The future of teaching has arrived at Roberts High School with artificial intelligence leading the way.
Shawn Abbey, a business teacher at Roberts High School and Early College High School has been using AI to help with lesson planning and developing instructions for future lessons.
“It saves me a lot of time, and if I’m looking for a curriculum, I can teach from a textbook or from real life,” Abbey said. “I’ll use it to prepare and structure a PowerPoint presentation, generating interest and a desire to participate in the marketing discussion. I’ll use it to create slides to help me get started and expand considerably, which saves me time.”
Abbey has been a teacher for 30 years and started using ChatGPT a year and a half ago when he realized it was valuable to his teaching.
“I primarily use ChatGPT searches to plan lessons and develop the structure of lessons or lesson series,” Abbey said. “It helps me find topics and search for information online, while also reminding me of several topics I hadn’t thought of.”
Other teachers haven’t picked up on this trend, and Abbey mentioned that there were doubts among her colleagues when the topic was raised.
“At first, I was hesitant because teachers talked about a pessimistic approach, and we didn’t know what to do about it,” Abbey said. “They were fearful, but when I researched it, a colleague who develops websites showed it to me, and I thought I could use it in my teaching.”
Lesson planning has been a breeze for Abbey as he is able to gather relevant information from all parts of the internet. He uses real life scenarios and ChatGPT comes up with data he hasn’t thought of before.
The student population in his classes is yet to catch on as the technology continues its ascent into mainstream culture.
“I haven’t seen students using it; when I mention it in class, they’re not quite sure what it is,” Abbey said. “Most of my assignments are on paper, so I’m not worried. I’ve heard of people using it in businesses, but not professors.”
Abbey hopes to continue using AI as a tool for his classroom and teachings. He hopes to dive deeper into ways the technology will make his job easier and will help students find more ways to learn information.
“I could see the quality of the presentations improve if I dig deeper into the topic thanks to AI.”
