A Message from Mr. Heath about ChatGPT
As an administrative team, we want to give you some information on a new technology called ChatGPT. I first started hearing about this type of technology at the annual superintendent conference I attended back in November. Over the last few weeks during our Administrative TEAM meetings, we have discussed this technology and its potential use in our buildings. Last week, I had the opportunity to attend a retreat with a group of the most innovative superintendents in Northeast Ohio. ChatGPT was mentioned by 5 of the 6 national and international presenters we had over the two-day retreat. It is gaining notoriety quickly, so we assume you will be hearing about this soon if you haven’t already. Here is a synopsis of what it is and how we are approaching this so you are aware:
ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is an advancement in predictive technology similar to how your phone predicts the next word in a text message for you, or how your computer will predict the next word or phrase as you type an email. ChatGPT is considered the 3.0 version of this technology in that you can put in the topic of an email and it will automatically write the entire email for you. You can give it a writing prompt and it will write an entire essay for you. You can give it a city you are traveling to along with some interests you have and it will create an entire travel itinerary for you with dates, times, and locations.
The 4.0 version of this technology (which is coming very soon!) will allow you to come up with the title of a book you want to write and it will give you the entire 60,000-word manuscript. It is a truly amazing technology that could transform the way we teach and learn. The educational researchers we spoke to at the retreat compared this educational revolution to when handheld calculators became widely available back in the late 1960s and early 1970s and first came into our schools. It completely transformed the way we taught math. ChatGPT could completely transform the way we teach not only English, but social studies, science, and virtually every other subject area as well. While many people will inevitably turn to the negative aspects of this type of technology and push to ban it from schools, every researcher we spoke to advised us to use ChatGPT…not ban it!
Obviously, there are pros and cons to every new piece of technology that comes into being, so that begs a couple of key questions:
What are we doing as a district?
- Working with our administrative team and principals to start discussing the positive uses of this in our classrooms.
- Identifying professional development opportunities for our staff - We already have 3-4 English teachers from the high school attending a webinar on this technology in a couple of weeks.
- Working with our curriculum department to identify some of the best practices that begin to emerge from its use in other districts.
What can I do as an educator?
- Experiment with the technology - Get a sense of what it can do for you as an educator and what it could do for your students as learners.
- Talk to your instructional coaches - Start thinking of possible uses of this technology in the classroom.
- Think about your assessment practices - How might you evaluate a student’s understanding of the material in a performance-based way?
Ultimately, as with most technology advancements as significant as this one, ChatGPT and Artificial Intelligence will be transformational in the world of education. It will force us to be more competency-based in our curriculum and more performance-task oriented in our assessment.
