two sleeping kittensI recently adopted two ginger kittens and they are a handful in every way–their relentless energy means that at any moment I am likely to have one headbutting me and another one nibbling on my toes. The kittens also have an admirable capacity for finding the cosiest spaces in the house: a small patch of sunshine, wicker basket, or cardboard box full of shredded paper stacked in the recycling bin. Their curiosity knows no bounds: today’s favorite item is the paper wrapper from a teabag, yesterday it was a twist tie that they loosened from a power cord, and above all they love stealing the cap from our milk jug to play hockey with on the polished living room floor.

Like the kitties who are always trying to figure out what item might become an excellent toy, the past few weeks I’ve been experimenting with some new Generative AI prompts to see how they might work well for instructional tasks. Here are a few that worked well, so I am passing them along to you:

  1. Create your course schedule using an AI tool like ChatGPT or CoPilot.  For example, you might try a prompt such as this: Create a list of Tuesday and Thursday dates between February 3rd and May 16th, skipping the week of March 24th.
  2. Consider using a generative AI tool to hone your existing rubrics. You might consider a prompt such as this one: Take the role of a history college professor who is assessing students in their use of primary and secondary sources to support a historical argument. Create a rubric for a 5-page midterm paper.
  3. Mix up your approach to the first day of class, by incorporating a new icebreaker activity to get acquainted. A prompt such as this one may work well for you to find a suitable activity for your discipline: What are 5 icebreaker activities that I could use on the first day of a college-level history course, to get better acquainted with the students?

From that last prompt, I especially liked this one:

Scenario for Historical character activity

If you’ve ever wondered about using an AI tool to automate some of your grading, I highly recommend reading Dr. Cameron Blevin’s thoughtful blog post, Professor vs. ChatGPT: The Grading Showdown.  In this article, Blevins shares his experiment with AI-based grading (TL;DR: AI grades harder than the professor) as well as how and why it’s essential for us to all humanize our classrooms more, even if we do choose to incorporate AI tools into some aspects of our teaching.

You may be already considering the AI policy that you’ll include on your Spring term syllabus. If so, there’s a fairly comprehensive repository of such statements available for every discipline, collected by educator Lance Eaton, that you may find helpful. And of course, don’t forget to peruse the resources at Chapman University’s own AI Hub for guidance as well, including the guidance about syllabus statements.

Perhaps you’ve found some other AI prompts or resources that you have found helpful–I’d love to hear about them and how they are helping you.  Please reach out any time.

And one more thing, because it’s the end of the term we have a fantastic checklist for you to close out Fall and prepare for Spring.