This week in our class we participated in an Ed Camp where we submitted topics ideas, then voted on which ones we are most interested in discussing. It was difficult to decide because there were many that I was interested in hearing others opinions and ideas about. The topic that I suggested: Using AI for lesson planning, was chosen as a discussion group. I started the conversation by saying that I chose this topic because I have been exploring using AI to develop lesson plans for my up-coming 6 week practicum. What I’ve found so far is that AI works well when given very specific prompts to fill in portions of the lesson plan. For example, I wanted to create an engaging hook for my “Sources of Health Information” lesson by reading off news headlines and having students guess which headlines are real. I asked ChatGPT to create a list of real and fake headlines for me, which was a great timesaver for me when creating this lesson. However, I’ve also tried giving AI very general prompts like “create a badminton lesson plan for a grade 9 PE class”. The output would have required so much editing, I found it would have been faster for me to create the plan myself. 

As a group we found it a bit difficult to keep the discussion going after the first ~15 minutes as we ran out of discussion points. To be more successful I think it would have been helpful to have some preparation done before hand (ie. know the topic, think of some questions to discuss etc.)

Our discussion highlights were 

• Some AI tools are better than others, depending on what you are using it for 
• It’s important to be specific with prompts and fact check its responses
• Only you can know your students and your class dynamic, use your discretion when using AI as what looks good on paper may not translate well into real world application.