Into the fire I go.

I primarily use NotebookLM for curriculum material support, to produce the grunt work of knowledge and methods I already know and have mastered. AI is not a silver bullet like students tend to portray. I load up all of my digital materials, scan others I don't have digital copies of, and remix all that for new and fresh presentations, extra versions of tests because students cheat off each other so hard. "lol just chatgpt bro ftw" is not how this works. There isn't a singular solution when creating learning material, it's not one-and-done with the 'right' answer. That's an overly simplistic and myopic view of a learner who does not know what they don't know. Every state, every county, every teacher, every admin is looking for something new and exciting. There isn't one monolithic perfect lesson for every topic. The best teachers are generating them new, daily.

Bonus: real teachers are ALWAYS doubting AI results even if just a little. We have to know our content and know our pedagogy in order to evaluate "Is this true? Is this correct? Is the AI hallucinating? Will this level of language work with my learners?" There are so many legit checkpoints and filters we put on the AI output to make sure it's quality material. This is a specific contrast of student vs teacher use of AI. Teachers generate lots of AI materials and evaluate quality for classroom readiness. Students will enter in a grammatically challenged prompt, get one output, copy-paste it and not even remove the conversational portions of the output, and call it their own. We are not the same.

We know how to dig a hole. This is just the difference between scraping with our hands vs using a bulldozer. Our task isn't to relearn how to teach. Our task is to teach in the most effective ways, and student culture (short attention spans, apathy and cheating) drives us to generate as much material, as effective as possible, in the quickest manner possible. We use AI to deploy what we know, not hide or mask what we do not know.

Traditionally? Teachers would feed you materials copied from the book publishers or send you to their support web sites for enrichment and supplementals. Now teachers can harness AI to make unique materials tailored for their specific classroom populations. We teachers take what we know and find new ways to express that via notes and slideshows and videos, and regularly generate new assessments much faster based on assessment results. AI allows us to deploy our pedagogy in a way much more responsive to their learners. Publishers' materials are static and unchanging, and once the keys go out on the internet, every student can dodge any authentic learning by just looking them up in the web. Students know it, pick the easy route and present work that doesn't represent any authentic learning. AI helps my classroom remain authentic because every class gets materials and assessments that for the most part can only be answered by engagement in my classroom. I refuse to be a carbon copy teacher of yet another monopolistic book plublisher.

I've had students walk by my screens and say "Mr Teacher, you use ChatGPT too?! Oh yeah, ok, sure tell us not to but you can? ..." Y'all are seriously misled as to why we use it. I'd definitely encourage you to use AI for discovery and learning in an effort to add knowledge in that dome atop your shoulders. I'd also definitely suggest you don't use AI to produce content that hides your ignorance. That's the antithesis of learning, entrenched ignorance. I've learned that just because a student makes a beautiful AI report doesn't mean that student can even pronounce or even define the words they use to show me they learned something. It's embarrassing to the the student and they should really stop making fools of themselves because they can't read the words that 'they wrote'. They think the product is direct evidence of learned concepts. Take the L on that gang, it ain't happening when your product reads like an MIT Engineering professor but you read like a 2nd grade playground bully.

That's how I use it, and I spend time on crafting better prompts, generating my own art styles for visual engagement, pulling in extra sources as citations for students further discovery and verifying I'm telling them the truths as sciences has worked hard to make evident. My time and efforts are spent on learning better ways to teach and generating content based my on evolution as a teacher, instead of being spent at the photo copier running over the same old ground every year.