From the beginning of the semester, I take a look through the various websites that host all the CALL services, like Kahoot, Wordwall, Matching pairs…etc. I concluded that the online tools are a bit hard to incorporate or design around it, due to multiple complex interfaces, a lot of advanced function locked behind subscription services or premium options. Also, I like my teaching materials and user experiences be consistence, so even if I’m going to massively incorporate CALL software in class, I might choose one platform and pay once for the full experience.

      Once I choose the assign reading topic related to chatGPT, the unlimited potential opens a huge door for me. Before reading the paper I only use chatGPT for grammar related functions. After the various demonstration on the papers, I try a lot of prompts, questions, variations of different lesson plans. I get such an amazing result that I decided to pay for chatGPT 4, that gives me the bonus of more accurate, lengthy response, and added functions to generate images, analysis complex files, images, and even create graphs and charts.

      Due to my limited teaching experience, and I also don’t remember a lot about the details of ESL lessons during my childhood. I only remember there are a lot of activities and games during the class sessions. I also know my English foundation are not tightly structured, especially grammar and writing, so I decided to stick to what I am most specialized in: geography and urban design. A lesson around navigating a map is the most feasible option for me. It requires multiple skills for student to participate, namely location vocabularies, prepositions, directions commands, and complex sentence structures. I asked chatGPT to try creating a whole package of lesson plan, including instructions, teaching materials, dialogues, possible outcomes and potentially points for me to be aware of.

      However, using chatGPT to generate endless lesson plans are one thing, I still need to teach it in real life. The chatGPT only gives me vague instruction to the activities in class, such as using a detailed city map for student to follow and optimize the fastest route, create a relay race between teams of students…etc. Even though chatGPT4 can generate images, it can’t generate complex and accurate images with words and meaning full maps to do lessons on. The map chatGPT generated are more like artistic interpretation of the final product, a concept stage as in the designing process, so in the end, either I had to try find suitable teaching materials online, or create one by myself from scratch.
I begin by sketching my map using a pencil on a piece of paper, and try to look online for teaching resources. However, I quickly realized the maps online are far away from what I want to teach, namely boring, grid-like streets, generic locations, inconsistent art styles. So, in the end, I decided to do everything from scratch.

      By using my previous knowledge from my design department, I use Adobe Illustrator to create vector style maps, and use Flaticon.com to gather endless amount of logos with consistent art style, eliminate the hassle of drawing everything on my own. After finished my maps, I uploaded to chatGPT4 and try to ask the software to create questions and routes based on my map. At first, it seems gives me detailed results from point A to point B, however, it turns out that chatGPT4 is just trying to generate results that seems correct, but when I cross references from the real map I create, I just see a lot of well-organized steps of nonsense, so I concluded that chatGPT4 aren’t suitable for complex image scanning and route creating at the same time.