AI - The Future for TPT Sellers

Kirsten 0:01

You're listening to the creative teacher podcast, a show for busy teachers looking for ways to engage, inspire and make an impact in their teacher businesses. I'm Kiersten, a teacher business owner who is all about simple and actionable tips, strategies and resources that result in wins, big or small. If you're looking for that extra spark of creativity, you've come to the right place. Let's dive in together.

You may have heard of some buzzwords in the last year. And they start with two letters AI, artificial intelligence, either you are all for it, or you might be a little skeptical of it. And I am going to just start out by saying this is going to be the future for content creators marketers. It's going to change a lot of things in what we do in our jobs, as teachers in school and all of the above. Like it's just something that is here to stay this is not a fad, in my opinion. So rather than be scared or weary of it, we should embrace it, in my opinion. So today we're going to be talking about why I think AI is the future for TPT sellers, and some reasons why, you know, you might have some myths, and we're going to be debunking those myths. I'm also going to share with you some of my favorite AI tools and how I use them in my business. So that is our topic for today.

Pretty much AI the background, from what I understand, it all comes from this open AI interface, which we might know as chat GPT. This is something that is increasingly prevalent in the business world. And this technology is used pretty much everywhere. There was a South Park episode in a recent season, they created a script like they everything in that episode was created by AI. So that was pretty interesting to watch. But there are some myths and misconceptions that have also emerged with it being so new. And it's like the wild west of you know what we're doing. And I wanted to share with you a source that had some information about those myths and how we can kind of navigate from there.

So the first myth that they share is that the AI tool immediately solves your problems. So well, it's very impressive AI is pretty impressive. Depending on the prompts you use, it is not a magic tool that will solve all your problems, or even replace our human minds. The machines that we are using are designed for solving specific problems. That's why you see a variety of businesses and tools out there like Canva. They're using it in different ways, and it can solve a specific problem and it can mimic human capabilities in certain areas. Another myth is that AI will replace humans at work. So while yes, we have had some machines pretty much eliminate previously human jobs like washing machines and excavators. There's some fears that AI will replace workers but that's not really the case. The reality is that AI solutions are supposed to support what you do. It's supposed to help support and make it a little bit more efficient and easy to navigate. But it will not entirely replace artists or content creators or you know copywriters That's not what's gonna happen, I believe. I think if anything, those artists and copywriters can use AI to enhance what they're already doing. So I definitely don't see AI as a replacement any time soon.

t we mostly use is up to like: 2021

This is another one, you always have the copyrights to the AI tools output. So this is a gray area, we've got a lot of debate on this. But there is a current consensus that only works created by humans can be subject of copyright. So there is no concern about copyright for AI generated works being attributed to AI itself. So we can't say that anything we output is not ours at this time, unless any laws change. The tricky part is there are a lot of cases where you can't tell if what was generated from a resource or a blog post was created by a human or created by AI, there's really at this point, no way to know that. So that's why it gets a little tricky. But I have heard of a colleague that they will input their information into a plagiarism checker. And they have found that there are no issues as far as you know, plagiarism. I know some people are saying, oh, yeah, they're copying sources completely word for word from other websites. And that's not necessarily the case. So, of course, I'm not a lawyer. So I'm just sharing my opinions. And also just based off of what I'm seeing here at the source that I am reading, which I will make sure to link in the show notes. One thing to know is that there is probably not going to be any going back from artificial intelligence, just like social media came about very quickly and the internet, it's going to be here to stay. It's just how we utilize it.

