Foreign teachers use generative artificial intelligence to assist teaching.

AI "ignites" the classroom

Foreign teachers use generative artificial intelligence to assist teaching.

　　Generative artificial intelligence technology is more and more widely used in the field of global education. It can not only provide teachers with a variety of help such as generating personalized teaching plans and acting as classroom teaching assistants, but also provide students with interactive, collaborative, situational, inspiring and immediate learning experiences. With the change and improvement of technology, educators around the world adhere to the concept of technology for goodness and constantly explore the possibilities of applying generative artificial intelligence to classroom teaching. This issue of Global Weekly brings together some cases of foreign teachers applying generative artificial intelligence to improve the quality of classroom teaching, in order to provide new ideas for teachers to apply generative artificial intelligence creatively.

　　English: Expanding Thinking and Promoting Deep Writing

　　English writing ability includes not only superficial language elements such as vocabulary, grammar and discourse, but also deep literacy requirements such as pragmatic ability, cultural awareness and thinking quality. In the process of English learning, writing has always been a pain point and difficulty for students. Students often face writing obstacles such as insufficient vocabulary, vague grammar rules, lack of writing materials, and chaotic logical structure, which affects their enthusiasm for writing. Scientific writing training is very important.

　　Stavros, a professor at Patrice University, introduced ChatGPT into senior high school English writing class, and tutored students’ English writing through ChatGPT. His English writing class is usually divided into three stages. In the first stage, students will write a theme composition in English, such as writing an email to a friend to introduce their favorite sports. At this stage, teachers will use ChatGPT to correct students’ vocabulary and grammar mistakes. In the second stage, students need to compare, analyze and learn the revised contents of ChatGPT, and at the same time, through discussion, reflect on whether the revised suggestions given by ChatGPT are reasonable, and sum up more correct and appropriate expressions. In the third stage, students will once again write a composition with a similar theme in English, and students can use the new expressions they learned in the previous stage in their second writing. By critically reflecting on the writing feedback given by ChatGPT, students acquire correct and appropriate pragmatic expressions in interaction, which promotes the development of cognitive ability and internalizes pragmatic knowledge and skills.

　　Students’ fear of difficulties in English writing stems not only from the lack of English vocabulary and expressions, but also from the lack of logic and richness of views, which often leads to the trouble of not knowing what to write and how to write. In order to help students solve the problems of lack of writing materials, single writing point of view and confused writing ideas, Dr. Sidi Yulidar Harunasari of Indonesia introduced ChatGPT into his "Creativity and Media Writing" course. It is usually difficult for students to generate innovative writing ideas. Therefore, Sidi Yulidar Harunasari usually asks students to have a dialogue with ChatGPT in the first stage of the course, and students can choose their own interesting writing entry points in combination with the suggestions given by ChatGPT. Similarly, in the story structure, ChatGPT can also act as a virtual partner for students to help them build a complete narrative structure and a coherent story. On the one hand, students can send the synopsis of the story to ChatGPT for optimization, or seek advice by asking questions (for example, "Do you think the plot conflict setting in my story is reasonable?"). On the other hand, students can create stories with ChatGPT through dialogue. In the teaching process, teachers will supervise students’ use of ChatGPT to ensure that students use it as a tool for inspiration generation, rather than relying on it to directly create content. One form of supervision is to collect historical chat data between students and ChatGPT. By analyzing the chat data, teachers can further grasp the development of students’ pragmatic competence.

　　Reading: Enriching Experience and Improving Literary Literacy

　　Reading is the foundation of students’ academic success, and educators have been committed to helping students improve their reading ability. With the help of generative artificial intelligence technology, "Reading Coach" platform can provide learners with personalized, fascinating and revolutionary reading experience. Anna Ruiz, a fifth-grade teacher at Baldwin School in the United States, introduced this platform into her reading class and made full use of the different functions of "reading coach" to help students improve their reading ability and stimulate their reading interest. On the "reading coach", students can read textbooks, digital library texts or use artificial intelligence to generate stories. Anna Ruiz will let students use the "reading coach" to read the text independently, and correct the wrong words through the instant feedback tool on pronunciation and fluency provided by the platform. It is found that one of the most effective ways to help narrow the gap in reading ability is personalized learning. In the "AI story" mode of "reading coach", students can choose the protagonist, background and plot of the story, and the system will automatically generate a complete story that matches the reading level chosen by the learners. The sense of participation brought by story creation has greatly stimulated students’ love for reading.

　　Reading famous books is also conducive to the improvement of reading ability, but how to make students deeply understand the characters and themes in famous books is often a difficult point for teachers to teach. Mike Kentz, an English teacher in a high school in Georgia, USA, uses the platform of Character.AI to help students understand literary works deeply in his English class. Character.AI platform is similar to ChatGPT, but the difference is that it allows users to chat with historical figures or celebrities, including famous scientists, literary heroes, movie stars, anime characters, etc. At the same time, the platform also supports users to build their own AI characters. After studying literary works, students may have doubts or construct some new ideas because they don’t have a deep understanding of people, events and themes. Mike Kentz found that his students were confused after learning The Catcher in the Rye, so he began to train students to use the Character.AI platform, arranged a classroom assignment to interview the virtual AI robot, the protagonist of the novel, Holden Kauffeld, and reminded students to actively listen to and respond to what the AI robot said. Students must compare the interview answers of AI robots with the actions, words and personality of the protagonist in the book to further deepen their understanding of the role. After the interview, the students will send the chat record with the AI robot to the teacher for class discussion. In the following discussion, each student should share the highlights and shortcomings of his interview and a deeper understanding of the characters. In this way, students jump out"Shallow reading" has realized a profound grasp of the reading content.

