#22. Introducing Chat GPT to Young Learners through Storytelling Activities

 This blogpost may be of interest to educators who are looking to introduce the concept and powers of Chat GPT to Young Learners in a fun, interactive way. For this example we will be using Books by AI , which is currently in its Beta phase. This is a platform that allows you to create and modify books (or the text at least) through inputting prompts. 

Before we start with the activity example for this blogpost, let's quickly touch upon the ethics of students using AI and specifically Large Language Models chatbots (LLMs). There are good arguments for both allowing and not allowing students access to AI tools to supplement and support learning. Personally, I think if there are productivity tools such as Chat GPT, which are now being used and will be used in daily life and work in the future, then it's probably a good idea to introduce students to these tools and try and get them using them in a productive and responsible way. No doubt some students will be unable to responsibly use these tools, just as many adults cannot. Such is life. However, if we can instil a sense of productive value into these AI tools and highlight the positives, maybe many of our students will be able to use these tools to improve their study and critical-thinking skills. With that said, let's look at how we might gently introduce the use of LLM chatbots to our young learners and incorporate those key critical thinking skills into the process.

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With screen time taking up a lot of our young learners' attention it has, over the last few years, been more and more difficult to get students to read. Yet learning to read and interact and engage with text is an integral part of young learners' development. Can we use chatbots to help us create literacy and literary-based classroom activities? Yes, we can. Our example lesson activities in the video below are aimed at Key Stage 2 elementary school students in an ESL context, Grades 4-6. However, the basic principles of introducing LLMs and Chat GPT in an analytical and productive way should hold for any young learners no matter the context. I specifically chose a Chat GPT chatbot which was embedded in the context of book-making so that students could clearly see a defined purpose, rather than just opening up Open AI or any of the other standard multi-purpose Chat GPT platforms. 

The slide deck from the video is here