2 Ways AI Chatbots Can Make Teaching Easier

Teachers are a beacon of knowledge, mentorship, and love. Apart from providing key academic learnings, they also support students emotionally, encourage a growth mindset, promote self-awareness, foster social skills, and offer guidance to navigate life and develop a sense of purpose and direction in life. Clearly, they juggle many balls at one time.

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However, what we don’t often realize is the long hours and stressful environment – exacerbated by the pandemic and changing political environment – that teachers have to face. They are now facing higher levels of stress and burn out than ever before. According to a survey conducted by the National Education Association in 2022, over half of the educators (55%) reported contemplating leaving the profession.

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So how can we support those who’ve supported us in a myriad of ways? Artificial Intelligence, it seems, can help. Here are two AI-based teaching strategies that can reduce the burden on teachers.

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Using AI to Create Explanations and Analogies

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It goes without saying that teachers help students learn a lot of complicated theories, ideas, and concepts in classrooms. In doing so, it’s key for teachers to give intriguing examples and concrete applications as evidence to support their claims and arguments. This not only helps students visualize the problem statement but also enables them to think critically and learn to notice the intricacies of our world. Coming up with these examples, however, isn’t easy.

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Making sure that the examples are relatable for all students, captures every aspect of the problem statement, isn’t too layered or complex, and will be catchy for all can take a lot of time and thought.

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AI chatbots like Google's Bard can help teachers generate examples and analogies quickly. Here’s an example of how one can ask Bing to explain rotational motion with three analogies.

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Once a teacher has this information, they can then make changes as they wish and tailor it to their student's needs.

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Using AI to Create Tests and Pop Quizzes

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As much as we’ve loathed giving frequent tests in school, they actually have numerous benefits. Testing improves knowledge retention, determines knowledge gaps, encourages students to learn more, helps students better organize their knowledge, boosts metacognitive monitoring abilities, and more.

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Again, teachers have tremendous time and effort constraints. So they can, for instance, use tools like ChatGPT to help them generate full-length pop quizzes swiftly. Here’s an example.

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We asked ChatGPT to assume that they are a quiz creator of highly diagnostic quizzes. We then entered details about what concept the quiz should test and which grade the students are in. We also specifically asked ChatGPT to not include ‘all of the above’ as an option in this MCQ test and ensure that the questions test a student’s knowledge beyond standard facts about the subject matter.

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These are just two examples of how AI-powered tools can be leveraged by teachers to focus more on providing engaging and effective instruction and helping students succeed and achieve their full potential. Stay tuned for more practical tips on what more can be done with AI when it comes to making teaching easier and more effective.