I've got a lot of mixed feelings about AI but, it is a thing that exists, and I suppose we might as well take advantage of it when it's useful.
One use of AI that I've recently realized is that it's very useful for creating pictures to show students the meaning of their sentences.
In the past, whenever my students messed up the syntax of a sentence, I used to spend a lot of time trying to explain to my students that their sentence meant something completely different than what they thought it did.
For example, I remember back in Cambodia I taught an advanced level writing class for many terms, and the students had to write an essay on the topic of deforestation. For whatever reason, every term several students would write something like "the trees are cutting down." And I would always go around to the students and say, "No, no, the trees aren't the ones who are doing the cutting. What you've written looks like this..." and then I would try to draw a picture of a tree with arms cutting something down with a saw. I'm not much of an artist, though, so I'm not sure my students go the point.
For example, I remember back in Cambodia I taught an advanced level writing class for many terms, and the students had to write an essay on the topic of deforestation. For whatever reason, every term several students would write something like "the trees are cutting down." And I would always go around to the students and say, "No, no, the trees aren't the ones who are doing the cutting. What you've written looks like this..." and then I would try to draw a picture of a tree with arms cutting something down with a saw. I'm not much of an artist, though, so I'm not sure my students go the point.
But if I was teaching that class now, I could simply put the sentence into Google Gemini and ask Gemini to create a picture for that sentence.
The idea of trees cutting down people is of course nonsense, but I've discovered that Google Gemini is actually pretty good about illustrating nonsensical sentences. For example if you give it a sentence like: "The hotdog is writing a book" or "The chair is riding a bike" then it will create images with an anthropomophic hotdog or chair doing those things.
This can be good for teaching parts of speech with madlib style sentence games in which you are encouraging students to put together nouns and verbs in creative or humerous ways, and then show them the results, and I've recently used it successfully with 5th grades. Gemini is also pretty good with illustrating adjectives, so you can encourage students to add in extra adjectives like "The old smelly angry chair is riding a bike", and then you and the students can have fun viewing the result.
In my experience, it sometimes takes Gemini 30 seconds to a minute to generate an image, but I will use this time to get the students to tell me what kind of image they think Gemini will produce. Then when the image does generate, we check our predictiosn agains the result.
I've also been using word cards to aid low-level students in creating these sentences, but more on that in a future post.
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