Speaking of how we utilize it, I want to share with you how I utilize AI in my business, I think it's very, very helpful. It's helped me be really efficient and produce more of what I want out to my target audience. And I'm not using it I'll share with you how I use it. But there's different ways I use it. So I'm going to share with you several different AI tools that I utilize. So one thing I have utilized is for product creation, educate. So that's edu, a i d e.ai. Educate is a total game changer, not just for TPT sellers. But if you're an educator, it's such a helpful and free tool. At the time of this recording, they're adding things all the time, every time I go in there, there's always something new. The cool thing that I like about it that makes it unique among other AI platforms are that it's specifically designed for education. So, if you go to the content generator, you can filter things by subject and different subjects will have different prompts. Though a lot of the product creation I use, I go into social studies and you can also filter by grade level. So presumably you know you want to try to get it the the language like the reading level and the terms used. It will adjust based on the grade level you choose. So they've got post secondary upper class underclass for high school, middle school, fourth, fifth, all the way down to pre school students, and you enter in your topic or keyword. There's different resources or there's different sections, but you can input things based off of Planning. Let's say you want to come up with a unit plan for the American Revolution, you can just click on unit plan. But they also have things like rubric and evidence statements. Going into information objects, anchor chart, you can create an anchor chart, you can create slides, outline sentence stems, direct instruction. And then there's independent practice with different prompts for that cooperative learning. So they have learning stations and project based learning. They've got gamification, so different review games that you can just put in a topic or keyword or standard that you're creating a resource for. And then questions. So there's multiple choice, deep question, fill in the blank scenario questions. These are golden, if you're creating a resource on a specific topic, and you are trying to figure out ways to enhance your product, maybe you're creating a teacher guide, you can use the planning and information objects. If you want to, you know, add more questions to a reading passage about a certain topic, you can go into questions. If you want to make it fun and interactive, you can click on the project based learning and gamification. And of course, anything that they output you are, you know, I always, always am editing, in fact, checking to make sure everything is accurate to the best of my knowledge based on what I'm also researching. So I'm not always just taking educated like what they output as gold as like, Oh, this is it. This is the way there have been times where of course they've been wrong, or I just don't like the questions or answer choices, or just it's really like this is, this is not what I was trained to do. I've also found ways to use it. And like I have a general idea for a type of project for a unit. And in this particular case, I was trying to figure out, I was like I want to do something that has to do with adapting and modifying the environment, like some type of persuasive poster, but I just didn't know how to put it all in words as far as like what the students are expected to do and what it would be assessed on. And I saw I just inputted what my idea was, and it gave me an outline of that project. It helps me go from there. And I of course took out things I didn't want about it or things I loved about it, and I tweaked it to make it my own. This is an amazing tool, I highly suggest you check out edge you aid.ai The other thing about it, I'm not gonna go too much into detail about it. But there is if you are a teacher, you know, they've got a section called Teaching Assistant, and you can filter it by grade level, you can put in a prompt and it'll give you email outlines, newsletter outlines, report card comments. And then even with like IEP outlines, it can increase the Lexile level, decrease the Lexile level, if you copy and paste a passage, it'll give you some ideas for inclusive strategies, icebreakers SEL activities, just it's so it's, it's awesome. It's a really cool tool and like you can pretty much play around with it for hours. But just without going into a whole episode just about educated, maybe I need to do that. This is something that has been super helpful as I've been creating products for my social studies curriculum, it just gets things done a lot faster, it helps me get things done a lot faster. So I'm getting things that teachers need out into my store a lot more quickly than I would have otherwise.

Another really great AI tool is Jasper, this is probably the first AI tool I've ever heard of. And I started using it, I paid for it. I think there was a free trial for it. And then I ended up paying for it for a certain amount of months. It is a little pricier but you can and put a lot of different things. It was really great helping me not just with product creation, but also content. If I wanted to kind of write a description for maybe a podcast episode or a social media caption. There's a lot of different prompts to help you with marketing. But I also loved using it because it helps me as far as creating passages or rewriting passages that I wanted to utilize and then also creating multiple choice questions. So I would type in you know, I'd copy and paste a passage and let's say I wanted to multiple choice questions or short answer questions. And I would say create 10 multiple choice questions with four answer choices with one being the correct answer. And that is kind of where I would go from there. error, of course, I'd pick and choose, if I'm looking for let's say I need 10, multiple choice questions, I usually put a little bit more like I'll say, Create 15. And then from those 15, I'll narrow it down to 10, just so that it doesn't overlap, like I don't like reagent generating something, and then it gives me some of the same questions. So I always do a little more than what I need. Anyway, random tip. But Jasper is a really great tool, if you do a lot of maybe passage writing, or maybe just something where you need extra tools as far as creating content.

The other tool I really recommend is, of course, chat, GPT, I go to Open AI. If you go to Open AI, you can create a free account. And I just use the free version. That's why I stopped getting a subscription for Jasper's. Because with every free tool that's out there, I can pretty much do what I need to although Jasper was a really cool resource in that you can change the tone and do some other extra tweaks that you can't really do with chat GPT. But chat GPT is another really great tool. I use it too, I like to use it like I'll insert a paragraph, and I'll ask it to rewrite it in at a fifth grade reading level. And most of the time, it does pretty well more times than not, I'm able to get what I need from chat GPT, you can save a lot of the different prompts or chats that you have. And if I ever want to refer back to a prompt that I had done, and I want to do like a similar one but different topic, I can always go on my left hand side and have that there. But right now I'm using chart GPT as far as helping me with generating multiple choice questions like an influx of multiple choice questions, and also rewriting paragraphs or rephrasing paragraphs in a way that is simpler and easy for students to understand. So I go back and forth. When I'm creating resources, I usually go back and forth between Ajay aide and chat GPT.

