If you follow me or Light Bulb Languages on social media, you will have seen that since my retirement from the classroom in the summer I have stepped up my production of resources. I've been focussing on special days in the calendar that can incorporate a linguistic and cultural element. This is one of the things that both primary and secondary teachers asked for recently.
When I first started making resources, in the mid 1990s, the tools I used were a photocopier, a black pen, a pair of scissors, a glue stick and Tippex. All I could make was worksheets or handwritten and drawn acetates for my trusty overhead projector.
In the thirty or so years since then, the tools available to the resource-making teacher have changed hugely. The computer, printer, CD-Roms of clip art, the interactive whiteboard and therefore PowerPoint.... The most recent development has been the arrival of AI tools.
I first tried out creating resources using AI in 2023, and at that time found it quite limited and frustrating. Since then the tools have advanced rapidly, and others added to their number. I then returned to AI last year, using it to help with my Reading Aloud in Spanish resource. I could see then how much the tools had improved, and how much more useful they could be.
Nowadays, anyone can create a resource simply by typing a prompt into one of the AI tools, and lots of people have been. It is usually pretty easy to spot something that has been created using AI and shared "as is". The materials generated usually have a certain look about them, and students are going to be seeing them popping up in lessons across all their different subject areas.
I don't use AI to generate complete resources. I use it to assist me in creating resources.
Let's take my recent Día de Muertos resource pack as an example. Here are the steps that I took to create the resource pack:
- I wrote in my notebook a list of the ideas that I had for resources.
- I asked ChatGPT, Claude.ai and Google Gemini for ideas for the resource pack, and added the ones I liked to my list.
- I researched the different elements such as calaveras, ofrendas and la Catrina. I didn't know much, going in, about the festival.
- I chose the 24 resources from my list that I wanted to include in the pack, and started to create the activities in the worksheet template that I already had set up.
- Día de Muertos is a celebration with some very striking images, and one of the main things that I used AI for was creating images to accompany the resources. I found ChatGPT most useful for image generation. Some of these are from Google Gemini. I kept the images used in the activities black and white, as per my personal policy.
- I also used AI tools to write texts about, for example, El cempasúchil and La Calavera Catrina. I then took these and edited them, often deleting parts and simplifying some of the language.
- I then checked all the texts against the GCSE prescribed word list. I uploaded the Edexcel interactive vocabulary list to Claude.ai (I find Claude the most reliable tool for anything language based) and asked it to generate a list of the vocabulary that was in the text but not on the Foundation Tier vocabulary list. I then glossed that vocabulary on the resource. This has saved a huge amount of time, and means I haven't had to look up every single word on the vocabulary list myself.
- Claude.ai was also helpful for suggesting reading comprehension questions.
Here are some of the pages of the resource pack. You can see that I have used AI elements on each page, but compiled the rest of it according my own resource creation principles, and thinking carefully about the learners who are going to be using it.
AI tools are certainly a game changer as far as creating resources is concerned. They save time, inspire us with ideas and can help us to adjust resources for different ages and levels of student. However we still need to be alert to inaccuracies, also their suggestions, especially for lesson plans, can be a bit bland and repetitive, and, most of all, they don't know the students in your class and their precise needs.
Do you use AI tools to create resources for the classroom? How and why do you use them?
