The recent advent of various AI tools such as ChatGPT and Dall-E has piqued the interest of teachers worldwide, who have turned to the tools to create classroom content. While a lot of these tools make it easier for students to cheat, just as the advent of search engines and translators did several decades ago, they can also be very useful in many different aspects of daily life and in various professions, including teaching. I recently tried my hand at using these tools to create stories to use in class and imagery to go with them. I’ll share my experience in this post.
I used ChatGPT to generate two different stories, one for my elementary class and one for my middle school classes. For the elementary story, we had just learned about animals, but I wanted to incorporate terms from previous lessons such as weather terms, likes and dislikes, colors, and parts of the body. I told ChatGPT, “Write a short story in French using the following terms: il fait beau, il fait chaud, il pleut, il fait froid, chat, chien, éléphant, lion, tigre, ours, oiseau, rouge, vert, orange, bleu, jaune, il y a du soleil.” and it generated a story. I felt it was a little short and also used too many tenses which would impede comprehension, so I said, “Can you make it a bit longer and only use present tense?” It spit generated an amended story. Then I realized I wanted to add some more terms, so I asked it, “Can you write it again but also include tête, pied, main, j’aime and je n’aime pas,” and it generated another amended story, which I used for my story, making only a few changes.
Once I had a story, I needed some images to illustrate the story. I played around with a few different programs, but I settled on NightCafe. NightCafe seemed to work the best for me. NightCafe is free, but it works off credits. It sends you an email every day giving you 5 free credits, so as long as you keep taking your free credits, you’ll be able to make plenty of images. On NightCafe, as on most of these sites, you type in what kind of image you want, and it gives you four renditions to choose from. If you want a high resolution image, that costs more credits. Here is the first image I came up with:
As you can see, it’s not perfect. It looks neat when you first glance at it, but if you keep looking, you’ll notice some issues. However, this was an experiment, and I felt it was good enough to illustrate my story. I went on to make several more images, and combined with emojis and some images I found online, I created a PowerPoint to present it with (email subscribers, click here to view the PowerPoint:
The students enjoyed the story and were able to understand a lot of it on their own. I then decided to make a second story, this time for my middle school classes. We had just finished learning about likes, dislikes and wants, as well as making, accepting, and turning down invitations. I told ChatGPT to make a story about that, including some of the specific terms we had learned. As before, it generated a story that was pretty good and only needed a few minor changes. I again used NightCafe to generate the images, but I chose an anime style because I thought it would appeal to middle schoolers more. Once again, the story went over well and the students were able to understand most of it on their own, but some of the illustrations drew some comments, such as the one below, which had students inquiring why there were people sitting in the back with trees for heads. This is the downside of AI-generated imagery: it still isn’t perfect, and oddities do come up.
Normally, as a follow up activity, I would have done a Quizizz or a Kahoot. Some students had recently been eyeing my Eggspert, however (which I had gotten out to use with my elementary class), so I decided to mix things up and use that instead. If you’re not familiar, Eggspert is a buzzer that allows up to six students to buzz in to answer questions, Jeopardy-style. They make a wireless version, which I’m sure is infinitely better than the lowly wired version I possess. With the wired version, students have to take turns coming up to the front of the room, and the wires inevitably get tangled. This can be a fun activity in a smaller class, but in larger classes, it gets chaotic, as students who aren’t taking their turn sometimes lose interest. I chose to ask open ended questions about the story. In every class, somebody was eventually able to answer every question, but in retrospect, multiple choice questions would have been better for my students. While I’ll probably use the story again, next year I will probably go back to the old standards of Quizizz or Kahoot for the follow-up activity.
Below is the middle school story with the follow-up questions and answers. Email subscribers, click here to view the story.
Have you tried using AI to generate material for your class? What did you do? How did it go? I’d love to hear!
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