All school teachers must become familiar with Chat GPT as soon as possible. They should utilise its speedy capability to produce lesson plans, worksheets and assessments writes Lawrence Fray Nations are vying for Artificial Intelligence (AI) supremacy, businesses are harnessing it for their own ends and educators need to come to terms with it. It’s clear that its potential benefits can revolutionise teaching-learning processes, improve learning outcomes, and facilitate student success. It can help teachers plan, assess and evaluate learners as groups and individuals, and enable them to draw important inferences from student data to inform their own teaching and formulate plans for whole school development. Chat GPT. Chat GPT is an AI chatbot that provides conversational responses based on its immediate evaluation of the user’s requirements. However, the responses need to be checked before incorporating them into any official communication as Chat GPT can, and does, make mistakes although it continues to learn and improve. Download it to your computer and your phone and ask it what you will; it’s always ready to help. And, at the time of writing, it’s free-of-charge. Chat GPT is becoming popular because it can interact with students as smoothly as a human. It can match its communication level to the learner’s so there are no barriers to comprehension. Better still, the learner’s self-confidence increases as she is in charge of terminating the conversation at the click of a mouse. Students can certainly use AI to improve learning. It has become the quintessential tutor with an ever-expanding database greater than any individual could have hoped for. Inevitably, there is a downside. Chat GPT could be used to sidestep the learning process by commanding it to churn out essays and solutions without the student making the necessary effort to engage with the teacher’s lessons. Yet a basic law of education, which states that ‘effective learning is proportional to effort’ cannot be circumvented. True, in a matter of seconds, Chat GPT can provide a completed assignment that otherwise would take a student substantial time and effort to research and produce. But such misuse of AI-based learning platforms not only replaces proper learning with easy solutions (with disaster looming when examination time comes around), it also hampers the development of critical thinking and problem-solving skills of students. More seditiously, it can trivialise the importance of teacher-student interaction. In short, there are great differences between a student’s use of Chat GPT to clear doubts and another who deploys it as a homework-generator. Like all discoveries throughout history, it is the user’s intention, rather than the creation itself, which determines the consequences. Against this backdrop, let’s examine the role of AI in four main areas of the teaching-learning transaction. Planning for learning. All school teachers must become familiar with Chat GPT as soon as possible. They should utilise its speedy capability to produce lesson plans, worksheets and assessments for specific age groups on any topic when properly prompted. Moreover as a lesson planning tool, it is truly a blessing.…
