An Introduction to AI for Teachers

If you've been on the internet or talked to another teacher in the past few months, chances are you've probably heard about AI. Teachers are often inundated with new strategies and methods to carry out their roles, as well as being highly trained in GDPR and online safety, so it's no surprise that many may be skeptical and wary when it comes to AI.

However, the right AI tool can offer practical benefits to support teaching and save huge amounts of planning and preparation time, allowing teachers to focus more on creating engaging and individualised learning experiences.

Where to start with using AI for teachers

In your school, you will want to ensure that AI is being used responsibly and in a way that safeguards staff and students. The free AI Pack for schools supports you with these considerations and includes a template policy, risk assessment and acceptable use agreements for staff and pupils.

While there have been many different AI programmes set up specifically for teachers, it may be best to try a free one first. The most well known is probably ChatGPT, a chatbot and virtual assistant that's been developed by OpenAI. The important thing to remember when using AI is to be specific in your prompts. With each of our examples, we'll show you the prompts we put in, and what ChatGPT gave us in return.

Individual Lesson Plans

Possibly one of the greatest time savers is using AI for lesson plan writing. Of course, there will be adaptations to be made, but for our very basic prompt "Write a lesson about sound", ChatGPT gave us a detailed 60 minute lesson plan for Year 3-4 students to learn about how sound is created, how it travels and how it is measured. This included Learning Outcomes, a materials list, an extension activity and exit ticket. Without prompting, it also included an online activity on Purple Mash as ChatGPT has learned from our previous prompts that Purple Mash is something we use regularly.

With more specific prompts, you will get more tailored lessons - you may want to specify that the lesson will include an experiment, what materials or resources you have within school to use, you might want a carousel of activities, or for it to find a video that demonstrates sound waves (or for more Purple Mash activities 😉).

Medium Term Planning

Extending the AI use out further to Medium Term Planning, our prompt this time was more specific: "Write a medium term plan for teaching sound to year 4 students. Include a range of practical investigations and experiments, videos demonstrating the theories being taught (include video links) and homework tasks. All lessons will lead up to a final end lesson where students will create a project piece created through STEM which demonstrates their knowledge about sound."

This prompt gave us 6 weeks' worth of lessons (of course, you could specify how many lessons you would like produced), with each lesson having a learning focus, link to a video, an experiment, demonstration or discussion activity and a homework activity. It gave ideas for a final lesson project and assessment and reflection activities for the end of the unit of work.

Slide Creation

Continuing on with planning our Sound unit of work, we then asked ChatGPT to "Write the slide content for each of these lessons, giving detailed explanations about sound and the activities that the students will do in the lesson. Include a first slide with learning objective, and also include video links". This information could then be easily copied and pasted into the slide format you use, or just used as a prompt to move through the lesson if not using slides. This was very useful for getting quick instructions for the experiments that children could refer to during the lesson.

Model text creation (WAGOLL)

Another time-consuming preparation task is finding or writing model texts (or WAGOLLs). We decided to give it the tricky task of writing a text persuading the audience to go on a trip to explore the sewer system (yuk!) and it did really well. Here's our prompt: "My class are beginning their persuasive writing unit of work. Write me a model persuasive writing text which persuades the reader to book a trip to see the underground sewer system". In the text generated, ChatGPT used rhetorical questions, alliteration, repetition, and lots more persuasive writing features.

Question/Quiz Creation

AI can also be used to create questions for learning, something that can traditionally take lots of time. However, the questions generated would then have to be printed out and hand marked. Not anymore...

Purple Mash has introduced a brand-new AI add-on for teachers inside 2Quiz! This tool generates high-quality, curriculum-appropriate quiz questions in minutes, with a wide variety of question types.

Here's how it works:

1. Choose your quiz topic (e.g. reading comprehension, a maths concept or science topic)
2. Enter your prompt into the AI add-on in Purple Mash's 2Quiz, or choose a curriculum objective
3. The AI will generate a range of question types within 2Quiz, ready for you to set as a 2Do and be automarked

This is a huge time-saver for teachers, especially when you need to create differentiated quizzes or multiple assessments quickly - and because it's built into Purple Mash and ring-fenced for teachers only, it's safe and secure.

Sign up for the Purple Mash AI add-on as an Early Adopter and you'll get it at a discounted rate.

Other blogs in this series: