Happy teaching experiment in ChatGPT

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    Hi, Beijing colleagues. 😍Again, it’s time to share my experience of ICT in TESOL. During this week, I have conducted an experiment in English teaching with my son. I employed several tools in the lesson with my son, including ChatGPT and Voki. While preparing and delivering the lesson, I realized what appealed me most was that technological tools could stimulate learning autonomy and motivation if we could unitize them in appropriate ways.

    As usual, I asked my son to repeat after authentic cartoon videos under my instruction. This time I selected a video in Blippi series (click here https://www.youtube.com/user/BlippiVideos) as the learning material (my son earlier complained that Peppa Pig was childish☺). The topic was seaplane. The following words from the transcript I selected were the vocabulary target of this lesson.


    Then I planned to do some vocabulary tasks so that he could be familiar with these new words. However, I had to avoid making him watching the seaplane video for the second time considering his limited attention span and quality as a young learner. What’s more, I wanted to cover the seaplane topic once again for the vocabulary task. Then what came to my mind was the popular tool, ChatGPT (click here to see more https://chat.openai.com/). I input the above vocabulary into it and asked the tool to make a short passage about seaplane for primary students. To my surprise, the cohesion level of the passage it produced was pretty good. I thought that this passage was a good material, besides the Blippi video, for my son exploring knowledge on seaplanes. It could make me feel ease when I prepare learning materials because I am convinced of the quality of language products regarding both authenticity and cohesion.


(chat box on ChatGPT)

(writing product by ChatGPT)

    However, this passage was totally above my son’s English level. I had to restructure the sentences so that he could handle the reading. To be honest, the step of editing made me worry that I might negatively influence the authenticity of the text. After all I am not a native speaker. We are all L2 learners. From this perspective, we have to weigh options before we decide to utilize ChatGPT to facilitate TESOL class. Another reason why we should critically use ChatGPT is that this tool would give me different products with inconsistent writing quality for the same inquiry. In the case of writing on the topic of seaplane, I made ChatGPT regenerate response and then it gave me a text in which the cohesion level was evidently below the former writing.

    I have discussed Voki (click here https://www.voki.com/) in my former blog. But the reason why I mention it again here is that I realize that I could combine different tools together for the same topic lesson in order to maintain students’ learning motivation. I suddenly expand my horizon and find a new world. We can use diverse technological tools to organise classes. The following video was made on Voki platform, which could present the seaplane passage made by ChatGPT. In the process of re-creating knowledge, my son and I really feel at ease by using amazing technology!

click here to watch it https://tinyurl.com/2ze33qw2





Comments

  1. YifanMarch 11, 2023 at 11:16 AM

    Thank you Yangyang for sharing this tool with us. I've also tried ChatGPT and I found it really useful. What an amazing AI software!

    ReplyDelete

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