22 4.3 Discussion
Generative AI in Education: Enhancing Lesson Planning, Student Engagement, and Educator Well-Being
Education, like all sectors of society, is finding itself embarking on the unknown – tapping into the enigmatic technology known as artificial intelligence. Generative AI is a powerful tool that can help reshape how we work in most fields, especially within analytics, near-instant summarizations, editing, proofreading and beyond; AI can greatly change the lives of human beings, especially the field of education (Iqbal et al., 2024). The possibilities are near endless in adopting AI into our lives, particularly in helping benefit our use of time. Educators tend to find themselves overworked and overwhelmed when planning for the classroom, with up to thirty students in a classroom, all of which are at different skill and knowledge levels, some with varying degrees of special exceptionalities and some with behavioural needs. Needless to say, teaching topics in the classroom environment can be difficult to plan for with such a variety of needs for the students. AI can assist in developing lesson plans according to your specifications and suggest how to break the concepts down in an easier-to-understand way. Education often involves time and effort regarding the learning content, which typically requires understanding complex concepts. Chat GPT can significantly help with these problems by customizing certain materials regarding particular topics (Huang et al., 2024). Despite being more focused on the use of Generative AI in improving the development of nutritional values, this still helps show the promise of how AI can benefit people of diverse backgrounds, social statuses, and beyond. Using this form of technology as a tool to assist in lesson planning can help speed up the process of developing a plan and then having to work backward in terms of scaling down the expectations to match student performance; additionally, it can even enrich the experience for students and have them even more engaged with the suggestions generated on how to execute the learning.
Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and Magic School AI are tools that are being used more and more in the workforce. ChatGPT is a generic Generative AI tool that is accessible and utilized by many; while Magic School AI was initially a tool for educators, it has been developed and has grown to support students as well. Magic School AI is a Generative AI platform that uses ChatGPT but is more refined to better support educators with whatever they require, ranging from rubrics to individual education plans and even professional email drafting. Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and MagicSchool can be transformative in teaching and learning by adopting Generative AI technologies in creating lesson plans, instructional activities and helping to create differentiations of plans. Generative AI is more of a compliment to teachers rather than a replacement. (Yang & Appleget, 2024). In my perspective, Generative AI can be used as a powerful tool for educators in developing and planning coursework and giving multiple versions of the plan to better fit the student’s capabilities. It can be used to speed up the thought process by giving many recommendations that can be picked from and then adjusted accordingly by the educator to better fill the in-between, and even better, it can help bridge the gap between learners by giving Universal Learning suggestions;
“When asked if “ChatGPT and other generative AI will help instruction be more accessible for ALL learners (including those with disabilities),” 43% agreed or strongly agreed that it can be beneficial, 23% disagreed or strongly disagreed, while 32% were undecided. It is important to remember that these responses were given before the ChatGPT workshop.” (Evmenova et al., 2024, pp. 825 – 826).
The utilization of AI is still very much in its infancy, which will explain a lot of the uncertainty as stated above however, even now, it shows that a majority of educators still believe that Generative AI has the capability to make learning more universal for learners, and with newer, more powerful AI tools being developed, it is becoming more possible.
Generative AI can be a great tool to make the lives of educators easier, so long as we utilize it appropriately; “Teachers need to know how to use these new tools in an ethical way. We must remember, though, that these are only tools, and the actual human teacher will also be needed for success in teaching, learning and assessment.” (Kehoe, 2023, p. 181); however, as I have continued to say time and again in this chapter, it is meant to be used as a tool to assist. We as educators must still do our due diligence to ensure that what is being generated makes sense, appropriate, and accurate. In this space, it is vital for all educators to consider learning what to look for when students use AI in their work. Yes, generated content is still fallible and should always be double-checked (Langreo, 2023). Even my personal use of Generative AI has primarily been to give me a jumpstart on brainstorming ideas, when used to develop a rubric, I take the core idea provided in the generated text and then rework and reword the content to better fit my view of the level and to make it sound easier to understand.
Despite the drawbacks of having to check to ensure that the information is valid, Generative AI is still useful to educators as it reduces the amount of time required to develop learning plans, thus allowing educators to spend more time teaching and engaging students while also improving interactions. AI has the ability to scour its vast knowledge to develop more responsive resources, which then create a more inclusive learning environment that can improve student engagement, and can be very customizable (Educational Technology, 2023). This will also assist in improving educators’ quality of life and thereby improving mood; practical implications for pre-service language teaching often focus on enhancing emotional well-being and fostering positive appraisal. These strategies help them not only highlight coping mechanisms but also the cognitive needs when AI is used for teaching and learning. (Yin et al., 2024). It is important to understand how AI can help educators utilize the various generative tools in education to improve productivity while also reducing the stress of lesson planning, thus improving one aspect of mental health, leading to less burnout.