A Practical ChatGPT Toolkit for Teachers – Developed by CEGEP Teacher Stéphane Paquet
Champlain College Saint-Lambert teacher Stéphane Paquet has developed a publicly-available toolkit to help guide instructors on the use of ChatGPT.
Stéphane Paquet is an English teacher who specializes in literature with a focus on comic books. With a background in computer science and over 20 years in education, Stéphane is dedicated to integrating AI into his teaching and actively shares this knowledge with colleagues to help them adapt to the new AI reality.
Excerpt from the Toolkit Introduction:
Many discussions on the use of ChatGPT are taking place across the college network. However, it is important to base our discussions on a practical understanding of the true limitations and capabilities of generative AI tools like ChatGPT.
In creating the ChatGPT toolkit, my objective was to make teachers feel empowered, to make them feel that they could understand and control the tool. My goal was not to have a conversation about whether we should use it or not in our teaching. I wanted teachers to develop practical knowledge of the tool and to accelerate their learning process with a hands-on guide. There are plenty of resources on integrating ChatGPT into our teaching practices, but few on how to use the tool and how to write an effective prompt.
The toolkit allows teachers to directly explore the capabilities and limitations of ChatGPT. Indeed, it can perform amazingly for difficult tasks and fail completely at others, which is referred to as the “jagged frontier” phenomenon. The only way to truly understand where the tool performs and where it fails is by exploring it, which is why encouraging teachers to spend time with ChatGPT was a priority.
Another objective of the toolkit is to guide teachers in understanding the concept of a prompt, which is completely different from using a search engine. In addition, the toolkit provides the proper vocabulary and terms, such as “delimiters” and “two-shot prompting,” that are needed to become efficient AI users as well as to discuss these tools with colleagues and students.
Essentially, the toolkit serves as an empowering guide where the teacher becomes the expert, and the AI tool is the assistant. Teachers will learn to instruct and program ChatGPT with words to make it perform a specific task adapted to their specific context.
