> a bit dramatic. there has to be an adjustment of teaching/assessing, but nothing that would "ruin" anyone's life.
If you don't have the power to just change your mind about what the entire curriculum and/or assessment context is, it can be a workload increase of dozens of hours per week or more. If you do have the power, and do want to change your entire curriculum, it's hundreds of hours one-time. "Lives basically ruined" is an exaggeration, but you're preposterously understating the negative impact.
> is it spam if it's useful and solves a problem?
Whether or not it's useful has nothing to do with whether or not it's spam. I'm not claiming that your product is spam -- I'll get back to that -- but your reply to the spam accusation is completely wrong.
As for your hypothesis, I've had interactions where it did a good job of generating alternative activities/exercises, and interactions where it strenuously and lengthily kept suggesting absolute garbage. There's already garbage on the internet, we don't need LLMs to generate more. But yes, I've had situations where I got a good suggestion or two or three, in a list of ten or twenty, and although that's kind of blech, it's still better than not having the good suggestions.
>Whether or not it's useful has nothing to do with whether or not it's spam.
I think it has a lot to do with it. I can't see how generating educational content for the purpose of enhancing student outcomes with content reviewed by expert teachers can fall under the category of spam.
>As for your hypothesis, I've had interactions where it did a good job of generating alternative activities/exercises, and interactions where it strenuously and lengthily kept suggesting absolute garbage.
I like to present concrete examples of what I would consider to be useful content for a k-12 teacher.
This would align with Year 9 Maths for the Australian Curriculum.
This is an extremely valuable tool for
- A graduate teacher struggling to keep up with creating resources for new classes
- An experienced teacher moving to a new subject area or year level
Bear in mind that the GPT output is not necessarily intended to be used verbatim. A qualified specialist teacher with often times 6 years of study (4 year undergrad + 2 yr Masters) is the expert in the room who presumably will review the output, adjust, elaborate etc.
As a launching pad for tailored content for a gifted student, or lower level, differentiated content for a struggling student the GPT response is absolutely phenomenal. Unbelievably good.
I've used Maths as an example, however it's also very good at giving topic overviews across the Australian Curriculum.
Here's one for: elements of poetry:structure and forms
Again, an amazing introduction to the topic (I can't remember the exact curriculum outcome it's aligned to) which gives the teacher a structured intro which can then be spun off into exercises, activities or deep dives into the sub topics.
> I've had situations where I got a good suggestion or two or three, in a list of ten or twenty
This is a result of poor prompting. I'm working with very structured, detailed curriculum documents and the output across subject areas is just unbelievably good.
There are countless existing, human-vetted, designed on special purpose, bodies of work full of material like the stuff your chatgpt just "created". Why not use those?
Also, each of your examples had at least one error, did you not see them?
>Also, each of your examples had at least one error, did you not see them?
I didn't could you point them out?
>There are countless existing, human-vetted, designed on special purpose, bodies of work full of material like the stuff your chatgpt just "created". Why not use those?
As a classroom teacher I can tell you that piecing together existing resources is hard work and sometimes impossible because resource A is in this text book (which might not be digital) and resource B is on that website and quiz C is on another site. Sometimes it's impossible or very difficult to put all these pieces together in a cohesive manner. GPT can do all that an more.
The point is not to replace all existing resources with GPT, this is all or nothing logic. It's another tool in the tool belt which can save time and provide new ways of doing things.
If you don't have the power to just change your mind about what the entire curriculum and/or assessment context is, it can be a workload increase of dozens of hours per week or more. If you do have the power, and do want to change your entire curriculum, it's hundreds of hours one-time. "Lives basically ruined" is an exaggeration, but you're preposterously understating the negative impact.
> is it spam if it's useful and solves a problem?
Whether or not it's useful has nothing to do with whether or not it's spam. I'm not claiming that your product is spam -- I'll get back to that -- but your reply to the spam accusation is completely wrong.
As for your hypothesis, I've had interactions where it did a good job of generating alternative activities/exercises, and interactions where it strenuously and lengthily kept suggesting absolute garbage. There's already garbage on the internet, we don't need LLMs to generate more. But yes, I've had situations where I got a good suggestion or two or three, in a list of ten or twenty, and although that's kind of blech, it's still better than not having the good suggestions.