefits of using it. The other thing to think about is you can bend that as much as you want in schools, students will find a way a little bit long dress and arc and the dinosaurs, they will find a way. And if they’re doing most of their assessments at home, I’ve got kids that have just finished year 12 and are going through year 11, and 12. Now, they don’t do their work in class, they’re doing it at home, they’re doing it on weekends, they’re staying up late at night. So that banding and all that thing, it’s not going to work. So I think it’s time to have those really good, robust discussions about where we can take this. So also,

Mark Herring: 26:05
Let’s, let’s try and drill down and focus on the positives. So as of now, like, we know that there’s big issues, you know, in our leaders, I think there’s something that we need to grapple with. And this will, this will go on over a period of time, there’s an evolution of us changing tech, and then the tech changing us. And so you could replace us with education as well. So that’s going to be going going what could teachers be doing this month, next month, the month after to really grab this and use the opportunity for some good with their students?

Adrian Francis: 26:35
So I can if we look at the pain points for teachers, what do they find painful. The first thing is always creating those unit plans of work. Unless they’ve got them beforehand, especially for your first hour teacher, you know, you’re kind of struggling to get this lesson plan, you’ve got to teach that lesson, your supervisor looks at it, this can help you build a structure of a lesson plan. And as Paul said before, you can link it to the AITSL or the teaching standards. And that saves you a bunch of time, you still have to refine it, you can’t just take it and run with it. Because sometimes it just doesn’t work, you know, oh my goodness, that’s not gonna work in my class, or you use it as a template, give it a crack, and go, Oh, my goodness, the thing that I thought was going to take 15 minutes took me 35. So I’ll just go in there and change it around. So use it as that base to help you create your lesson plans. And help you save that time. So you can focus on that teaching in the classroom, but then go back and refine it. The other thing I think you could use it for in that lesson planning area. So look, I’m going to teach a lesson on Monday, on some sort of, say, a year level physics thing. I teach thing on motion, please give me five things, I can teach my new 10 class on motion, it’s good to go for 45 minutes. And please give me some YouTube videos. So I can go and learn about it beforehand. Now that gives you a resource, so you can actually get it ready to roll, you can then use it as your learning spot. But if you want to be even more clever with it, which I would be thinking is that personalized learning that you can then personalize it for different students in your class, you can differentiate straightaway. And give them a separate learning task learning journey, learning whatever, in that space by using the chat GPT to generate it for it. And they can have all the same overall experience. But it’s been personalized and differentiated for each student with those resources at the bottom of it, you still need to look at those resources and make sure they’re appropriate. But I think for differentiation in the classroom, it’s superb. And then if you link it to a rubric or an outcome site and link it to this rubric for my assessment, then you know, your assessments going to be the same across all your students, even though the task might be slightly different for each student because of the fact that there’s been differentiating for you, which takes time in real life. But you can get this to a point,

Mark Herring: 28:46
time savers are reported.

Bex Rose: 28:48
I’m kind of off the back of what Paul was saying about his wife going into secondary school and talking to their kids about it. Ask your kids what they can do with it, and give them a roll with it because then you’ve got a really good understanding of how far they can take it as well. Get them to have a go and ask the questions and see what they come up with. And, and start from that because at the end of the day, once you open it up, they’re gonna go and give it a go anyway, so actually finding out what they get out of it as well would be a really good opportunity for them, then you have a really good understanding of their questioning techniques. And maybe there’s some key areas there that you could work on. And see what they come up with.

Adrian Francis: 29:30
Some of my reading as well, Mark I was looking at Yeah, I just kind of thought well, what else could you use chat GBT for and one of the ones that came up quite regularly was like a virtual assistant. So typing students can say we’re on the school website do I need to look to find canteen times and it will go through and look at your school website or then give you the idea down to find it so you can use that as a virtual assistant to help you and for students to work their way around. But just imagine onboarding a new staff member, you know, where do I go in the school now to find this use the the school’s website, fill it in grab that information that will help you out that way. So it’s an interesting kind of virtual assistant slash, I don’t need to ask everyone about this, I can actually find something about myself. So it’d be interesting to see how well that does that. But it could be a nice little helper for students and teachers as well.

Mark Herring: 30:14
That might be something that comes further down the track, because I don’t know that it is connected to the internet at the moment, because whenever I’ve tried to get it to do that, it sort of says, I don’t have access to the Internet right now. So that yeah, that’s definitely down the track, I think.

