What can Generative AI do for you?

You don’t have to look too far to find people like this guy posting about all the great ways that you should be using Generative AI to help your fledgling business flourish. Despite this constant bombardment on our social media channels, I find it fascinating to learn about all the ways it can help us improve productivity and creativity in classrooms all over the world. 

In their report called “The Class of 2030 and life-ready Learning: The technology imperative”, Microsoft says that “Artificial intelligence (AI) gives teachers and schools new ways to understand how students are progressing and allows for highly customized, timely, and targeted curation of content.” To learn more about how Microsoft sees the future of education with AI, download the report. 

Teachers everywhere are beginning to adopt Generative AI into their classroom workflows. With websites like Chat GPT and Google’s Bard, it keeps getting easier for them to try out these tools and integrate the technology into their workflows. Look no further than every education conference to find a multitude of sessions and workshops being led by teachers showcasing how to use these tools right away. Soon all those attendees will remix those ideas into the context of their own classrooms.  

There is no shortage of ideas. With the right mindset, these can be exciting times. Here are some of the exciting things we are seeing: 

• Content creation: Generative AI can be used to create new content, such as articles, blog posts, or even books. This can be a valuable tool for teachers, students, businesses and organizations that need to produce a lot of content on a regular basis. Sign up to beta test using Generative AI in your Google Docs and Gmail and get Bard to help you write an email to a student’s parent.
• Personalized learning: Generative AI can be used to create personalized learning experiences for each student. This can be done by generating different learning materials, such as practice problems, quizzes, and assessments, that are tailored to each student’s individual needs and interests. Try using Conker.au to create your next class quiz. 
• Managing Data: Generative AI helps you learn how to manage the blocks of data that you are collecting…like grades. Take a look at this prompt for managing data in Google Sheets.
• Provide feedback. Generative AI can also be used to provide feedback to students on their work. This feedback can be in the form of suggestions, corrections, or encouragement. Imagine students and teachers pasting their work into Bard and asking for suggestions on improving it.
• Art creation: Generative AI can be used to create new art, such as paintings, drawings, or sculptures. This can be a valuable tool for adding images to slide shows that you create for your class. You’ve probably already heard of Midjourney.  We have found that it can feel a little complicated to get started. If you feel the same way, don’t worry. The same kind of image creation is already in Canva and coming soon to Adobe Express and Google Slides.  
• Music creation: Generative AI can be used to create new music, such as songs, melodies, or beats. This can be a valuable tool for musicians who want to experiment with new sounds or compositions or for students that need some royalty-free background music for their videos.  Sign up for Google’s AI Test Kitchen to try out MusicLM.

It is funny to imagine that as soon as we post this article, the list will have changed. Generative AI is a rapidly evolving field, and new applications are being developed all the time. While you can still choose not to try out these cool tools, you need to know that it will soon be impossible to ignore them. Take, for example, this video Google recently released that is both exciting and a little bit frightening:

As generative AI technology continues to improve, it is likely to have a profound impact on a wide range of industries and fields and not just education.