Classifying and Ranking Exercises
Exploring the benefits and possibilities of AI created classifying exercises
I have just created and been experimenting with a GPT that creates 2 exercises: one is a classifying exercise, and the other is a ranking exercise (the link and prompt instructions are at the end of the post). These exercises are complementary, and are designed as a way to start a class/introduce a topic and provide an alternative to brainstorming. Below are some suggestions for when classifying exercises might be suitable, apart from just adding variety to a lesson. The AI prompt and the complete exercises with answers are in the subscriber section at the end of the post.
1 Starting a class with an unfamiliar topic: Self-driving cars
Usually, if students are familiar with a topic, you can start by brainstorming ideas about that topic with almost no preparation. However, if students are not familiar with a topic, you might need to do a little more work. For example, I was teaching about autonomous vehicles (also called self-driving vehicles or robotaxis ). Few communities in the world, except perhaps San Francisco, have actual experience of self-driving cars on their streets. So brainstorming didn’t really work. It’s difficult for students to spontaneously imagine the impacts of self-driving cars on people’s lives when they have no real experience of self-driving cars in their city. In this instance, a classifying exercise helps students start to think about the pros and cons of self driving vehicles. This was a class with fairly advanced language skills.
2 Starting a class with low level students: Daily routines
And, of course, students often don’t have experience of the language you intend to teach them. Classifying/sorting exercises are also useful for low-level or weak or shy classes. I teach English to low-level Chinese students who have trouble thinking of or even pronouncing very elementary vocabulary. So exercises like the ones below about daily routines and occupations below are really useful.
And here is another exercise for occupations.
3 Giving an old topic a new twist: Food cravings
Classifying exercises can also be used to tweak on old topic you’ve been teaching for years. AI can help relieve a teacher’s boredom! For example, a common way to teach about food is to use a food or flavor sorting exercise. But with AI, you can turn a fragment of an idea into reality. This is a food classification exercise based on intensity of cravings.
4 Organizing mind boggling topics: Workplace numbers and statistics
Some topics, like numbers and statistics, used to seem just impossible to teach. I always knew students had problems with difficult types of numbers and statistics. But I just skipped this topic (as did most textbooks), as I had no idea how to teach it. AI can you give you organizing principles you had never thought of.
5 Exploring new topics: Social media algorithms
Social media algorithms is a topic that is familiar to everyone who is online. But how do you teach it? Classifying is a good way to start. Just by giving the topic a test run in the GPT, I realized this is a great topic. Everyone can relate to it and has opinions about social media algorithms. I’m going to create a more extensive lesson for this topic soon. Below, I’ve also added an extra opinions exercise.
6 Creating exercises for complex topics quickly: Climate change
Of course, another benefit of having a specialized GPT for classifying and ranking is that exercises and lessons about complex topics can be created quickly.