Alright, let's talk about content creation and social media. So I haven't been able to find it in a while. But Uber Suggest has if you have a paid subscription for it, there was a point in time where it had hashtag generators and Meta Description generators. And it was awesome, and I cannot find it now for the life of me. However, they do still have a really cool tool, I guess it was just in bed beta. But they have a really cool tool called AI writer. And you can pretty much write a blog posts from start to finish, but it's on a focus keyword that you might have. So we know keyword research is important. And after you do that keyword research on a blog post that you're going to be updating and you have that keyword that longtail keyword in mind, you can insert that keyword. And it'll generate, it'll start with title. So it'll generate some titles for you and you can tweak that up, then it'll generate some descriptions for you and headings, and eventually, like a whole blog post pretty much. I thought, that's really cool. I like it and kind of like it's okay. But I do use it as far as getting ideas as far as the outline of what I want to say, in my blog post. Some of the sentences or sentences I would never ever say. So I don't really use all of it. But I think it's really cool of how they're, they help give you meta description, ideas and title ideas and ways you can improve it. I use that in conjunction with rankmath, which is something that I use on my WordPress blog. So I can try to get, you know, a nice green score, as I'm optimizing my blog post for those important keywords. But it's a really great tool if you are writing blog posts and finding ways to optimize them. So I mentioned previously that I use chat GPT in my content creation as well as product creation. So one idea, let's say you have a podcast, like I have a social studies podcast in addition to this podcast, and something I do is I post a blog post that goes along with that podcast. It's not as in depth as the podcast episode, but it still gives important information that anybody can search for online. So what I thought like one time I was like, Well, what if I inserted my podcast transcript into chat GPT and see what happens and it actually didn't do a bad job. I did a prompt to the effect of turn or rewrite this podcast transcript into a blog post with headers that incorporate the keyword blank and I put in the keyword. So I've just, I was just playing around with it. And I was very pleasantly surprised that it, it did a pretty good job of not only reorganizing my podcast transcript into a blog post it added headers in bold, it, you know, all the paragraphs were spaced out. And, you know, it was organized appropriately, it took out all the arms and the SOS and the you knows that I always do. And it wrote a blog post. And I didn't have much editing to do after that, you know, I took out words that I wouldn't ever really use in my messaging or anything like that. And I posted it up. And I of course, I did some extra optimizing to make sure it was in conjunction with rankmath. But it did a really great job. So if you're a podcast and you're trying to figure out how to repurpose that podcast into your blog post on your website, I definitely recommend trying to see if you can run it through chat, GBT or Jasper.

One other tool that I like to use is the Canva AI tools. So Canva recently launched this image generator. And I remember there was one resource where I was really stuck on finding a picture of Anne Hutchinson, of all people, of course, one of the founders of Rhode Island. And so I said, Well, what if AI did it? You know, so I typed in an Hutchins Senate gave a nice little portrait of Anne Hutchinson, or you know, an image depicting in Hutchinson, as well as a few other religious leaders in the 13 colonies. So that was pretty cool. I was very impressed with that. And another AI tool that Canva has is the Canva magic, right? I mostly use that to help me with my social media captions. I don't like writing social media captions, among other things. But it does help me as far as I'll say something like rewrite this podcast description into a social media post, rewrite this product description as a social media post. So I like to take copy what I already might have somewhere, whether it's like, maybe I'll have a transcript, or I'll have a description of a product, or I might have already written an email, and I can put it through AI and, you know, turn it into something different, like a caption, or maybe even helping me generate hashtags. So cancer magic, right is another really great tool, you might as well use it, if you have a pro account or a Canva account. It's another tool that's out there, that's super helpful.

So without getting super long into this episode, I hope you got some really, really great tools that you might want to try or check out. And hopefully, this episode, at least, you know, gave you some awareness about how AI can help us work smarter in our businesses and help us be more efficient, and that we can have permission to if we don't like what AI is coming out and outputting we can change it, we don't have to go with it. I do recommend though, that you'd give it a try at least you know, give it a chance. Because I think it's a really great way for businesses to be more efficient.

Google is incorporating AI into their business more businesses now than ever are using AI. I'm just now thinking I had to return something off of Amazon. And I have this chat bot with me. And I am wondering now if that was also orchestrated by AI as well. It was the easiest call ever, you know how you instead of having to call somebody and getting somebody on the other line waiting for 20 minutes, I literally was able to process a return in like five minutes just by clicking a button. So I mean, AI can make our lives a little bit easier if we let it. All right. Hopefully you enjoyed this episode. And I hope you have a wonderful rest of your week. I'll talk to you all again next week.

Thanks for listening to the creative teacher podcast. If you enjoyed listening to today's episode, feel free to subscribe and leave a review. I'd love to hear your feedback. You can also follow me on Instagram at the southern teach dot designs. Have an amazing day.