Today’s tips go toward @Bitman, who asked me about my school’s (and my) opinion about the use of ChatGPT. Interesting question - and I would like to expand the scope to my country’s stance on ChatGPT.
I’m sure fellow educators are using other AI-powered platforms like Diffit and Dall-E, but I am more familiar with the prevalence of ChatGPT, so I shall focus my sharing on that and not bite off more than I can chew.
As a cosmopolitan and capitalist-driven society, Singapore usually embraces any technology that is touted to streamline processes and save time. After all, time is money lol. Suffice it to say that the Ministry of Education holds a positive attitude towards ChatGPT. I should know because I volunteered to be a conversation leader to facilitate a discussion on “Leveraging ChatGPT in Teaching and Learning” during a face-to-face party our ministry held for educators last year.
Yup, I’m somewhere in this picture.
The Educational Technology Division has grabbed the bull by the horns and published a useful guide on how teachers can use ChatGPT to quicken their writing and editing of student testimonials. Their guide even includes specific prompts that educators can use - no need to be a prompt engineer by yourself!
Since our ministry approves of the use of ChatGPT, several teachers have really been enthusiastically using it to enliven their lessons. So there is a FB group that connects educators. The hype has died down a bit, but last December, there was a flurry of posts from teachers sharing about how they used ChatGPT 4.0 to create customised chatbots to come up with lesson plans. Yes, teachers using their own money to subscribe to the paid version because they want to do better by their students. It’s quite heartwarming to witness, actually.
A teacher even went the extra mile to create an Excel file that automatically generates useful prompts for lesson planning, taking in mind your learners’ profiles and 21st century competencies. It’s really quite impressive. All I had to do was to fill in the relevant details regarding my situation and Voila! I can use the prompt to kickstart my conversation with ChatGPT.
Narrowing the scope down to my school, well, I was tasked to lead a workshop that guides teachers of graduating classes to write testimonials for their charges. So I guess we are gradually jumping on this bandwagon of AI-facilitated teaching.
Personally, I do use ChatGPT occasionally in my classroom, but since I teach in a low-progress school, I haven’t had many opportunities to guide students how to use ChatGPT themselves. But I did once use Google’s speech-to-text feature to record down my students’ oral responses, paste them on ChatGPT and ask ChatGPT to suggest three vocabulary words they could use to elevate the quality of their speech. I was so impressed. ChatGPT not only delivered on the task, but also explained why its suggested words were better than the original phrases used by my students.
Hope to post more articles on the ChatGPT scene in Singapore!