What should I ask an educational AI? Prompts for teachers
Artificial intelligence is here to stay, in education too. AI opens up a world of possibilities for teachers, but you need to know how to really make the most of it. We’ve all probably chatted with ChatGPT for a while, asked it to suggest a gift for a friend or write an email, or had fun trying to debate with it. But AI has much more to offer. Do we know how to take advantage of it? Let’s talk about the magic of prompts.
The tekman Education pedagogy team has trained an artificial intelligence to turn it into a powerful tool for teachers: thinköAI is a platform that can create exercises, lessons, learning situations and complete projects for early childhood, primary and secondary, including upper secondary. How did we make sure the AI guarantees the pedagogical quality of its content? How was it trained? What is it asked to do to generate the materials? We talk to Esperanza Mejías, a teacher and pedagogical innovation specialist at tekman, one of the people behind the knowledge and pedagogical criteria of thinköAI.
What makes thinköAI different from a general-purpose artificial intelligence like ChatGPT?
thinköAI is an artificial intelligence platform built on the same technology as ChatGPT, but specifically trained by teachers and education experts to generate high-quality educational content at teachers’ request. thinköAI isn’t a chatbot for talking about philosophy, for example, but just by filling in a few fields about the content you need and the characteristics of your class, it can create exercises, lessons, learning situations and projects for any subject, offering reliable, personalized content that’s ready to use in the classroom. Another big difference between ChatGPT and thinköAI is that it creates structured content, with every element of the pedagogical design (context, product, objectives, competencies, assessment, etc.). What’s more, one particular feature of thinköAI is that it lets you share the content you create with other teachers at your school so you can edit and expand it collaboratively.
How does thinköAI guarantee the pedagogical quality of its content?
We’ve all had that WOW moment the first time we asked AI to create something. It’s truly impressive because it comes fairly close to what a professional in the field would answer. However, then you start to discover the flaws and realize that, just like when you talk to a professional, you need to spell out a lot of things. For example, you have to share the vocabulary and the educational perspective, and describe the pedagogical context in detail… You have to talk to it about educational psychology, neuroscience, pedagogy and teaching methods for its proposal to be truly high-quality. If you want something you can use in your classroom tomorrow, you first have to explain a lot of things to the AI. That takes time and means selecting the right theoretical frameworks, giving it options to choose from and characteristics so it can clearly define the result. You even have to tell it what it can’t be. That’s the work done with prompts.
Each prompt takes up at least a full page.
How were the prompts in thinköAI designed and implemented?
To create the thinköAI prompts, the first step was to gather teachers’ needs. At tekman we’re in touch with teachers from many schools, from early childhood and primary to secondary, and we worked directly with them to design the prompts. In fact, the tekman team that developed the project is made up of teachers ourselves, so it’s been a collaborative effort.
A prompt is the instruction you give an artificial intelligence platform so it creates what you want. Writing a prompt isn’t hard; what’s hard is knowing which educational instructions to give it. And, as I mentioned before, in our case, to create a high-quality exercise, lesson, project or learning situation, you have to define each of these creations carefully. To give you an idea, each prompt takes up at least a full page. They are pedagogical instructions that ensure learning experiences are explained in enough detail to be truly useful for the teacher; in other words, so you can teach the class the next day or download the plan for the learning situations. And of course, these prompts include key context information, made up of the data we ask the teacher for: country, grade, subjects, topic, core knowledge… and also, something other platforms don’t do, the characteristics of the class, which is very important for personalizing lessons.
A machine will never be able to help a student the way their teacher does […]. That said, artificial intelligence holds a huge amount of information that a teacher can’t store.
What strategies does thinköAI use to personalize content to students’ individual needs and support diverse learners?
A machine will never be able to help a student the way their teacher does, mainly because of the emotional connection it requires. That said, artificial intelligence holds a huge amount of information that a teacher can’t store. We’re still at an early stage, but in the future it will be able to break down research findings and, based on the student’s characteristics, offer you the strategies that have worked best in the past. In fact, it already does this with the information it has. Of course, the teacher has to follow up and adjust, but it gives you the starting point: you tell it what your students are like and it tells you whether it’s better to give them more guidance, more visual support, more time, have them work in teams, take breaks, etc. Lots of options to personalize according to the class, based on today’s main educational frameworks for supporting diverse learners, mainly universal measures based on frameworks such as UDL.