　　History: creating situations and deeply perceiving history.

　　The key to history teaching lies in breaking the gap between history and reality and narrowing the distance between students and history. By creating rich teaching situations, generative artificial intelligence leads students to perceive and discover history in an immersive way, and then helps students understand history and master historical knowledge.

　　Benjamin Brin, a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz, introduced ChatGPT as a teaching tool into the university history classroom, and simulated the interactive historical background in the classroom with the help of generative artificial intelligence to help students immerse themselves in learning history. Historical events are far from the present, and students are vague about the background of historical events, so it is difficult to really enter history in class. In order to help students fully understand the background and influence of the medieval plague, Benjamin Brin developed a "medieval plague simulator" based on ChatGPT. The simulator is available in three versions: Damascus, Paris and pistoia, with different protagonists and story lines. In the Damascus version, students play a traveler infected with the plague in Damascus. In the Paris version, students need to play a quack who profited from the plague by selling fake drugs. In pistoia’s version, the student plays an upright city councilman who is looking for a solution to the plague. Students enter the "simulator" through the shared document provided by the professor, and copy the prompts marked in the shared document into ChatGPT to enter the scene. For example, in the Damascus version, the professor set up prompts such as "health status", "doctor’s treatment", "confirm whether the family members are sick", "find a better doctor" and "restore health" and different scenes generated. In class, students first enter the "simulator" with the help of ChatGPT to experience stories and situations.Then the students compared their simulated experience with the real historical records of plagues in these three places, and wrote reflective papers. In this paper, students should further reflect on the authenticity, emphasis and representativeness of the simulated situation. Through this situational experience, students can think and explore historical events from multiple angles to deepen their understanding, and also cultivate critical thinking and creative thinking.

　　The richness and interactivity of learning materials are very important for students to deepen their understanding of historical concepts. Professor Jussi of Turku University in Finland provides personalized learning materials for students of different levels through ChatGPT. He first determined the theme of the course and the corresponding historical data, and then used ChatGPT to generate text materials and test questions with three levels of difficulty: high, medium and low. In order to deepen students’ understanding, he used the AI painting software Midjourney to generate matching image data. In class, according to the students’ level, he personalized the learning materials of different difficulty levels and arranged the students’ learning content. Students understand what they have learned through text materials and picture materials, and then answer the test questions. After class, teachers use ChatGPT to check the completion of the test questions. If the students’ correct rate of the test questions meets the requirements, they will be assigned more difficult learning materials in the next stage of learning, otherwise the difficulty will be reduced. By providing students with personalized interactive learning materials, students’ learning participation and mastery of knowledge are significantly improved.

　　Morality: Inspire thinking and deepen moral cognition.

　　Moral courses usually emphasize guiding students to experience real situations, deepening students’ cognition and understanding of learning content, cultivating students’ deep thinking ability, and enabling students to enhance moral feelings and transform moral behavior in self-speculation and independent construction. Topic-based, situational and heuristic teaching methods are conducive to promoting students’ independent thinking and dialectical thinking, which are more common in moral courses.

　　"Moral Dilemma" has become a common method to create situations in moral classroom because of its strong cognitive conflict. A primary school in Yamagata Prefecture, Japan, combines artificial intelligence with "moral dilemma" to stimulate students to think multi-dimensionally in the moral curriculum. Primary school students’ moral rationality needs to be formed and developed. Facing the specific life situation, primary school students’ understanding and comprehension of moral significance are often relatively simple, so teachers need to guide them effectively. Faced with the "moral dilemma", teachers set ChatGPT as one of the participants in class discussion. In the past, classroom discussion and communication were usually carried out among peers with similar cognitive level, but in the face of a new "smart partner", students need to think more deeply in order to promote the dialogue to continue. On the one hand, facing the answers provided by ChatGPT, students need to make new judgments and changes. Some students said, "I want to listen to AI’s judgment before making a decision", while others said, "I’ll think about it myself before asking AI". In the process of classroom discussion, teachers guide students to actively think and reflect on differences, and gradually form the ability to make independent judgments in the face of moral problems. On the other hand, there is no single standard answer to the "moral dilemma". The answers generated by ChatGPT can be used as topics for students to discuss and communicate, and students can further interact with ChatGPT to explore the causes of cognitive differences. By constructing the situation of "moral dilemma", teachers present the judgment of artificial intelligence, encourage students to think independently, reflect carefully and make decisions seriously, and finally enhance moral cognition.This unique learning experience increases the interest, participation and education of moral classroom.

　　Generally speaking, generative artificial intelligence represented by ChatGPT has a wide range of application scenarios in the field of education, and teachers are constantly tapping the potential of generative artificial intelligence in classroom teaching, including human-computer collaboration, dynamic teaching framework, personalized learning support and counseling. However, there are still some uncertainties and some predictable and unpredictable risks in generative artificial intelligence. When using it in teaching, teachers should fully consider and avoid risks as much as possible, and pay more attention to cultivating students’ higher-order thinking, especially critical thinking and creative thinking. At the same time, teachers should constantly improve their digital literacy, constantly explore the use of new technologies, promote the integration of advanced technologies and classroom teaching, and make the classroom richer, more interesting and more efficient.

　　(Ni Qin, Liu Lu and Li Xiao are from the Global Education Research Center of Shanghai International Studies University, and Xuan Mo is from Songjiang Yunjian Middle School, a foreign language school affiliated to Shanghai International Studies University)

　　Author: Ni Qin Liu Lu Li Xiao Xuan Mo

　　China Education News, 9th edition, March 28th, 2024.