Generative AI: Useful tools for teaching staff

Everyone is talking about ChatGPT, but other generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools provide a wide range of resources which can be very effective in the classroom. A group of AI experts from the eLearning Innovation Center (eLinC) of the UOC (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya) have produced an infographic highlighting the most useful AI tools for teaching staff in different areas. This article provides a summary of them

Writing and search assistants

 Writing and search assistants can help summarize information and identify the most relevant content on specific topics for a course or for academic research, among other features. They are also useful for planning lessons, finding ideas for activities and projects for students, and overcoming writer’s block.

Tools: Bing Chat, ChatGPT, TutorAI, Perplexity AI, Google Bard

Surveying and summarizing documents, articles and books

Generative AI tools are very effective for understanding and summarizing complex key ideas, analysing and identifying the most relevant content, and when used in class, improving the students’ learning experience.

Tools: Chat Pdf, Explain paper, Humata, Chat DOC, Talk to Books.

Creating presentations

If you need to prepare a presentation, artificial intelligence (AI) can be useful for turning texts and searches about a topic into slides, inserting images, and creating attractive presentations for lectures, for example.

Tools: Magic Slides, Tome, Slides AI, GPT for slides, MotionIt AI.

Audio transcription

Automatically converting an audio file into written text saves on time and effort. Tools like those listed below enable users to transcribe interviews, presentations, lectures, conversations with students and other teachers, as well as other audio materials and recordings related to academic research.

Tools: Whisper, Happy Scribe, Dictation.io.

Transcribing YouTube videos

As with audio files, generative AI tools can also convert video content into written text, which can be used to prepare presentations and other educational resources. Transcribed texts are also useful for people who are hard of hearing or who do not speak the language in which the video is recorded.

Tools: Happy Scribe, Glasp.

Creating images from text

Finding the right image to illustrate content can sometimes be difficult. Generative AI makes this task easier, by enabling users to create custom images and make lessons more visual and appealing to students.

Tools: Craiyon, Midjourney, DALL-E, Stable Difussion, Fotor, Adobe Firefly.

Creating videos from text

Generative AI lets you create videos from text. It can be used to generate personalized materials for the classroom, teaching materials, more attractive presentations, and in short, more original and inspiring resources for students.

Tools: Runway, AIStudios, DeepBrain AI, Synthesia.

Programming code

For programming, there are accessible generative AI tools that can be used to generate code in any programming language based on descriptions, run tests to check that a piece of code works correctly, generate documentation, detect and fix errors, and speed up the process of writing code.

Tools: Tabnine, ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot, Ghostwriter, SourceAI.

Testing environments

Generative AI tools can be used to run multiple machine learning models, and implement state-of-the-art models.

Tools: Replicate, HuggingFace.

Detecting plagiarism

How can we detect copied content in students’ work? The resources that we present in this area help to determine whether students have committed plagiarism or if they have used reliable sources in their work. Some advanced detectors can also identify whether text has been rewritten or paraphrased to conceal plagiarism.

Tools: Smodin, OpenAi API Key.

This report supports United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4, Quality Education.