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What is ChatGPT? The Chatbot that went viral.
ChatGPT, or Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer, which quickly went viral on the Internet after its launch by OpenAI in November 2022, is an AI chatbot built to provide responses and information to human inquiries and inputs. It makes use of Natural Language Processing (NLP), which means that it is designed to understand and respond to natural language input through training from Internet sources, and is capable of engaging in human-like conversations. The chatbot quickly garnered tremendous attention the moment it was launched due to its extraordinary ability to offer detailed and articulate answers to a wide variety of domains of knowledge, ranging from science and history to coding.
Using ChatGPT to Do Things You Never Thought Possible in the Classroom
With over 40 students to handle in each classroom in Malaysia’s public schools, it is almost impossible for teachers to conduct engaging lessons while at the same time dealing with endless administrative tasks, let alone providing students with personalised learning experiences. The arrival of ChatGPT has the potential to transform the way teachers work completely, with its freakish capabilities as a teacher’s assistant, counsellor, data analyst, and many more at the same time. While there is an ongoing heated debate among teachers on the potential threats of ChatGPT creating a cheating epidemic in schools, we certainly cannot ignore the huge potential for ChatGPT to herald a new era of greater innovation, productivity, equality and critical thinking in the Malaysian education landscape.
30 Ways Malaysian Teachers Can Use ChatGPT in the Classroom!
For Teachers of All Subjects and Levels
1. Write Lesson Plans
We all agree that writing lesson plans is among the most time-consuming and tedious tasks for all teachers. ChatGPT can help you write comprehensive lesson plans, with details down to lesson objectives and procedures, so you can focus on what’s important – conducting the lesson itself.
2. Provide feedback on student assignments
Isn’t it great to have a second pair of eyes to go through your students’ work with you? ChatGPT can be used to assist you in your grading process by providing quick feedback on your student assignments. It does so by evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of the work, as well as providing suggestions for improvement.
3. Provide after-school home tutoring
After-school tuition is a common practice in Malaysia. However, with inflation and the rise of tuition fees, not every family can afford home tutoring. ChatGPT can serve as an after-school home tutor for everyone, especially for subjects that are difficult to teach in a traditional classroom setting, providing students with adequate learning support outside of the classroom.
4. Create personalised learning experiences
With ChatGPT, teachers can create personalised learning experiences for students with different needs, abilities and learning paces easily. Here is an example of how ChatGPT adapts teaching content to a visual spatial learner:
5. Generate recommended reading lists
Want to assign additional readings to students after class? ChatGPT can generate effective recommended lists of reading materials through its vast knowledge base on a wide range of subjects. This can be done by using prompts like “Generate a list of recommended readings for [subject]” or “What are some good books on [subject] for [student level] students?”.
6. Generate assessment questions
Creating school exam papers can be painfully time-consuming for teachers. With ChatGPT, teachers can finally have more free time for themselves. ChatGPT can generate a variety of assessment questions with different difficulty levels, language complexities, and cognitive demands from multiple-choice and true/false and fill-in-the-blank, to short answer questions.
7. Find the source of your students’ work
With its rich database of published literature and media, ChatGPT can help you find the source of your students’ work with details down to the authors, dates, publications and chapters quickly and effortlessly. This way, you can easily tell if your students are plagiarising.
8. Create a grading rubric
If you ever need to create a new grading rubric for your class or assessment, ChatGPT can do so by identifying the learning objectives, specific skills, knowledge, and abilities that the students are expected to demonstrate, then proceed to define the criteria for evaluation and grading.
9. Explain a concept or topic to your students in another language
Of course, an AI trained with a wealth of Internet data would be well equipped with translating text from one language to another. Many even said it is more reliable than Google Translate given its Natural Language Processing technology! With ChatGPT, you can easily explain a concept or topic to your students in another language with high levels of accuracy.
Especially Useful for Malaysian Teachers
10. Create karangan prompts
Let’s admit it, none of us likes to come up with new essay prompts for students every single time. ChatGPT can be used to create essay prompts tailored to different levels of difficulty and specificity, and not only that, the prompts can be tailored for a variety of purposes such as exams, assignments, or class discussions. Here is an example of essay prompts created for the theme of “Alam Sekitar”:
11. Do summaries for your History Class
Summarising texts is one of the most frequent things teachers do in class, especially for subjects like History, which is full of complex and chained events. ChatGPT can come in handy by providing a condensed version of the main points contained in a text. Students are also encouraged to use this function to recap key ideas from a text in their revisions.
12. Demonstrate a Mathematical solution without needing to scribble on the blackboard
ChatGPT can perform operations such as arithmetic, algebraic manipulation, and solve equations. However, do take note that there are limitations to its ability and it may not always provide the correct answer, especially for more complex or abstract mathematical problems as of now.
13. Generate experiment ideas for your next Chemistry class
Imagine having new experiment ideas generated for your Chemistry lessons outside of the usual textbook examples! Not only can ChatGPT suggest experiment ideas to demonstrate various chemistry principles, it also takes into account time constraints and available resources by suggesting experiments that can be easily and safely carried out within a classroom setting.
