This week I had the opportunity to learn more about AI and how it can be used to benefit myself as a teacher and my students. Project Read AI was a tool I was very interested in learning more about as I think it could be very useful as a tool to further support teaching developing readers and it can also be used as an extra component to UFLI. Project Read AI states, “teachers can quickly generate high-quality decodable stories for a chosen phonics skill with our Decodable Story Generator.” I was very interested in this as I was curious about the stories it generates and if they would be useful to use with students. The process of generating the story was much more simpler than I expected. All I had to do was choose the “scope and sequence” I chose UFLI as this is a popular program being used by most of the schools in Cranbrook. Then under objective you can choose the specific lesson you are working on with the UFLI program, I chose lesson 45 the “sh” words. Then you can type in up to 5 custom words. I wanted my story to be outdoors themed so those are the types of words I chose to include as my “custom words.”

Here is the story it generated for me:

I would personally change a few things to this story, however I think it is a helpful jumping point to developing decodable stories to practice with students. I also think that it’s important to take into consideration that I probably won’t have a lot of time to write my own stories, therefore I think this can be a useful tool for further help develop my students reading abilities.

I think AI can be a very helpful tool, however I think when using it it is extremely important to consider the overall learning intentions and how it will benefit the learning of your students. I think it’s great that teachers now have a way to get so many ideas from, however I believe taking the learning needs of individual students into consideration is crucial when using AI as a tool in the classroom. There may be really great resources or activities but it doesn’t mean that it will support every single individual students. One tool might work really great for one student and not so great for another, therefore as I would if I took a lesson from Teachers Pay Teachers or Edutopia I would adapt and modify it to meet the learning needs of my students before using it as a teaching resource. I think the story generated above is a perfect example of this. It’s great that it gives a lot of examples of decodable “sh” words, however parts of the story are very random and I don’t think it would make a lot of sense to a younger reader especially. This reminds me of the decodable stories we read in class. I liked how they were simple and gave a lot of examples of particular decodable words, however I did not like how the actually stories were confusing and literally had no meaning. I could see how this could be boring for a student and potentially discouraging not being able to figure out the meaning. Overall I do think AI can be very beneficial and I do find it a helpful tool (Chat GBT especially right now for me) however I think it just needs to be used with extra caution and consideration.