Using Artificial Intelligence to Portray Text Evidence
Usually, around January or February of every school year for the past few years, I have my English II classes, which are sophomores, read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel The Great Gatsby. Gatsby is not only one of my own favorite novels, but is still consistently ranked amongst the greatest novels of all time. Last year, however, for the first time I can remember, my classes did not seem all that taken by the novel, its language, characters, or story, despite my own enthusiasm for this great work of fiction. Given this feedback from last year, I aimed to reinvigorate this unit with additional ways for my students to better experience just how rich and vivid Fitzgerald’s language is throughout the book.
During chapter one, the students created single images that were hand-drawn using only specific quotes from the book, such as the one describing Gatsby reaching for the green light. A subsequent assignment asked for mock Instagram posts depicting key excerpts from the novel describing the transformation of James Gatz to Jay Gatsby, and the people and things that influenced that change. As an end of unit assessment, I decided to have the students create brand new images, using Artificial Intelligence (AI) text-to-image generators. The key for the creation of these images was their ability to take key pieces of details from the text to provide to AI in order to create the most accurate depictions to demonstrate a complex understanding of the text.
This lesson could be differentiated as needed, including: requiring the students to create less complex (or more complex) images, giving them existing images to analyze and evaluate and apply text evidence in their work; by supporting visual learners by allowing them to engage the text in a manner more suited with their learning style; and by promoting creativity, originality, and critical thinking skills; by allowing for collaboration between students to work on the images with a partner or in small group; and as prompts for essays based on the images, among other possibilities.
This AI allows the students a creative and original way to interact with the text and for me to assess their learning and understanding. From the start of the instruction, the students were engaged in the process, from seeing the options available to them to the instructions and requirement through to the actual creation of their own images. Not only were the students sharing work ideas with me, but were collaborating and interacting with each other for ideas and ways to improve the outcomes through various text inputs and experimenting with additional features of the technology. While the final assessment of this project will not come until the class has finished the book, the perceived level of participation, engagement, and high quality work being demonstrated even early on showed that this use of this new technology is an appropriate and exciting addition to my classroom instruction, and one I will continue to try to adapt for other classes and lessons.
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