A World Language Teacher’s Favorite AI Tools

Megan Brady, OFLA President Elect 
Spanish Teacher, Northwest High School

Have you explored AI in your classroom? While it seems like most of the teachers in my school are a bit apprehensive, I have decided to take a peek and see how it can help make my life easier, and I am thrilled to see the results! By the time this article is published, OFLA will have had its AI training, and I’m sure I will be joined by several of you as an intrigued teacher once we discover the capabilities AI currently has and how we can harness this to our advantage.

A current favorite is CLAUDE.AI. I have used Claude to come up with speaking and writing prompt ideas, generate ideas for a syllabus, write a recommendation letter, create a reading activity comparing 2 versions of La Llorona (complete with comprehension and comparison questions!), and more. While I do end up tweaking some of the things it generates, I’m very pleased with the results and it definitely helps get my creative juices flowing after a long day. 

Before discovering Claude, I used ChatGPT to help me create ideas for choice boards for reading novels. First, ChatGPT came up with mini activities that took 3 minutes or less to complete for my Spanish 2 students who read for 10 minutes. This held them accountable, without taking up too much time. Then, I asked it for longer project ideas and it came up with some great ones that I could make prettier in Canva.  Chat GPT was also able to create projects for my Spanish 3 students.  They were able to choose how to show their understanding in a more complex way. It also came up with a great rubric for a cooking project and ideas to celebrate and teach Day of the Dead to the community at our Sociedad Honoraria Hispánica event. 

Another awesome product from ChatGPT was a general comprehension worksheet for Duolingo podcasts. I was looking for something specific for one of the episodes, but since ChatGPT doesn’t have access to information before 2021, it instead gave me a generic form that works with all of their podcasts. I absolutely love this form and use it every week. Other ideas it could help with are lesson plans, worksheet ideas (“come up with a way to practice family member vocab in Novice level Spanish,” for example), emails to parents, etc.

I love ChatGPT and wanted to use it with my students to have conversations. For example, I asked it to be Frida Kahlo and speak to me at a novice level, and it did a pretty decent job. However, my tech department never got around to officially approving it for student use (remember the apprehensiveness mentioned above?). Luckily, my amazing tech coach showed me mizou.com, which is built for chatting! Here you can choose the grade level, language, and it will pull up some ready-made chatbots about certain topics. You can even create your own by typing in some of your goals for students. I created a chatbot about current events, asking it to engage students in conversations at an intermediate level and it offered me 3 different options. (I chose the AI generated chatbot after inputting my student objectives.) I chose the one that asked them to be reporters on a current event, and the chatbot guided them to add and discuss more information. I even tested it by saying “I didn’t know” (typical student response!) and it was very understanding and helped guide me to find a topic I was interested in and had me answering questions. I love that they can have this interpersonal speaking practice on varied topics, and it sends me the transcript and a suggested grade and reasoning for this grade. It also has a little play button below the written comments, and if a student presses it once, it will continue to speak out loud to them for each answer. At the end of each session, they have the option to either save the session for later or to exit. It’s also nice because they can type in their name for each session, but students are not required to have an account, which means I don’t need to wait on permission from my tech team. It will take you 5 minutes to get logged in the first time, find/create a chatbot to suit your needs, copy the link and send it to your students and you’re on your way!

The last little tidbit I wanted to share with you is this site: https://freetools.textmagic.com/text-to-speech. This site allows you to put in text and then choose from a variety of voices to read the text aloud. There are 50 languages to choose from, so I plan on using it to practice listening comprehension questions and to have it read excerpts from our little novels in my classes with a voice other than mine. You just paste the text into the box (max of 2500 characters) and then check the box saying you aren’t a robot, you can hit play to listen, download, and it comes to you as an mp3 file. Easy peasy!

I hope you are able to find something in here that piques your interest, and that you take some time to play with the resources available to us. I will admit it takes a few tries to figure out what prompt you need to give it to get exactly what you want, but the more you mess with it, the easier it gets, and really the possibilities are endless. I, for one, am very grateful for the help in planning my 4+ preps. It makes it easier to differentiate for all levels of students and push them further. As always, I’m happy to help/share anything if you need it, don’t be afraid to reach out!  See you at the conference next month!