Integration
The other day, I was telling my daughter (now doing her MA and trying to figure out the magic formula of time × research × life) about the days when I was working on my PhD thesis. Skipping the ‘once upon a time’ part, the internet was much slower back then, and it certainly wasn’t as (over)flooded with content – useful, fluff, and AI slop alike – as it is today. So I would go to the library, flip through the index, often manually, to find my a-ha book, the one that sounded right. Then I’d order it to be brought to the main reading hall.
And wait.
Sometimes the wait was longer if someone else was reading it. Sometimes I even had to travel somewhere else entirely just to read the book. These scattered resources, on the one hand, made research harder, yet they also gave us more time to think.
Now life feels far more integrated. And the latest layer of integration is, of course, big AI, with models trained on trillions of sources from the web, from books, and from all kinds of Creative Commons and copyrighted material, and whatnot, including the many ideas, materials, and activities generously shared by WordPress and Blogger and other communities. A blend of human thought, scribblings, and money-making.
This integration comes at a cost: our thinking time has grown much shorter.
I’ve also done a bit of integrating by bringing together a few AI-powered tools that were scattered across the blog into one place, where I can monitor and tweak them as needed, without ‘going places’.
Here’s how it works. The Studio brings together five of the experimental tools I’ve shared (and tested) on the blog: Dialogues: Espresso & Extended, Speech Topics, Role-Plays, Task Twists, and Jazz Up.
The tools are powered by large language models (mainly experimental and open-source) and are guided by my approach to language learning, research, and classroom practice. I use them for two main purposes: to help brainstorm and create new activity ideas, and to support teacher training by helping teachers rethink familiar tasks and explore different ways to reiterate activities and engage learners.
The Studio generates activity cards with suggested tasks, which are fully editable before you download them, saving the time usually spent on copy-pasting.
Dialogues module (formerly Scripted Conversations Generator) helps draft structured conversations and Espresso dialogues, focusing on communicative functions and supporting learners in practising and performing these functions in English.
Read more about this generator, including sample activities, in DIALOGUES: SCRIPT, EDIT, TEACH, and about Espresso dialogues in ESPRESSO DIALOGUES.
Speech Topics is a new module that helps redesign standard speaking prompts (e.g., Describe your ideal holiday) to make them more engaging, meaningful, and cognitively stimulating. In this module, I use an approach similar to Q-Smart (ASK BETTER QUESTIONS, GET BETTER ANSWERS).
Role-Plays module (formerly Role-Play Generator) helps design role-plays for classroom use.
Read more in ROLE-PLAY GENERATOR.
Task Twists (formerly Task Tweaker) helps brainstorm ideas for task variations. The main focus here is on rethinking a given task by tweaking certain elements of it.
Read TASK TWEAKER: REPETITION, BOREDOM, AND TASK VARIATIONS.
Jazz Up! is a new module that works similarly to Task Twists, but with a focus on engagement (or simply adding ‘fun’) by adding certain fun-damental elements.
Read TEACHING FUN-DAMENTALS.
To generate materials or activities that are relevant for your learners, you’ll need to provide some contextual information. This information is used across all the tools in the Studio:
Your students’ proficiency level
Their age
Their interests
The learning goal or objective
The topic
The language focus (a general description or specific grammar or vocabulary items to be incorporated into the materials).
You enter this information once, and then simply add task descriptions, or any specific instructions, or constraints for particular materials or activities.
As the Studio is currently running in test mode, all information will be ‘gone with a click’ when you close your browser. So make sure to download your decks as PDFs. Otherwise, you’ll need to enter the information again, brew some espresso, and wake the AI back up.
Click the link to check out My AI Toolkit Studio, and as always, I’d love to hear your ideas and suggestions!
Cut the wait, keep the thinking, beautiful people!
Share this:
Discover more from ELT-CATION
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
