CENTURY is an online teaching and learning tool. Using AI and the latest research in learning science and neuroscience, it creates constantly adapting personalised pathways for students and powerful intervention data for teachers. Our content library contains thousands of high-quality English resources, created by our team of experienced teachers. We have language and SPaG courses for KS3 and GCSE students. We cover a range of literature texts, from ‘Macbeth’ to ‘A Christmas Carol’. Litdrive members are eligible for a 10% new customer discount off first year subscription, which includes access to all English resources, product features, training, implementation and ongoing account support. Visit our website to find out more: https://www.century.tech/explore-century/english-for-secondary-schools/
Over half of teachers are using the power of generative AI to provide activities to learners, but is it reliable? Every teacher knows that the wrong activity can send a lesson into a tailspin, and that the right activity – which takes into account prior knowledge of the students in front of them – can set a solid foundation for the rest of the lesson. Can we really trust ChatGPT to get it right?
Existing tools like ChatGPT or Gemini have been trained on large, non-specific data sets and can create text, image and video outputs. To work in the classroom teachers need to ‘prompt engineer’ the tool, i.e. give it really specific instructions to ensure that what comes out is appropriate. This is time consuming and unfortunately can still end up in a frustratingly inadequate set of resources. In order for generative AI to be effective, it requires additional context beyond what it was trained on. In the DfE’s words: “Generative AI is more efficient and accurate when given highly structured requirements”. The more context you give, the more reliable the outputs. Advancements are happening at a rapid pace – the DfE recently announced that they have managed to increase the accuracy of generative AI models to 92%. They did this by training the model with learning resources such as curriculum guidance, lesson plans and anonymised pupil assessments. When no targeted data was provided to a large language model, accuracy was just 67%.
CENTURY, an AI-powered recommendation engine, has been supporting the teaching and learning of English for nearly a decade, ensuring learners are seeing the right lesson content at the right time. We have always been at the forefront of artificial intelligence and making sure it is embedded into the core of the platform. CENTURY has already done the work announced by DfE by combining generative AI alongside our teacher-made, quality resources to create TeacherGENie™. TeacherGENie™ instantly generates printable activities on a chosen topic, using CENTURY data to make sure they are the right level for the learners in the class.
The DfE has also noted the vital role of educators in the development of generative AI tools – something we’ve always known at CENTURY. Not only do our teachers create all the learning content on CENTURY, they are some of the biggest voices during the creation and refinement of any feature available on CENTURY. For TeacherGENie™, they have provided invaluable feedback by specifying the reasons why a question might need to be regenerated. Our initial analysis is showing that TeacherGENie™ generates questions at the right level and content 97.67% of the time.
Caption: TeacherGENie™ in action, creating an English SpaG worksheet in seconds
These worksheets, consisting of five questions, can be used in class as a starter to assess prior knowledge, as a plenary to check learning, or as part of home learning. The questions can also form part of repeated practice, acting as a great revision tool in the run up to exams. The feature also contains a ‘Copy question’ button to allow you to easily copy and paste the generated content into your slideshow presentation. For more information about CENTURY’s English resources, including the TeacherGENie feature, click here. Litdrive members receive 10% off your first year’s English subscription on CENTURY.