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Don’t Ban ChatGPT in Schools. Teach With It.

The New York Times: “…Creating outlines is just one of the many ways that ChatGPT could be used in class. It could write personalized lesson plans for each student ( “explain Newton’s laws of motion to a visual-spatial learner”) and generate ideas for classroom activities ( “write a script for a ‘Friends’ episode that takes place at the Constitutional Convention”). It could serve as an after-hours tutor ( “explain the Doppler effect, using language an eighth grader could understand”) or a debate sparring partner ( “convince me that animal testing should be banned”). It could be used as a starting point for in-class exercises, or a tool for English language learners to improve their basic writing skills. (The teaching blog Ditch That Textbook has a long list of possible classroom uses for ChatGPT.) Even ChatGPT’s flaws — such as the fact that its answers to factual questions are often wrong — can become fodder for a critical thinking exercise. Several teachers told me that they had instructed students to try to trip up ChatGPT, or evaluate its responses the way a teacher would evaluate a student’s. ChatGPT can also help teachers save time preparing for class. Jon Gold, an eighth grade history teacher at Moses Brown School, a pre-K through 12th grade Quaker school in Providence, R.I., said that he had experimented with using ChatGPT to generate quizzes. He fed the bot an article about Ukraine, for example, and asked it to generate 10 multiple-choice questions that could be used to test students’ understanding of the article. (Of those 10 questions, he said, six were usable.)…”

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