I attended a fantastic webinar this morning at 8:30 AM, Learn With AI: 10 Ways to Try AI in Your Classroom Right now, co-hosted by Maha Bali at the American University in Cairo and Jon Ippolito at the University of Maine. Jon has a comprehensive site, Learn with AI, which is pretty impressive and well worth a looksie.
A recording of the webinar will be made available which I’ll try to remember to post if/when I have the link. Maha is generally excellent at following up on what she promises by making such professional development opportunities available as open education resources. The webinar over Zoom was a 20 minute or so lecture by Jon followed by 20 minutes of a breakout room with educators who got to select an activity from wide-ranging topics. And then, each group submitted their work for further analysis and research by Maha and Jon. Lots of folks on the call so no doubt there were a number of submissions. I selected the Literature breakout room and worked with an education professor (also interested in this topic) from a university in the the Middle East.
After coming up with a plan and following the group activity outlined in the document’s instructions (shared in the above link to the workshop), we worked with prompts to build an assignment for a 10th grade English teacher to introduce Charles Dickens’, A Tale of Two Cities, to students. After the teacher introduces 15-20 minutes of lecture about the novel and its author, students are asked pair up to draft an outline ultimately leading to the creation a 5 slide presentation using two quotes from Dickens’ novel that resonate with them. I won’t paste the lengthy engagement with GPT but here’s the final product we submitted. Jon and Maha will then use the data and share back what they are working on with crowdsourced input from teachers. It’s the first time I’ve used GPT in a live call in a breakout room with another educator whom I don’t know.
I wonder if as soon as OtterPilot is connected, it requires disclosing its presence as a condition of hooking up a Zoom meeting. Good question!
A few screenshots of Jon’s excellent presentation.
A tip on structing an effective prompt from a template. You can insert what’s relevant to your inquiry.
This activity below, Improve a portfolio, is a research question I have currently when when working with community members on building professional websites.
I could envision having colleagues using this kind of prompt to update their website’s look and appearance, (like I need to do) or using a similarly-structured templated prompt when first building a website. That’s something I’m really interested in for my work with the Think Tank this semester. We’re already prototyping a GPT design here in LEDS with two student assistants. More on that later. But for now, back to website redesign prompting.. I’ve been collaborating with Ryan Dowling ’24 on his professional website for nearly two years. Ryan just custom-branded his site and has put the final touches on a major update. He’s just now sharing its link actively with prospective employers. In January, during one of our meetings, we invoked Gen AI to help think over his layout. I think it sparked some creativity for Ryan because, a week later, he majorly overhauled along “with a little help from our AI friends…”
Because I’m having so much fun, it’s time to wrap up this post.
I explored a few GPT in the “app store.” Riffing with line from a popular Beatles song, “I get by with a little help from my friends.” Bing images gave me this image.
I downloaded and uploaded to “GPT4 Logo Creator,” Ro the GPT invokes “DALLE.”
Logo creator rejects it stating it’s copyright material. It suggested I describe this prompt without the image. I did. And it returns this:
But I was perplexed by the copyright question, so I tried out a different GPT, Super Describe, which was fine with it. It took the image and generated this one. Wow. It produces impressive figures but totally gets text wrong! It would take more corrective prompting to fix this. But I had to Let It Be for now.