AI can now write lesson plans.

Oh, and they can also suggest activities, create teaching materials, give feedback to students, and much more. All for free.

Let's take a look.

AI Writing and ChatGPT

AI writing has been a trend in the last year or so, and has helped marketers and copywriters write product descriptions and sales letters.

However, a new program called ChatGPT from OpenAI has exploded in popularity in the last month. It can generate human-like text with a high degree of accuracy across a vast number of topics. It can write code, stories, movie scripts - anything you can think of.

The key differences between ChatGPT and other AI writing tools are:

1. The interface is much clearer (it looks like a Chatbot), so you type what you want rather than have to be technical.

2. It does a great job of remembering what you've already asked. So if you would like it to change or edit something, it will.

But how can this can help us as teachers?

What Do Teachers Create?

What do we language teachers spend our time making? Here’s what I create (although I’m sure I missed lots - let me know in the comments what else you create!)

1. General lesson activities

2. Language-specific activities

3. Lesson plans

4. Student feedback

5. Conversation prompts

6. Dialogue & role-play

7. Grammar explanations

8. Grammar exercises

9. Cloze exercises

10. Personal development

I’ll let ChatGPT do the talking - I'll ask it to create each of the items on this list and let you judge the outcome.

1. General lesson activities

We’ve all struggled to think of a fresh activity, so our students won’t get bored. Now we can ask ChatGPT for ideas:

Top tip: you can type ‘please continue’, which will suggest more activities.

2. Language-specific activities

Or perhaps you’re trying to think of a way to practice a particular language point? You could ask:

3. Lesson plans

This one blew my mind:

4. Student Feedback

I then picked out an example IELTS writing answer from Cambridge's website, pasted it in and asked ChatGPT to give feedback:

5. Conversation prompts

6. Dialogue & Role-play

7. Grammar Explanations

8. Grammar exercises

9. Cloze exercises

10. Personal Development

Getting started

You’ll need to create an account first. Once you have, then you can visit

It’s simple: go to the OpenAI website, and click ‘Try ChatGPT’. It will guide you to create an account with OpenAI, then you can try ChatGPT. If you have a Google account, you can use it to sign up and log in.

Words of warning

It can sometimes be inaccurate - I’ve seen it refer to learning styles (argh!) and also had it confidently tell me incorrect information when I asked about common errors Chinese learners make when learning English.

Also, the AI was only trained on data until the end of 2022, so it won’t know anything more recent.

What do you think?

What are your thoughts about ChatGPT’s capabilities?

As teachers, what else could we use it for? Let me know your ideas in the comments.

Let’s not forget that this is all from the teacher’s point of view - I’ll look at how it can help students from their point of view in the following newsletter!

🎄Looking for a Christmas Gift?🎅

If you’d like to treat yourself (or your favourite teacher) this Christmas, you might consider one of my books:

1. Plan better, faster and stress-free with Lesson Planning for Language Teachers (132 ratings, 4.5⭐ on Amazon).

2. Develop calm students and a classroom full of learning with Essential Classroom Management (25 ratings, 4.5⭐ on Amazon).

3. Improve your teaching in five minutes daily with the Reflective Teaching Practice Journal (12 ratings, 4.5⭐ on Amazon).