Barrington 220 Tech & Innovation Sessions at IDEAcon

February is the time of year for the IDEAcon! IDEAcon (formerly known as the Illinois Computing Educators "ICE" Conference) is an annual education conference for passionate educators looking for innovative practices and who wish to find creative best practices to integrate into their district, building, or classroom. According to their website, IDEAcon is “a 3-day national conference that draws in presenters, thought leaders, exhibitors, and partners from all over the world.”

Barrington 220 will be represented at IDEAcon by members of our Technology & Innovation team. We will present three sessions in two formats:

Crafting Prompts: Getting the Most Out of ChatGPT

This is the third in a series of articles about Generative AI in education. The first discussed the need for those in the education industry to realize the potential impact of AI in education. The second gave examples of how teachers can use AI to improve their workflow and learning materials. This article will discuss getting the most out of ChatGPT by creating better prompts—also known as prompt crafting. 

As the old saying goes, you get out of it what you put into it. 

The quality of responses generated by ChatGPT largely depends on the prompt the user provides. A well-crafted prompt can lead to more accurate, relevant, and creative responses, while a poorly written prompt can result in vague, uninspired responses. To maximize ChatGPT’s capabilities, it’s essential to understand the critical considerations for effective prompt writing (or "prompt engineering"). The primary elements of effective prompts for ChatGPT are context and clarity. Once you’ve mastered those, you can elevate your prompt craft to encourage open-ended responses and create templates for desired outcomes. 

Context

Audience

Understanding the target audience is a crucial aspect of crafting prompts. Knowing the background, language proficiency, and preferences of the target audience can help you tailor your prompts to suit their needs. For example, suppose your audience is a middle school class learning about volcanoes. You can tell ChatGPT to “write for a seventh-grade class with limited knowledge of thermodynamics.” In addition, you could tell it to use “simple and clear language” or to “Explain photosynthesis in a way a 5th grader would understand.” 

Domain

Tailoring the prompt to specific domains can also significantly improve the quality of ChatGPT responses. ChatGPT has been trained on a diverse range of texts, making it capable of generating responses for various topics. However, to get the best results, it’s important to provide a clear context for the task. For example, if you want ChatGPT to generate a response about a specific subject, such as finance or history, you should mention the subject in the prompt. You can tell ChatGPT from what perspective to respond, such as “Pretend you are an expert poet. Explain basic rhyming schemes found in poetry to a group of high school freshmen.” This will help ChatGPT understand the context and provide more relevant and accurate responses. 

Tone

ChatGPT is trained to write in the tone you present in your prompt. If you want a funny answer, say so in your prompt. If you want a serious and professional tone, tell ChatGPT to respond that way. Be direct and consistent in the tone you want ChatGPT to use, and it will keep that tone throughout the chat. Consistency in the tone and style of prompts helps establish a clear and recognizable voice for ChatCPT’s responses. 

Clarity

Specify the Task

This may seem obvious, but it's essential to clearly and specifically state the task you want ChatGPT to accomplish. Avoiding ambiguity and vagueness is crucial for effective, prompt writing. Ambiguous or vague prompts can lead to unclear or irrelevant responses. For example, a prompt like “What is the meaning of life?” is too broad and is likely to result in a general and unhelpful answer. On the other hand, a prompt like “write an essay on the meaning of life according to Western philosophy” provides a clearer context and is more likely to result in a more specific response. The more specific and detailed the prompt, the better the quality of the response will be. 

Specify the Format

You can direct ChatGPT to respond in a particular format as well. Typically, ChatGPT writes in a verbose, narrative style. You can clarify responses by asking for a specifically formatted response. For example, when asking ChatGPT, “What were the causes and consequences of the Civil War?” you will get a narrative response. But you could add “respond with a bulleted list with headers for each section and two relevant discussion questions for each cause listed.” This will give you a clear response formatted for your use. The quality of the response improves with greater formatting detail. You can specify the number of words, key vocabulary to incorporate or any other specific and relevant information. 

Using Templates

Once you’ve learned what works and doesn’t, you may want to experiment with creating templates for certain tasks. Testing and iterating your prompts is a crucial aspect of improving the quality of ChatGPT's responses. By testing different prompts and analyzing the results, you can gain insights into what works well, what doesn’t, and make adjustments as needed. ChatGPT is constantly being trained and updated, so you should try similar prompts over time to see how the generated responses change.

