For this month’s podcast recommendation, we suggest an episode entitled How to Use ChatGPT as an Example Machine from the Cult of Pedagogy podcast. This podcast is hosted by Jennifer Gonzalez, a former K-12 language arts educator. From the Cult of Pedagogy podcast website, “Teaching strategies, classroom management, education reform, educational technology — if it has something to do with teaching, we’re talking about it.”
The episode we suggest for this month is a conversation between host Jennifer and two educators (Chris Mah and Sarah Levine). In the episode, they discuss a practical way to make use of ChatGPT for teaching – by using the tool to generate examples.
Examples are a powerful way to help deepen student understanding of concepts, but at times, it can be difficult to come up with many examples. From examples of physics concepts to examples of writing in the style of a particular author, ChatGPT can generate examples for you to use to deepen student learning. In the podcast, the educators discuss how ChatGPT can be used to generate examples for various classroom concepts. They also discuss contrasting cases (or non-examples) as a way to further enhance student learning.
They discuss the concrete steps that instructors can take to use ChatGPT as an “example machine.” These steps include:
- Establish criteria
- Prompt
- Review and adapt
- Prompt for contrasting cases
- Review and adapt
While time may be needed in the review and adapt phase of the process outlined above to make the examples most useful for your classroom context, ChatGPT can certainly take some of the time needed to brainstorm new examples. To hear more, check out the podcast! The website also includes a corresponding blogpost if you’d like to read more.
