Explore the High School Biology Collaborative Group’s journey into using AI tools to enhance teaching and learning. Discover what worked, what didn’t, and how to build a powerful “AI Toolkit” for your classroom.
The Mission
The GHSD High School Biology Collaborative Group set out to answer a critical question: How can teachers leverage AI to provide more powerful classroom learning?. Through collaboration and experimentation, the team explored various tools to develop labs, discussion questions, and assessments, discovering that while AI is a powerful engine, it requires a skilled driver.
The “Right Tool for the Job” Guide
One key takeaway is that no single AI tool does it all. The team found success by matching specific tasks to the platform best suited for them.
- Google Gemini:
- Best For: Google Workspace integration and content creation. It is seamless for generating lesson plans, activities, and vocabulary lists directly within the Google ecosystem.
- The “Safety” Win: When used with a Google for Education account, Gemini offers Enterprise-Grade Protection, meaning student data is not used to train the model.
- Gamma:
- Best For: Creating visually appealing slideshows.
- Why: The team found that Gemini often produced poor-quality presentations, whereas Gamma excelled at generating high-quality slides from existing materials.
- NotebookLM:
- Best For: Review and accessibility. It shines at generating summary documents and even creating “podcasts” from YouTube videos or text documents, perfect for students who missed class.
- ChatGPT:
- Best For: Varied content and Q&A based on provided websites. The education platform shows potential for creating diploma-level questions.
Successes: Where AI Shines
The team found AI to be an excellent “starting point” that saves time on foundational tasks.
- Content Generation: Efficiently creates email summaries, lesson plan ideas, and vocabulary lists.
- Knowledge Questions: Works well for generating knowledge-level questions, provided the prompts are specific.
- Creativity: Tools like Suno can create engaging songs to introduce or review learning objectives, offering a fun “hook” for students.
Challenges: Proceed with Caution
AI is not ready to run on autopilot. The team identified several limitations that educators must manage.
- Scientific Accuracy: Image generation for scientific concepts (e.g., cells, diagrams) is often inaccurate or unrealistic.
- High-Level Assessment: Creating critical thinking or “diploma-level” questions is difficult. It requires very detailed prompting (e.g., providing specific sources and using terms like “critical thinking”), and the output often still has flawed distractors.
- The “Human Edit”: Nothing generated is completely user-ready. Everything requires review and modification for accuracy, formatting, and relevance.
Try This: The “App Smash” Lesson Workflow
Don’t limit yourself to one tool! Try this workflow developed by the team to create a comprehensive lesson package:
- Slides in Gamma: Generate your visual lecture content.
- Student Worksheet in ChatGPT: Create a companion worksheet for the lesson.
- Review in NotebookLM: Upload your materials to generate a podcast or summary for review (great for absent students!).
- Outcome in Gemini: Use Gemini to tie it all together with specific lesson content and activities integrated into your Google Classroom.
The Bottom Line: AI is great at quickly generating materials and brainstorming ideas to give you a clear plan, but it works best when you act as the editor and guide.
