Over the past six months, we’ve been exploring Artificial Intelligence (AI) and ways it can make teachers’ lives a whole lot easier. Let’s fill you in on what we’ve been up to!
If you haven’t used AI yet, we’d recommend you do what almost every teacher does when they discover it first: Log into ChatGPT and ask it to create a lesson plan suitable for your class based on a theme. Even this simple prompt will produce a reasonably acceptable lesson plan, without blowing you away. The creative teacher will take this plan and create resources to go along with them. In fact, a couple of our Mash sellers did exactly that! We think it’s a great idea for our sellers to harness the power of ChatGPT to help them to create original content. In fact, that’s exactly what we’ve been doing in different ways. We believe that not only will we be able to help you produce good content for your own classroom, we believe that sellers will be able to use it to make even better products.
For example, over the last six months, we’ve utilised AI to write our blog posts. We’ve used a combination of ChatGPT and Zapier to do this. Essentially, every day or two we get a headline from the media and then we get ChatGPT to create a blog post about how one could use it as a theme in the classroom, followed by a few different ideas for doing so. Our blog now has hundreds of articles that can help you in your class. You can have a look by going to our dedicated blog – https://mash.blog
In August, we decided to try and automate our social media posts. This was a little more difficult to do and it involved a number of tools including Google Sheets, Placid, Dall.E and ChatGPT, as well as some Javascript to tie it all together. We’re fairly happy with the results for August but we’re aiming on improving them significantly as we come to the new year. For sellers, we’re looking at a tool where you can recommend one of your own products and we’ll be able to turn it into Instagram posts and stories automatically! This should help you further your reach and we’ll let you know when this is available.
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg!
Our goal goes way beyond simply creating blog posts and social media posts. We even want to go further than creating AI-generated generic lesson plans. We want to help you create lesson plans, resources and teaching aids that look fantastic too! That’s why we’re excited to introduce our first AI project.
The Unit of Work generator is our first tool towards achieving this vision. Our new tool utilises AI to generate comprehensive units of work that are not only effective but visually appealing as well. We firmly believe that aesthetics play a crucial role in engaging students and making learning a delightful experience. So how does it work?
Essentially, you simply give our generator an idea for a unit of work. Think of a chapter of textbook. For example, let’s say you want to explore dog training. Simply type in that idea to our generator and once it’s approved (we have to manually approve content for now!) the magic begins to happen. After a minute or two of magic, a beautiful unit of work is produced. It contains 4 sections – an introduction, a profile of a child, a news story and an event. Each section has comprehension questions and puzzles. You can then print it out or share it with colleagues.
It was important for us to create something that wasn’t generic. We wanted to ensure that apart from looking good (we think it does!) it is also useful, straight away in the classroom. This meant that we spent several weeks tweaking and harnessing the correct prompts to make the unit of work. We used a combination of tools to lay things out including OpenAI API, Dall.E, Placid, Javascript and Make.com to bring everything together. We’re hoping you’ll find it really useful whether you are a customer or seller on Mash.
And speaking of sellers, here’s something special for all our Mash sellers out there! We’re working on developing a suite of AI-powered tools exclusively designed to assist you in creating, editing, and sharing resources with your customers. These innovative tools will enhance your productivity and provide you with more time to focus on other things. But we don’t want to do this alone – we want your input! We’re eager to hear your ideas and suggestions on how we can further enhance these tools to meet your specific needs.
We understand that all of this will take some time, but we’re committed to creating a valuable AI-driven ecosystem for educators like you. We genuinely believe AI is going to change the way we work and rather than the bigger companies out there taking over, we wanted to get in first and create quality content. We’re looking at ways we can manage this as there are costs for using AI tools but we want to ensure that this is more than affordable. The aim is to make all the tools cost less than a cappuccino! (Hopefully the cost of a cappuccino outside of Dublin 😂)
So, join us on this exciting journey of integrating AI into education. Head over to Mash.plus today and experience the power of AI for yourself, risk-free.