14. Generate discussion prompts for your next Literature class
ChatGPT can be used to facilitate discussions in a literature class by posing open-ended questions related to the plot, characters and author of a specific literature. Here are examples of discussion prompts generated by ChatGPT for the famous “Hyde and Jekyll” taught in Form 3 literature classes:
15. Generate Pendidikan Moral scenarios to apply in everyday life
Pendidikan Moral does not have to be solely about dry and boring memorisation of nilai and values. Use ChatGPT to generate real-life scenarios you can use to teach your students to apply the moral values they learned in their everyday lives!
16. Explain complex Physics concepts in simple terms
One of the greatest challenges of teaching physics is explaining complex physics concepts in an easy-to-understand and digestible manner. With ChatGPT, you can instruct the bot to explain a complex concept in a way even a 5-year-old can understand.
17. Teach grammar and punctuations with examples
ChatGPT can be used to support language learning by providing grammatical explanations, as well as generating sentence examples. This helps students to easily understand the applications of grammatical and punctuation rules.
18. Teach new vocabularies and phrases
Who needs a thesaurus when you have ChatGPT? Unlike thesaurus that can only provide you with synonyms and related words for a given word, ChatGPT can also generate alternative phrases and sentences to describe things. This can offer variety to the mundane and typical phrases being used in essay writing and help expand your students’ vocabularies and improve their writing skills.
19. Analyse data in Accounting class
ChatGPT can be used to do a series of data analytics tasks including statistical summaries, explanations of complex data relationships, predictions or forecasts, and recommendations for further analysis. With the analysis ChatGPT provides, students can gain deeper insights into the data set provided.
Some Really Cool/Fun Things You Can Do with ChatGPT
20. Teach in a particular teaching style during your kelas ganti
Think ChatGPT can only have a straightforward, robotic tone? Think again. ChatGPT is trained to have the capability to explain things to you in different styles and even personalities. This is extremely useful when you are the ganti guru for the day.
21. Get ChatGPT to do some of your administrative tasks
One of the things we dread most as a teacher is having to perform the tedious administrative tasks including lesson planning, monitoring student performances, scheduling, reporting and record-keeping. ChatGPT can be used to help ease teacher burden by taking over some of these administrative tasks from your plate, or even creating a workflow system to help manage your tasks, as shown below:
22. Get your students to debate the bot
Make debating fun by changing up the usual way you run debate events in your class. Instead of dividing your students into two teams, let your students debate ChatGPT. You can also get them to learn from the arguments as well as limitations of arguments of the bot.
23. Invite your students to engage in a philosophical discussion with ChatGPT
Encourage critical thinking in the classroom by inviting your students to engage in a deep, philosophical discussion with ChatGPT. ChatGPT can provide reasoning and justification for its stance, answer follow-up questions, as well as challenge incorrect premises.
Read the full conversation here.
24. Let your students engage in a conversation with a thinker in the past
Not only that, you can invite your students to engage in a role play dialogue with a prominent thinker from the past using ChatGPT. This is helpful in getting your students to evaluate the arguments of the thinker as well as their own stance.
25. ChatGPT can play the role of a counsellor
Yes, you heard it right. ChatGPT is not just a customer service agent, it can also play the role of a counsellor. ChatGPT can provide some decent support and advice for students, including action steps that students can take to overcome their problems. It isimportant to note, however, that ChatGPT is not a substitute for professional counselling.
26. Get advice for your teaching problems
When you cannot seek the school principal for your problems, you can seek ChatGPT! Share with the bot the problems you encounter during your teaching experience and you will be surprised by the suggestions and recommendations the bot has to offer!
27. Entertain students with high quality jokes
Want alternatives to lame jokes to brighten up your class? ChatGPT may be your saviour! ChatGPT can be used to generate jokes and memes when you prompt it with a specific pattern or context. For instance, we asked ChatGPT to generate a few jokes appropriate for Malaysian Form 5 students:
28. Remix your students’ work
Explore new perspectives and ways to teach a topic by asking ChatGPT to remix your students’ work. For instance, you can remix your students’ work as a soap opera with some unexpected results, as shown below:
29. Bonus: Use ChatGPT to build interactive classroom games with ClassPoint!
ChatGPT can be used to provide classroom activity ideas based on the inputted subject matter, target grade level, learning objectives, etc. You can then plug these ideas into interactive teaching tools like ClassPoint to instantly transform your classroom experience! Below is an example of an interactive classroom game you can easily set up using Draggable Objects, Name Picker and Gamification in ClassPoint2:
30. Bonus: Use ChatGPT with ClassPoint gamification tools!
Finally, ChatGPT offers interesting ideas on how to gamify your class. One way to gamify your class is by rewarding classroom participation, and ClassPoint has just the tool for that. In ClassPoint2, the improved and upgraded version of ClassPoint, you can award stars to students during your PowerPoint presentation to boost motivation and reinforce positive achievement in the classroom. Here ChatGPT shares the various ways you can award stars to your students creatively:
This is just the beginning. With the endless possibilities of ChatGPT, alongside the rise of Artificial Intelligence being used in education, the Malaysian education landscape is certainly going to undergo change in new and exciting ways. So as teachers, be sure to embrace new and upcoming technologies like ChatGPT with an open mind, open heart and open will.
Ready to Get Started with ChatGPT?
Try it out for yourself here.
