Generative AI and ChatGPT for K-12 Educators

Vanderbilt University via Coursera Specialization

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Details

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Provider

Coursera Specialization
Pricing

Paid Course
Languages

English
Certificate

Certificate Available
Duration & workload

4 weeks, 10 hours a week

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Overview

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Despite what you may have heard, ChatGPT and other generative AI tools offer exciting possibilities for innovative teaching and personalized education. This hands-on specialization is designed for K-12 educators looking to harness AI to enhance lesson planning, engage students, and foster creativity—no prior experience with ChatGPT, AI, or prompt engineering required! What You’ll Learn Throughout this specialization, you’ll gain practical skills to: ✅ Generate engaging lesson plans tailored to student interests—like teaching fractions through Pokémon. ✅ Create interactive games and printable learning materials—such as a World Cup-inspired math game. ✅ Design AI-powered class activities—like students building their own fictional characters and crafting funny fill-in-the-blank stories. ✅ Help students think innovatively—such as brainstorming how to build a paperclip-and-bottle bridge strong enough to hold a person. ✅ Generate personalized quizzes on demand—allowing students to test themselves on topics they care about, like BMX racing geometry. These techniques are adaptable to any subject or student level, making learning more interactive, creative, and fun! Our students are growing up in a world where tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and LLama will be integral to how they learn and work. But truly succeeding with AI requires a new mindset—one that amplifies critical thinking rather than replaces it.

Syllabus

Course 1: Innovative Teaching with ChatGPT
Course 2: Generative AI for Kids, Parents, and Teachers
Course 3: Prompt Engineering for ChatGPT

Courses

2 reviews
18 hours 48 minutes
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ChatGPT and other large language models are going to be more important in your life and business than your smartphone, if you use them right. ChatGPT can tutor your child in math, generate a meal plan and recipes, write software applications for your business, help you improve your personal cybersecurity, and that is just in the first hour that you use it. This course will teach you how to be an expert user of these generative AI tools. The course will show amazing examples of how you can tap into these generative AI tools' emergent intelligence and reasoning, how you can use them to be more productive day to day, and give you insight into how they work. Large language models respond to instructions and questions posed by users in natural language statements, known as “prompts”. Although large language models will disrupt many fields, most users lack the skills to write effective prompts. Expert users, who understand how to write good prompts, are orders of magnitude more productive and can unlock significantly more creative uses for these tools. This course introduces students to the patterns and approaches for writing effective prompts for large language models. Anyone can take the course and the only required knowledge is basic computer usage skills, such as using a browser and accessing ChatGPT. Students will start with basic prompts and build towards writing sophisticated prompts to solve problems in any domain. By the end of the course, students will have strong prompt engineering skills and be capable of using large language models for a wide range of tasks in their job, business, personal life, and education, such as writing, summarization, game play, planning, simulation, and programming.
0 reviews
2 hours 10 minutes
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Despite what you may have heard, ChatGPT offers exciting possibilities for supporting innovative teaching and personalized education. This course provides practical techniques that any educator, from K-12 to higher education, can use to help support their teaching. No experience with ChatGPT, prompt engineering, or Generative AI is required. In this course, you will learn how to do exciting things to support your teaching and student learning, such as: 1. How to brainstorm lesson plans that integrate learner interests and needs, such as generating a lesson plan to teach fourth graders about fractions using concepts from Pokemon 2. Create interactive games and turning them into concrete educational materials that you can print, such as creating a game inspired by World Cup Soccer and creating a PDF of the necessary game pieces 3. Generating engaging class activities, such as having students design fictional characters based on vocabulary and then generating funny fill in the blank stories based on the dialog 4. Helping students think of new and innovative ways of solving problems, such as generating possible ideas for building a bridge out of paperclips and plastic bottles that could support a person 5. Generating personalized quizzes on the fly that students can use to test themselves on topics and incorporate their interests, such as creating a Geometry quiz that a student can customize on the fly to use questions based on BMX bicycle racing The techniques taught are adaptable to almost any subject and student level.
0 reviews
5 hours 30 minutes
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My son is going to grow up in a completely different world that is filled with generative AI (e.g., ChatGPT, Claude, LLama, etc.). I think this is a world of possibility, creativity, and deep thought that will enrich the way we think and solve problems. I want to make sure that my son is set up for success in this new world and understands how to use generative AI in a way that helps him learn, create, and solve problems. Even though generative AI seems obvious to use, it isn't. Really learning to innovate and succeed with generative AI requires a change in mindset about the way we use it and how we solve problems. We have to teach people to think more, not less about what they are doing. I spent the last year working with my son to empower him with the skills to use generative AI to augment and amplify his critical thinking and creativity. I distilled this teaching into a series of courses that you can use to help teach your kids, either at home or in the classroom, these same skills. This is the first of these courses. Some of the things that we have done that you will learn to do with your kids: - Take pictures of anything and have generative AI turn the photos into world records that you can fact check - Interactively brainstorm how to build anything out of any material using generative AI as your partner - Invent new games from photos of everyday objects I teach a course on Prompt Engineering, which is the study of how you converse and solve problems with generative AI that 100,000s of people have enrolled in. I have gotten to hear about how companies all over the world are changing the future of work with generative AI. These courses are specifically designed to help you teach kids to succeed in this new world. This course is meant for parents and teachers to do with kids. You watch the videos, preview the exercises, and then lead kids through the fun activities. You decide what to show and how to best communicate with your kids. Along the way, not only will your kids learn to innovate with generative AI, but it will reshape how you use it personally.