During the six-week practicum, I have learned to integrate AI in my lesson plannings and other technologies for a more interactive learning environment. I also have thoughts on improvements for my future teaching opportunities.

      The best part that I have learned from CALL lessons is to design lessons with the assist of AI. I used ChatGPT in the beginning but turned to Microsoft Copilot for the actual plannings. The difference between these two AI tools is internet connection. ChatGPT is only a language model in which knowledge is drawn only from its own language database. However, Copilot is an artificial assistant which can draw information from the internet while still having the intelligence and creativity of normal language models. For me, the most important function of AI during lesson plannings is for information researching and idea boosting. I use them to generate lesson structures as drafts and vocabularies and sentences for each lesson. The upside of AI instead of traditional brainstorming and researching is AI’s ability to browse the web at an instant and generate as many versions of contents as the teachers want. It shortens the time for lesson designing and raises the quality from my perspective.

      Other than AI, I also learned to integrate Kahoot for a more interactive and competitive learning environment and use PaGamo for pretests and posttests for each lesson. Furthermore, the digital whiteboard provided by the school is also very useful since it allows students to interact with the slides or other teaching content shown by the teachers instead of only sitting there and listen. Students are allowed to draw, circle, or even add new vocabularies or thoughts on the digital whiteboard. All these tools are good methods of bringing the students into the lessons instead of lecturing them with talks and homework.

      My final thoughts on my six-week lessons are, I need more practice on students’ language and motivation level analysis. As for now, I am not able to accurately evaluate my students as to creating incompatible materials for the lessons, which slowed down the learning speed and learning motivation for them. I also need more polishing on integrating technology tools into my lessons, since they were mostly composed of handwriting and conversational tasks. During the final oral reports, I learned from other peers which used cooperative whiteboards for students to work together on different laptops and other interesting technology integrations. I would like to try them out in further teaching opportunities. After consultations with the Professor, I also realized that I need to work on limiting students’ use of technology. Taiwanese students mostly lack self-control while given the liberty to use technology without proper supervision. I need a more concrete way to supervise their use other them splitting their seats and setting a time limit while using laptops.

      Overall, I now understand how to use AI for lesson planning, how to use Kahoot, PaGamo and digital whiteboard for interactive lessons. Also, I now have clearer directions on improving, such as evaluation skills, technology integration skills, and setting technology usage limitations.