Using AI to Create Images for Clarifying Grammar and Vocabulary

(TESOL Ideas--Useful Websites or Apps)

A couple weeks ago, I made a post explaining how AI could be used to make pictures to illustrate student generated sentences.  

It probably goes without saying that AI could also be used to illustrate teacher generated sentences.  But I'm going to say it anyway.
Long time ESL/TESOL teachers will no doubt be familiar with scouring Google images to find the perfect picture to illustrate your grammar or vocabulary lesson.  With simple vocabulary like "apple", of course, it was always easy to find what you were looking for.  But for more difficult vocabulary or grammar, finding the perfect picture to illustrate your lesson was a lot more difficult.  (If you look back through my archives, you can certainly find examples of me struggling to find the perfect image to illustrate my sentences.  A prime example is my jokes slideshows, but there are lots more examples I could point to.)

Well, now instead of having to find an image online, you can just create an image.  You can tell AI exactly what kind of image you want, and it will create it for you.

I've recently discovered this is very useful for teaching phonics.  I am currently teaching CVC -at words (e.g. mat, cat, rat, vat, sat, bat, hat, pat) and I was trying to find a graded reader that used only CVC -at words.  And then it occurred to me, I could just make up my own reader, by getting Google Gemini to create illustrations for my sentences.  I then copied those sentences over to a slideshow (slides, pub) to create a reader for my class.

...actually while I was doing this, Google Gemini suggested to me that I might want to create a picture book using their new Storybook feature.  And I found that the storybook feature is very useful.  But I'll talk about that in a separate post.  Stay tuned.