Reflection on key concepts - Module 2

 

This second module named Artificial Intelligence to Enhance Students’ English Skills meant a huge opportunity to improve my English teaching skills by implementing these interesting tools. That is what caught my attention, and I focused on discovering all the things AI can do to help me to be a better teacher. The second module required a lot of work because, in comparison with the previous module, this module was more focused on the practice of managing these new tools. Through time, the content studied during the course became more and more interesting and helpful not only for English Language teachers but also for English Language students. I was really surprised because even though the content was becoming more helpful, the use of these tools was user-friendly since it was very simple to use letting user expand their results based on their imagination. Something that I like is that we continue using the knowledge we learned in the first module as a basis to take advantage of and use these tools appropriately. Concepts such as prompt engineering, machine learning, and hallucinations were key to better understanding what working with Artificial Intelligence means. On the other hand, I enjoyed the certifications we took during this module such as Generative AI for Educators in which I learned many key concepts that teachers require to have an appropriate implementation of the tools Artificial Intelligence provides. At the same time, I learned that when we use AI for teaching, we need to take into account students’ needs. It is not only to create activities we like but also, we have to consider if those activities will fulfill students’ needs. We have to keep in mind that all the students have different needs, and we have to try to cover all those needs as matter as possible. In addition, I enjoyed the certification we take at Magic School because I learned how to take advantage of the many different tools that Magic School gives us to create authentic teaching material. Continuing talking about the creation of authentic material, it was very interesting that we focused on AI tools for Receptive Language Skills and Productive Language skills going further to look for ways to cover students’ needs. That made me get engaged because I know the importance of covering all the student’s needs, and I never imagined how helpful Artificial Intelligence could be. Everything we need to adapt these tools to our methodology is to practice because even though I think practice does not make perfection, it makes improvement. So, it depends on how hard we work to improve and how much we let our imagination fly to create good authentic material.

Furthermore, I got interested in how the tools were divided according to the skills they were used for. First, we focused on using Artificial Intelligence for Receptive Language Skills by using tools such as Reading Progress, Read Theory, Reading Coach, and ZenoChat, and I realized that we have plenty of alternatives to give our students the opportunities to improve their macro skills in this case their reading skills. AI provides students the chance to practice their reading skills dynamically and effectively by exposing them to catchy activities and practices. Students are exposed to interesting, dynamic, and interactive online reading activities to improve their reading. This is very helpful because most of the time students do not like to like, but if we implement AI tools appropriately, we can give students a better experience when reading. Tools such as Read Theory, Reading Coach, and Reading Progress give students a set of interactive activities in which they can test their reading comprehension. Also, Reading Coach provides students with readings according to their English level, and they have the opportunity to read aloud while the AI listens to them to give them feedback. Likewise, Reading Progress lets students personalize their reading according to their topics of interest and complexity. Those tools not only give students the chance to enjoy practicing their reading skills but also, help teachers leave their comfort zone to implement activities that allow their students to enhance their skills. On the other hand, we discover interesting tools to develop Productive Language Skills such as Elsa Speak, Grammarly, ChatGPT, and others. By using these tools, we as teachers encourage students to practice their productive skills in this case writing and speaking. It is important to guide students to use AI appropriately to take advantage of what it can do, for example, they can use these tools to have speaking practice in real-time and receive feedback on grammatical structures or mispronunciation. Likewise, they can take advantage of Grammarly to improve the quality of their texts because it gives students suggestions of vocabulary or different ways to transmit the message. AI provides not only teachers but also students a huge quantity of advantages, but it is really necessary to keep in mind that these tools just assist them to improve in their roles. So, it is not appropriate to be AI-dependent to carry out activities that demand the development of macro skills.

Afterward, I never imagined that we were going to create such amazing things as a Bot with Artificial Intelligence. When the idea of creating a Bot as a learning assistant arose, I got very excited and nervous thinking about how difficult it could be.  However, the teacher guided us in this process showing us that it is simpler than it seems. During the process, we focus on training the Bot appropriately to make it as effective as possible. We tried to train it with the correct information looking for educational sources to avoid hallucinations or misunderstandings. The purpose of creating a Bot as a learning assistant was to give students a useful tool that allows them to get the appropriate information to study based on the content they were studying at school. It permits they save time searching for information and at the same time, it helps them to avoid fake information producing misunderstanding of the content. During the process of creating of the Bot, we have three options to create our assistance Bot. Poe, Cody, and Claude were the options to design our Bot, and all these AI-powered chat apps allowed us to let our creativity fly to design a user-friendly interface for our bot. In the end, we decided to work in Poe because we felt it was very easy to use and it did not give us problems when creating the Bot. To conclude, I am very convinced that the tools we have worked with give us many advantages to improve our English teaching skills and students’ English learning skills. AI not only helps English teachers to discover their best version as teachers but also other areas of teachers; it is just necessary to lose our fears and let our imagination and creativity fly to explode all our teaching potential.