Week 4 Reflection
This week in class, we further discussed AI and our experiences with AI-generated lesson plans. We were instructed to create a lesson plan using a GenAI platform, and after speaking with my peers, I foundout that many people were not pleased with their results. My peers used ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Claude and Magic School. They mentioned that there was information missing, it wasn’t exactly what they asked for, the layout was not to their liking, and they had to ask AI to adjust their response many times.
On the contrary, I personally had a simple and successful experience using ChatGPT to create my grade 4 science lesson plan. To design my prompt, I used the “GenAI Prompt Writing” document by Randy Labonte. It suggested that prompts should be detailed with clear instruction of how the AI should respond. It was interesting to learn that it is valuable to inform the AI how to act and what the response will be used for. For example, “act as a grade 4 teacher, teaching a science lesson.” In the past, I have never put much thought into my GenAI prompts. Many times, I haven’t needed to be specific to AI on what response I want. However, with creating a lesson plan, there are so many targets and details I wanted to include; therefore, I needed to specify them in my prompt.
My prompt to ChatGPT: Please act as a K-8 school teacher teaching a class of grade 4 students about phases of matter (solid, liquid and gas). Explain what phases of matter are using real-life examples. Please create a lesson plan emphasizing observing and experimenting with different phases of matter. I want my students to be able to a) describe the different phases of matter (solid, liquid and gas) in real-life objects, b) collect data and observations, and c) predict phases of matter based on prior knowledge. Some resources you have access to are ice cubes, water, cups, beakers, and a hot plate (teacher-operated).
You can see that I was very specific about the requirements, targets, and resources of the lesson plan I wanted AI to create. Now I am unsure of what my peers’ prompts were that didn’t meet their expectations; however, maybe some of them were not formatted precisely. I believe that if students have access to GenAI and use it as an educational tool at school, they should be required to be taught how to use it to its full potential. Students should learn how to write prompts when using AI and what to look for in responses. I also think that as teachers, we should learn how to use GenAI effectively when it comes to planning lessons and units. We don’t want to become lazy and forget to meet the expectations and requirements for lessons because we didn’t prompt AI appropriately, assess the response, or AI couldn’t create the ideal output. It is all a learning process that will continue to evolve. As teachers, we are responsible for trying to keep up and apply the best versions of ourselves to our students.
Getting started with prompts for text-based Generative AI tools is a helpful beginner’s guide to understanding how to write prompts and why.
I found this useful general guide to writing GenAI prompts from the University of Newcastle, Australia.
Annissa, thanks for including your peers’ experiences. You wrote a very detailed prompt and got much better results than your peers, even using the generic ChatGPT (not MagicSchoolAI, designed for K-12 educators). As I read it, I thought it was a good example of critical thinking. I have noted many times that when setting up a prompt, as I add detail and think more about what I want, I don’t need the AI to do this for me. I guess I was ‘lazy’ at the start of the process and relied on AI to do the thinking!