5 Must-Use AI Tools For English Teachers
At English For IT, we love using AI tools to enhance both teaching and learning. We also enjoy sharing tips with ESL teachers and fellow educators on how to use AI effectively for language instruction.
In this article, we will highlight five must-try AI tools that can save you time, allowing you to focus on more creative tasks and challenges. We encourage you to explore each tool and experiment to find the best fit for your teaching style and classroom needs!
1. ChatGPT
How could we make this list without including ChatGPT? This tool is a wonderful time-saver for English teachers. You can leverage it to give feedback on students’ homework, explain grammar or vocabulary topics, generate wordlists, and much more.
But did you know that you can also use ChatGPT to generate ESL curricula and lesson plans? With a few simple prompts, you can free up so much of your time! Here is how you can do that:
- Start a new chat with ChatGPT
- Enter a prompt. Here’s an example prompt you can use:
Create an ESL curriculum generator that includes topics, functional language, and grammar, based on the following details: 1. Audience: Career switchers breaking into tech 2. Level: Pre-Intermediate 3. Goals: To enable students to work in an English speaking environment and improve their level to a confident Intermediate or Upper-Intermediate 4. Frequency: 2 classes per week (1 hour each)
Note: By asking ChatGPT to “create a curriculum generator”, you won’t have to repeat the prompt! Just input new details and ChatGPT will generate a fresh curriculum for you.
Here’s what ChatGPT generated based on the prompt above:
Not too shabby for a start! It gives you a basic roadmap of the topics and lesson structure you can expand on.
Now, let’s design a lesson plan for our first class.
- Start a new chat
- Input a prompt. Here’s an example prompt you can use:
Create an ESL lesson plan generator. Generate a detailed and engaging lesson based the details below: 1. Level: Pre-Intermediate 2. Topic: Overview of the tech industry 3. Functional language: Tech roles and key terms 4. Functional grammar: Present Simple and Present Continuous for routines and current activities 5. Format: Online 6. Duration: 60 minutes
ChatGPT will generate a basic outline of a lesson plan. Now, you can ask it to “add”, “remove”, or “replace” certain things to make the lesson plan more tailored. For example: “Add a fill-in-the-gaps activity in the grammar section”.
Tip: Keep your lesson plan and curriculum chat separate and don’t use them for anything else other than lesson plan and curriculum generation. This will help the model generate a more precise output.
2. Claude
Claude is an AI assistant like ChatGPT. With Claude, you can easily generate interactive online quizzes and activities for your students.
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Here is an example of an online quiz created with Claude.
Prompt used:
Generate a fill in the gap exercise on the topic of modal verbs.
You are welcome to make the prompt more detailed. For example:
Generate a fill-in-the-gap exercise with 12 questions on the topic of modal verbs. Make sure the sentences are relevant to project management.
Tip: Simply hit “publish” when you are happy with the activity Claude has generated for you. After that, you will receive a link you can copy and share with your students.
3. ElevenLabs
ElevenLabs allows you to create high-quality AI voiceovers. You can use it to generate pronunciation and listening comprehension activities or enhance reading exercises by providing students with audio recordings of the text.
Tip: Dialogue creation is available in the paid version. Here is a video tutorial on how to generate multi-voice recordings with ElevenLabs.
4. Synthesia
Synthesia allows you to create lifelike talking AI avatars, perfect for developing custom videos, homework assignments, and explanations for your students.
Tip: The free plan on Synthesia includes 9 AI avatars, giving you the flexibility to assign a different avatar to each type of video. For instance, you could have a dedicated avatar for grammar lessons, another for pronunciation practice, and one for vocabulary explanations.
Check out this video explaining the difference between the second and third conditional sentence types. It took less than 5 minutes to create!
5. NotebookLM
NotebookLM is a powerful tool for summarizing and transforming information. For example, you can convert a long YouTube video into a concise text digest.
Most importantly, it allows you to generate realistic AI podcasts based on the materials you upload. For example, you can prepare a listening activity based on a book, video, or article you’ve watched or read with your students.
Here is a podcast we generated using our previous article about Creating a Great Resume. Can you even tell it’s AI-generated?
Looking for a great textbook you can use with your students along with these AI tools? Check out our digital textbook “English For Tech”. This combination of English For IT™ expertise and all the modern tools we’ve listed is guaranteed to make students fall in love with your lessons!