Prompt templates are a powerful tool for improving prompt writing and generating high-quality responses. By creating reusable prompt templates for common tasks, you can save time and effort in the future and ensure your prompts are consistent and well-structured. For example, you could create a prompt for writing a news article, an email, or a lesson plan and then use that template each time you have that task. While prompt templates are a great starting point, modifying them to suit specific needs is important.

Effective prompt writing is a crucial aspect of getting the best response from ChatGPT. By relating the context of your prompt and specifically stating things like task, tone, and format, the responses you generate will vastly improve. By following these recommendations, you can ensure you are getting the most out of generative AI. 

Now, I know that some of you are uneasy about the prospect of artificial intelligence seeping into our classes and replacing teachers. I want you to remember these encouraging words that come straight from my heart. No really, they do...

Login Fails & Fatal Errors in Schoology & Respondus

Over the last several weeks we have been experiencing failed logins to Schoology for both staff and students, as well as fatal errors launching the Respondus Lockdown Browser. The Instructional Technology team has been working closely with Schoology and Respondus to pinpoint the cause of the errors and find a solution. While the login issues have been partially solved, students are still experiencing difficulty bypassing the Captcha screens, often failing after several attempts.  

After a couple weeks, Schoology Support and Respondus Support seem to be communicating more effectively, and we expect that we will have a solution or update soon. In the meantime, students have had success logging in to Schoology through Safari, and launching the lockdown browser from there. 

Thank you for your continued patience as we work through these problems.

657 Trees

Through surveys conducted as part of our Framework 220 initiative, staff members have expressed a desire for “green” programs to conserve natural resources. There is some low hanging fruit in this regard to carefully consider—namely, printing.

Our Papercut printing system estimates that 657 trees were harvested to provide Barrington 220 with enough paper to feed our building-based printers during this past calendar year. Papercut also estimates that 153,275 pounds of carbon dioxide (a primary greenhouse gas) was produced throughout the production of that paper. Further, the energy required to do so is the equivalent of running a standard light bulb for well over 4 million hours.

Our printer usage dropped considerably during the height of the pandemic. Daily printing totals have trended upwards since our days of remote learning.

Framework 220 has a “Stewardship” component related to this topic, not just from a green environment perspective, but from a monetary perspective. Just as the price of eggs has recently soared, so has the cost of a ream of paper, which is now over twice the price that we were paying just a short time ago.

I urge our staff members to think twice before printing. Consider working with your peers at your building or department level to brainstorm and find ways to use technology to offset the need for printing. Our staff and students have devices, apps, and services that provide a rich set of creativity, communication, and collaboration tools. Are there new possibilities to preclude printing pages? Our Instructional Technology staff also has many ideas on how to move toward a less-paper-heavy environment with the use of technology. If you are interested, please reach out to your building LTA staff.

Awareness & Identification of Children & Youth Experiencing Homelessness

Even though the IC (Infinite Campus) team deals with student information services on a daily basis, you may not know that we are also the department that serves the needs of our students in transitional housing, sometimes called McKinney-Vento, or Homeless students. 

I wanted to bring this to your attention because we have a homeless student population in the district. Our community has also started to see an uptick in students and families seeking refuge from war-torn countries such as Ukraine and Venezuela, and more students and families who could use our help just to get by due to economic instability. This is especially important as we think about and nurture the social-emotional learning needs of our students and what their life is like outside of the school day hours.

During the 2019–20 school year, public schools identified over 1.3 million students who experienced homelessness, or 2.5% of all students enrolled in public schools. Youth and young adults who experience homelessness are much less likely to remain and excel in school than their stably housed peers.

That being said, I would like to ask all of our teachers and staff to consider signs of homelessness and Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) needs as you interact with our students daily. This document from the National Center for Homeless Education can help you look for warning signs and provide tips for identifying homeless children and youth in your classrooms or around the school.

If you suspect that a student might fall into this category based on your observations or interactions with their parents, please let your building principal or social worker know what led you to believe that you have a student who may be homeless or in need of additional resources. They can follow up on it and get in touch with our student information department if necessary, in order to make sure students have what they need, when they need it, in the way they need it to succeed.

Since you are on the front lines for identifying our students in need each day, we need your eyes and ears to help us meet the needs of all of our students—even if they don't think they have a need themselves.

Please click here to learn the definitions of homelessness and learn ways to make yourself familiar with some of the tell-tale signs that can help to identify our students in need. It could mean all the difference to that child and/or family. 

Since teachers are in the business of making a difference in children's lives, you are the perfect person to do this!