Have you heard of PechaKucha before? It's an intriguing format that necessitates a presenter to speak for 20 seconds each for his or her deck of 20 slides. It's nerve-wracking as you are conscious of this race against time while forcing your mind to stay focused and speak concisely. Well, today I worked on a PechaKucha presentation on Quizlet. Here's my script:
1. Hi, everyone. My name is Kai Le, and I teach English at NorthLight School. I have been teaching English professionally for about 16 years. I love how ChatGPT has added spice to my teaching life, so much so that I'm here to share with you how I have been using it in my everyday work.
2. For a start, I am passionate about writing. As you can see from the pictures, I write regularly on Workplace and for my personal blog. I see ChatGPT as my writing buddy - one who spots my mistakes and gives me suggestions for improvement. I fancy myself as a prompt engineer.
3. So I will like to share three important lessons I learnt as a prompt engineer. Firstly, even if you use short and sweet prompts, you will be able to generate the content that you need. Let me share with you some Internet acronyms I used with ChatGPT and shared with my entire school.
4. TL; DR means "too long; didn’t read". When I had to forward a long email to my colleagues, I typed TL;DR on ChatGPT to extract a summary to share with them. At one glance, they knew the key ideas and understood their necessary follow-up action.
5. ELI5 means "Explain like I’m 5". I use this to get a succinct version of the concepts I need to teach my students. After asking ChatGPT, I will transform the insights into an easily digestible format that will help my students acquire the key ideas easily.
6. I picked this up from a writing workshop. So, we can simply type "proofread" and our writing, after which ChatGPT will edit it for us. Hence, it acts as a second pair of eyes and helps you eliminate embarrassing spelling and grammatical errors. Now, I run through my email with ChatGPT before sending it to the entire school.
7. You are probably thinking about whether you should use ChatGPT to vet your student remarks. Well, I learnt from Ms Serene Ngo that we shouldn't use ChatGPT because these remarks contain their names and other identifiers, which could be detrimental to their privacy. I intend to explore Launchpad in future.
8. The second lesson I learnt is to treat ChatGPT as a conversational partner. Talk to it like a friend. If I don't get the results I need, I refine my prompts until ChatGPT understands what I need and delivers my desired content.
9. Let me give you an example. I needed to generate a role-script for my students so that we could make a video for Staff Appreciation Day. We decided to honor the security guards, so I inputted my students' names and security guards' duties into ChatGPT.
10. As you can see from my outburst of ‘no, no, no’, ChatGPT didn’t deliver what I needed. In fact, it apologised for failing to understand me. So I made some changes to my original prompt. It was good practice for me to fulfill the Purpose, Audience and Context of my writing task!
11. In the end, ChatGPT wrote the script for me within less than 5 minutes. The lines were rather on-point. So, my students practised their line seriously and collaborated to make a video for Staff Appreciation Day. We slayed it!
12. The last thing I learnt is that I don’t have to accept everything that ChatGPT recommends. Even if the writing offered by ChatGPT sounds more polished and sophisticated, I sometimes stick to my raw English because I feel it will resonate with my audience better.
13. Take, for instance, this email I sent to thank the whole school for Spelling Bee 2023. I asked ChatGPT to elevate the level of sophistication in my language. However, I don't think my colleagues would relate to phrases like "poignant anecdote" and "profound impact", so I never used its suggestions in the end.
14. After sharing with you the three lessons I learnt as a wannabe prompt engineer, I will now like to share with you how I have used ChatGPT in my everyday work.
15. First, I use it to provide personalised coaching. For example, I used Google Docs to convert my students' oral responses into text and pasted them into ChatGPT. I then asked ChatGPT to provide three suggestions to elevate the quality of their responses.
16. Secondly, I use it to generate exercises that supplement my classroom teaching. Whenever I have a list of vocabulary words I want students to learn, I will ask ChatGPT to come up with a word-gap exercise so that they can practise using these unfamiliar words in context.
17. In addition, I also inputted a text I wrote for the NT preliminary examination. I made clear to ChatGPT that it should make edits that are aligned with my needs, namely the British English variety, the number of words and the Flesch Kincaid readability level.
18. I even used ChatGPT as a resource to generate English and Math questions during our class's Zoom meeting on a Home Based Learning day. So my form teacher and I took turns to prepare students for their upcoming English and Math final-year examinations with the questions suggested by ChatGPT.
19. To sum it all, I think ChatGPT is a game-changer and enjoy the spice it has brought to my life. It not only saves time, but also helps me love writing more because of its targetted writing recommendations. Most importantly, I think it will help me prepare my students for the unknown future.
20. As you can see from the article, IBM aims to train up to 2 million people in AI, specifically on how to craft prompts for AI. So, I believe that our responsibility as language teachers is to help our students write effective prompts to aid them in their educational journey so that they can take on such jobs in the future.
I used the above transcript and made a video with Loom. I then updated it on YouTube. My video is can be found here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDtJ89HWhrE
