AI&Human: Creative Collaboration (pt.2) - Lesson planning
I'm running a five-part series with creative human-AI collaboration ideas. Part 2 is about coming up with lesson ideas when there's no time.
I'm pretty sure I'm alone when I say that sometimes I just have absolutely no idea what to do in a lesson. Especially if it's a conversational business class, which basically means that my students are quite communicative, they know just enough to solve various situation in English, and most course books simply bore them.
So what to do in this case? I turned to AI for help. But I didn't want it to do everything for me. And I had my reasons:
I actually asked for a complete lesson plan from sveeral chatbots just to see what I get, and the first results was almost exclusively about the importance of negotiations, while the second was about the future of their professions. I wasn't that impressed...
I wanted to stay in control and only take what I want.
Let's get started!
This was actually my first and only prompt:
Give me or generate 5 interesting business cases when something went wrong and had to be solved. Students will have to figure out what should've been the best decision or solution.
I got some pretty good cases and even a suggested lesson plan with discussion questions.
Creating the slides
The next thing I did was create a slide deck first with the discussion questions and then added the cases.
You can actually merge these first two steps by asking a presentation generator like Gamma to do the case generation and the slide creation in one go. But I’ve found that specialized tools seem to be doing that one thing well which they’ve been trained for. So, Gamma can do pretty slides but the content is far from great.
Editing for language
Then I highlighted the words and expressions which I thought my students would not know, and asked the chatbot for short definitions to create a quick matching activity on the final slide.
You can ask chatbots that use code, such as Claude or Canva AI, to create an interactive game for vocabulary practice. Such a game, for example, is this simple matching one.
Finally, I created the table on the slide myself and added the key in the speaker notes.
And here's the result! :)
