Cana Fuest, PhD Candidate

This fall semester, I have become more intentional about using AI to enhance my teaching practice, and reduce the time I spend planning lessons. After teaching the same subject material for several years, I have plenty of lecture notes, assignments, and learning material to work with. However, I want to find ways to make the learning environment more engaging and better aligned with my learning outcomes.

Enter ChatGPT.

I do pay for the premium subscription, which is $20 a month. For me, this is a worthwhile investment. I am able to use ChatGPT as an assistant to help me stay organized and complete tasks more quickly than I would on my own. I have found ChatGPT to be very good at providing me with ideas for assignments, but also giving me entire outlines for lessons. As someone with ten years of teaching experience, I can quickly identify whether the generated content and ideas would work well in the classroom. After a few iterations, I have been given some excellent learning activities and assignments to use with my students.

Another way in which ChatGPT has been very useful is in generating survey tools that can be used to solicit student feedback. The premium subscription to ChatGPT allows the GPT to “remember” certain details, which it will later draw upon in conversations with the user. In this way, ChatGPT really does feel like a personal assistant who remembers projects we have worked on together before.

If you have not yet used ChatGPT, or another AI assistant in your lesson planning, I recommend you give it a try. I believe AI can help teachers save precious time so we can use that to time to learn, think more clearly, and spend more time with our students.