Paul Hamilton: 30:26
Yeah, I think the other thing too, to realize is that this is coming from primary teachers heart and soul here is looking at beyond the text as well. So obviously, it’s a dialogue, and it’s a chat, so it involves text, but it also spits out emojis. So as a primary teacher, let’s say that I’m a learning support teacher, and we’re doing a book study on Harry Potter. And my students are really struggling with the text, but they’re going through it and we’re discussing it, you can ask chat GPT does spit out 50 emojis in sequential order of the plot of Harry Potter, and then use that as a visual stimulus and scaffold that for your students to make sense of what those emojis are, and have those discussions. And so you could create a great little work activity around what are the emojis in order here? And how does that correlate with the plotline of the book. And so I think for me, the magic of chat GPT is going to be in the creative ideas that teachers come up with to us. And the students, that’s the gold ticket. And to be honest, that’s been the way in ed tech for the last 1015 years, right? The teachers, the innovators are the ones that look at creative and effective uses of the tech, not just using how it’s been used before. It’s almost like, we’re all pioneers, right? We’re always coming up with new ideas. And I think teachers kind of undersell themselves as pioneers quite a lot, because they’re coming up with new ideas all the time.

Mark Herring: 31:50
So So for former teacher looking at this, and I haven’t heard anything about it, I don’t know where to go, where would you go to have a have a trial credit account, have a little play around before you get back into things with your teachers, students? Or if you’re, you know, you got students tomorrow? Where would you go to get that started?

Paul Hamilton: 32:08
I’ll jump in first really quickly, I simply have a play first. So that my thing would be if you can get on it, because we know that it’s been down recently. Jump in and have a play yourself. Because it I would say that as soon as you put in that first response, you’ve got the oh, well, I can, I can see what everyone’s talking about here. So if you type in a question or a prompt, you’re not going to get that and see it authentically. So that would be my first point is have a play. We can put the link to it there. But if you just Google Chat GPT it’ll come up there, you can sign in so that it records your dialogue conversations a little bit like, Hey, I met with BEX the other day. And this is almost like a what we talked about in this kind of subsection, which is really, really nice. But my first advice would be before you open up, you never open up new tech in front of the kids and explore have applied yourself first, just so that you’re comfortable with it, you’ve got a basic knowledge before you talk to your kids about it.

Adrian Francis: 33:08
That’s really cool. So I mean, for me, I keep on coming back to that time saving thing, because when you talk to teachers at the end of term two or term three, they’ll always say, I’m gonna give you some tough time for understanding the pump. So I’d be looking at it to see where I can save time. So that might be an even writing some generalized reports for students here. What do you hate about teaching I don’t like I just don’t like writing reports. At the end of the term, well throw your data and they get it to write a report for you use that as a report bank, but then you can customize and edit and use again, so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. I have asked it to grade a an English essay. And it does really well. It tells you the things that they’ve done really well the strength where it’s fallen down. And if you say you specifically look for grammar and sentences and references to as a Romeo and Juliet essay, it will then tell you where those references were done properly, and whether it was done accurately as well. So that would save a bit of time. But once again, you’re still gonna go look back and look at it again. So I think it’s a really good way of being able to save things. But as Beck said, I get the kids to give it a crack. Talk to the students about this. This is what’s here. How can we use this better for you? What do you think you can use it for to make your learning better? And how can I help you use this the best way you can so that you learn better in my classroom. And I think that’s where that personalized learning is going to come in.

Mark Herring: 34:24
And that’s the conversation that you can be having, right because it’s a broader conversation about technology and the best case uses of it. So whether it’s students spending far too much time on Tik Tok, or whether they’re using AI to generate art that’s not really theirs. And then they’re, you know, using it for for means where they’re going to make a monetary gain. There’s lots of conversations about the ethical use of technology that I think this just as a really good topical thing to grab. It’s front of news at the moment and a lot of people are talking about it, use that as an option to have those conversations with the students. So yeah. Great, great, great way to start, whatever it is that you’re doing any class I shared with the students for sure.

Adrian Francis: 35:02
It’ll be interesting to see where it gets to, like where it morphs to what happens next? And what gets value added to it. Because you sort of see what’s a Nike, Apple, Microsoft and Google’s, what are they doing evaluate this space as well. So it’ll be interesting to see what comes off the back of it, Microsoft’s got a really cool thing coming out with language. So you get you get something to read it to you. And it’s very monotone, because it’s that kind of voice that they’ve recorded. If you now speak to it, it picks up all your intonations, and then when your text is read back to you, it takes those intonations and makes it real. So it sounds like a real person reading to you. So that’s going to be live in a little bit. That’s really cool. So just imagine that being paired with this, that brings up a really good opportunity for that kind of your conversation with someone who doesn’t exist.

Paul Hamilton: 35:46
We go into the Entertainment Tonight part of this segment. And we look at what’s happening and the things that might not be true. Definitely lots of reports at the moment about Microsoft acquiring that for $10 billion. So that’s the big news at the moment that they can build into their Microsoft toolset in regard to Excel and Word. So lots of talk about that. I’m pretty sure Microsoft were some of the early adopters and investors and they’ve already invested a lot of money along with Elon Musk and some other people in regards to open AI, open AI, which is the company. So that’s the kind of talk to is where where does the paywall start and it’s already started. Now, if you’ve been on recently, you’ll notice that you might have got a request to join the pro account, which will give you free access when the server is down or when it’s not working, you get free access with no wait periods. So there’s always going to be a manner monetization of this we need. If we want good tools to be working well, there’s a whole team behind it, you can imagine the team behind this at the moment that needs to be employed and paid and all that sort of thing. So it’s really interesting now to see the companies that might leverage that from our platform, and from their market share point of view, and how some of the other platforms might scramble in regards to kind of bring out something similar or investing at least in in that sort of tech.

