In November 2022, artificial intelligence (AI) exploded into the consciousness of many teachers. Open AI release Chat GPTThe services allowed anyone with a free account to quickly create lesson plans, summarize documents, translate chemical principles into poetry, and more. Once the initial excitement wore off, many people began thinking seriously about how these technologies could be used to make teaching and learning more effective.
The AI platform I use
My preferred AI platform is Microsoft Copilot, which I use through an educational license from my school, so I can get GPT-4 and Dal-E3, and all my data is protected by commercial data protection. No one other than me has access to what I input into the system or the output, and nothing is stored or used in training the underlying models. There are other AI platforms available, which you can access for free. GPTFrom -3.5 Open AI And Google's Gemini.
How to create a quiz using AI
First, provide detailed prompts that communicate Copilot's role, purpose, and how the output should be structured. This is where Dan Fitzpatrick's PREPARE framework comes in handy: We've found that providing specification content directly to Copilot improves the quality of the output.
We then edit the responses from Copilot to ensure we are happy with the correct answers and that the incorrect answers are plausible. AI can provide seemingly plausible nonsense output, which is called hallucination. Two key principles for the use of AI in my school are “have a skilled human in the loop” and “own the output from your AI tools.”
Then import your questions and answers into Microsoft Forms. Microsoft Forms has a very handy Quick Import feature, which saves your questions and answers into a Word document and creates a quiz for you directly. In your class, you can send the quiz to your students and, once completed, discuss their answers. Microsoft Forms makes it easy to analyze student responses in the form of a pie chart. If you include a question that asks for descriptive answers, the system also creates a word cloud that highlights common thoughts. This can help you spot misunderstandings.
Making the most of AI
In summary, AI can be a real asset to reduce your workload and create interesting resources. However, like any new technology, it takes time to learn how to use it effectively before you can realize the time savings. You also need to stay up to date to ensure the quality of what is produced by AI and what you use in your classroom.
David Patterson
