Richard is a secondary school teacher with over twenty years’ experience. He is Head of Religious Studies at a secondary grammar school based in Kent.
My first introduction to AI (Artificial Intelligence) was through cinema. The terrifying moment in ‘Superman III’ (1983) when a supercomputer achieves sentience and sucks in a human being to transform them into a cyborg, and then proceeds to nearly kill Superman scarred my childhood. When I was a bit older, I watched ‘Terminator 2 ‘(1991) and got to be terrified all over again as out of self-defence, AI. Skynet creates a nuclear apocalypse to eradicate humans. AI perhaps needs to hire itself a PR agent, like British actors, it seems to be constantly cast as the ‘bad guy’, when actually it is proven to be an indispensable digital assistant in my life.
My first use of generative AI came purely from curiosity and no doubt an eagerness to procrastinate from looking at my inbox. I managed to navigate to Gemini and on the 11/11/24 I typed my first ever prompt: “Give me an explanation of Paul’s missionary suitable for teenagers, include pictures’. This was after I had worked out the prompt box was at the bottom of the page as opposed to being at the top. What followed was an Epiphany, before my eyes was – albeit basic – an outline of Paul’s treks across the Mediterranean, spreading the message of the fledging religion. Stupidly though, rather than generating resources or considering the pedagogical implications, I thought it would be fun to harness the power of AI to create pictures of dinosaurs in sombreros playing pool. Then I just left it.
Thankfully outside circumstances got me to see sense - an idea I had for my personal CPD had fallen through, so I decided to pursue learning about AI. Time is the most precious commodity we have, and it was vital that I had the time to learn the skills for using AI. Frequently those in education can find themselves in a ‘Schrodinger’s Teaching Resource’ conundrum. A resource exists that can make a teacher’s life easier and save time, but they don’t find it easy to find the time to actually use the resource in the first place. Anchoring it in my CPD meant I had ownership and accountability. Useful too was an early piece of research by the NFER (National Foundation for Educational Research) who discovered that teachers using CHAT GPT were cutting lesson planning time by about 25 minutes a week.
It was critical that I learnt from the ground up, as if I knew nothing (which was easy because I didn’t). I completed the Google Course ‘Generative AI for Educators’ - two hours well invested in learning the fundamentals. The most important was how to prompt, and then probing (checking) the responses afterwards. The prompt is the instructions you give AI and the P.A.R.T.S guideline is superb. Persona, Aim, Recipients, Tone and Structure. So, “I am a Religious Studies Teacher (Persona), I want to create an information sheet on The Trinity in Christianity (Aim), it is for a Year 7 class who have just studied the Baptism of Jesus (Recipients), they are a class with a good level of literacy but use accessible language (Tone), please include space at the top for name, form, date and make sure there are images (Structure).” Using this as a spine for prompts gives clear instructions to the AI. and helps with greater precision in answers. Of course, AI makes mistakes so probing the answer is necessary. An early encounter with AI had me looking at a photograph of Dr Quinn Medicine Woman herself as Jane Seymour after prompting very clearly that I wanted a timeline of Henry VIII’s wives. An essential part of my learning has been to try and cut through the myths, scaremongering and misunderstandings of AI – the fear (albeit cinematically entertaining) that we might end up in situations sketched out in popular culture - can create a lot of noise and misconceptions. However, it is worth remembering that human beings created AI. Reading the outstanding book ‘Supremacy’ by Parmy Olson was priceless in giving me the context and origins of AI. Olson paints vividly the individuals involved, the eye-watering sums of money ploughed into the industry and the moral issues flaring up as a result of these digital pioneers. The British genius and Nobel Prize winner Sir Demise Hassabis, an integral architect of AI, is one of the leads of this digital thriller. Today he is a key advisor to the UK government, and has also pledged to reside in the U.K. rather than Silicon Valley.
AI has helped me plan schemes of work, create infographics from YouTube transcripts, design displays and generate revision plans. The value, I discovered, is not necessarily in which AI platform you use (my algorithm is constantly pushing me the latest costly AI software for schools) but how you use it. The gold rush in the U.S.A in the mid 1800’s didn’t really benefit those looking for gold. It benefitted those who sold them the tools to look for gold. Levi Strauss and his jeans, or the opportunistic Leland Stanford who bought every pickaxe, shovel and bucket he could find in San Francisco to sell at inflated prices to those going to the goldrush. All those in education need the tools to use AI, the prompt is the gold. Even if that prompt is used to generate images of prehistoric creatures playing pool.
References
ChatGPT in lesson preparation – Teacher Choices trial
Generative AI for Educators with Gemini
Supremacy by Parmy Olson (ISBN-10: 1035038242/ISBN-13: 978-1035038244)