An email to a parent

During a meeting with my child’s teachers to talk about my son’s spelling and reading about how we can support him more.

At the end of the meeting we got talking about ChatGPT, they had heard but not seen it. So I gave my fellow educators a demo.

So I gave the following example

Response

see full ChatGPTs transcript here.

The room was suitably impressed with the response, the speed etc, “might use this I guess”, “Isn’t that impressive”, “there are definitely some framing elements in the wording, it has captured some of the points I would use”, “It might save me some time, but I would need to edit it”

There was though however a stark difference in the email I received the next day, the email I received was written by a human.. (I won’t share it as it is personal to my child).

However trust me when I say was pretty easy to spot the difference between the two, it had personal information, recall of the conversation, demonstration of action and a depth of resources presented as well as human personality. Admittedly the prompt could also have been developed further to extend this response, but still IHMO I do not think it would have come close.

Notwithstanding there are several predictive/AI writing tools that could be used in this way and potentially teachers who are already using statement banks of their own to write to parents, in addition hold pre considered responses as e.g. a child struggling with their reading is a traditional problem, not to mention people new to the profession for modelling.

If you want to read more about using AI tools for productivity, there is a good article here