Adrian Francis: 37:11
And also, where I mean this while we’re while we’re doing the Saturday Night Live, or whatever show we’re on the the the ethical side of it. So you’re getting responses that have been written in a certain way, especially when you have a conversation about what cultural and ethical background has been used to generate those responses. And that’d be a great thing for a philosophy caf or an ethical class at the higher level in education to kick around, you know, who’s making these decisions to give you those responses? Are we getting the responses from a developed third world AI, or are we having it from a developing country point of view. So it’s really interesting the way in which those responses are given. And that would be a really good thing to dig into as well, which we haven’t got time to today. But I’d like to explore how that has been used and therefore how your thought processes have been not controlled, but kind of buried in by the responses that you get from this AI. So it’s a very interesting world to be in or interesting space to be in.

Mark Herring: 38:14
Like a TARDIS isn’t it? As soon as you take a little look inside. It just gets bigger, bigger, and all the questions is huge and huge. Yeah, so maybe to wrap up, if everybody just think of what’s one key takeaway that a teacher could take, maybe whether it’s something for themselves, or something that they can use to share with their staff or as a leader with your team, what would be one thing that you’d take away from this conversation?

Paul Hamilton: 38:37
But for me, it would be give it a go. Yeah, I’m with you. They can jump in and have a go and talk about it with staff for me, try to set up some frameworks when you introduce it to your staff, because I think sometimes frameworks and parameters for your discussion are really good. So I know that when I used to hold staff meetings, it was I’m going to introduce this tool, but I need to set some guidelines here, we’re not going to be judgmental, we’re not going to bring our own emotions to it. We’re going to critically analyze and see what it does, what it does well, and what impact it will have on our students. So sometimes in staff meetings, we know this as teachers, we can get over emotional about bringing our own history to the table and a whole range of different things that doesn’t, we end the meeting with not knowing what we spoke about or what actionable there are. So I think for me is bring it to the staff meeting, introduce it, get excited about what it can do. But then just critically analyze it go through a little plus minus interesting or whatever you want might want to do about it, to get people to look at it instead of just making a judgement based on something that maybe it’s not the best judgment to hold it on. So that would be my advice.

Bex Rose: 39:46
I would absolutely do that at a teacher on a day like what a great team building activity as well. Like who can come up with the coolest thing you know, like bring this to a teacher any day, giving it an hour for all staff, they could collaborate together they could go on one on one Like, how cool would that be coming up with, you know, who can bring back something crazy or cool or wow, you know, and being able to share it. So a big great teacher only egg day activity.

Adrian Francis: 40:11
I would really be looking at that personalized learning and differentiation in the classroom. So I think we talk about it a lot. But it’s very hard to do sometimes in class. And this could give us a really good way of being able to create tasks, assignments, or whatever for our students to be able to create their own learning journey within the parameters that we set. And I think that would be a really good way to even get the students to, you know, you might be doing something in, say food tech, which we call over here in Australia. So I’ve got to create you bake a cake and decide that these are the ingredients you’ve got come up, they’re a recipe that you need to prepare and do within a 45 minute lesson. And you’ve got to make these outcomes, each student can come up with an Individual Learning Plan, based on what they want to do, uses the ingredients that you’ve already ordered into the school, every kid’s doing something slightly different, but within a framework, you’ve got an assessment tool there, and they own the learning. And I think for me, that would be a really super cool place to start in using it to actually enhance the learning outcomes for students.

Mark Herring: 41:08
So cool. Well, if you’re if you’re watching and you’d like to know anything more, don’t ask us because we’re still learning, we’re asking questions as well. So So I think, you know, in all of the work that we’re doing with schools and working with teachers in classrooms, I think we’re going to see this evolving over time. And it’s going to be really interesting to see as month goes by what happens with acquisitions, and whether there’s a paywall, and all of the different types of technologies that start to be combined. So that this isn’t just an AI tool that’s using words, but it’s actually using visuals, it could be using webcams, there’s talk about it using AI and the human behavior, space and voice as well. So it’s going to be interesting to see what happens with that. I think my biggest takeaway is just just being open. You know, like Paul was saying, being open to the possibilities, looking at things objectively, looking at the the things that we might need to be concerned about, but then also looking for the opportunities as well. And I think it’s a really good opportunity for people to continue having this conversation as we go forward. So thanks, everybody. Great to have you on the call. And we’ll see you with the next huge adjustment and innovation that’s coming up with tech GPT