Frequently Asked Questions
Frequently Asked Questions
TeacherMatic is a team of people who have taught and worked in education for many years. We are committed to improving educational outcomes for learners and helping teachers make their jobs easier and more engaging through the use of technology.
In straightforward terms, GPT-3 is an AI engine with a natural language processing front end. So if you supply it with some human text (like a question), it will respond accordingly, just like a human would. GPT-3 is extraordinary in that it has been ‘trained’ on just about everything on the Internet so it ‘knows’ a lot. However, it is important to keep in mind, that GPT-3 is pretty dumb and does not know if what it answers is true. So anyone using GPT-3 must carefully review anything it produces for inaccuracies.
The TeacherMatic generators are a set of routines that we have developed that ensure that when a user wants something from GPT-3 (like a lesson plan), the output always comes back is of good quality and in the right format to use. In the background, our generators take the input query from the teacher and modifies it to get the best results back. To do this, we have spent many hours ‘tweaking’ the generators to get the best results. Many of the generators also have additional modifiers (like level of schooling) to make it easier for teachers to ensure that the response from GPT-3 meets their needs.
GPT-3 is a little like Google: you type something in and something comes back. The difference is that GPT-3 does not return a list of Websites, it returns an ‘answer’ in English. GPT-3 will answer as if it was a human, but it’s just a very sophisticated program that appears to be human. So you might use GPT-3 directly or you can use TeacherMatic to do it for you. We have worked hard to make sure that if you want a ‘lesson plan’ GPT-3 returns something useful and in the right format. You can spend a lot of trial and error to get GPT-3 to produce what you want.
The TeacherMatic generators are clever ‘front ends’ to GPT-3. The generators are designed to take any input from teachers like a ‘lesson topic’ and then design just the right query to send off to GPT-3 to get the most useful response. We have designed the generators so they take into account everything that a teacher might consider when developing their teaching resources and plans, like the level and age of the learner.
Designing all the resources teachers needs to teach, assess and support takes a lot of time; time that they could spend engaging learners and doing the best for them. TeacherMatic helps by starting off the creative process for the teacher by producing inital ‘drafts’ of whatever the teacher is working on, like topics for a classroom discussion. Using TeacherMatic can reduce the time it takes to produce a new teaching resource by up to 80%. Teachers need to work on the ‘initial drafts’ that TeacherMatic produce, correcting them and modifying them to suite their needs. But even so, that initial draft saves teachers significant time and effort. It is very important to stress that whatever TeacherMatic produces, still requires the teacher to check it over and modify it if necessary. TeacherMatic will not know if something is correct.
The accuracy and veracity is dependent on where GPT-3 has got the information from in the first place. It is important that teachers check and correct anything that TeacherMatic produces. Sometimes the output will not need any changing. Sometimes the output may sound a bit odd but then it is the job of the teacher to edit it and correct it if necessary. The important thing to remember is, that most of the time, TeacherMatic is saving teachers a significant amount of time in producing resources and planning for teaching.
Certainly not! teachers still need to make the output from TeacherMatic their own and they will still be doing the really really hard bit of actually teaching. The introduction of TeacherMatic is like the introduction of digital calculators which freed us up so that we could focus on solving problems, developing new ideas rather that spending time carrying out complex calculations by hand or by slide rule. Teachermatic frees up teachers from some of the pain of preparation to being more creative in the classroom and more engaged with learners.
No! TeacherMatic is just a tool that teachers use to help them design and build better courses for their learners. It can’t teach.
No, TeacherMatic will free teachers up to be more creative. Teachermatic takes the initial pain out of preparing resources and means teachers can spend more time making those resources the best they can be and helping make the learners experience in the classroom more interesting, engaging and better place to learn.
Yes, your personal information is absolutely safe. TeacherMatic does not share any of your personal information with OpenAI or anywhere else. You can read our Privacy Policy here.
How to use the TeacherMatic Generators
Yes, you can register with the TeacherMatic site and then sign up for the free version. The free version only allows you to use the generators five times in a single day but it will give you a good idea of how TeacherMatic can really help you in preparing to teach.
There is no support for anyone registered for the free option of TeacherMatic but anyone who has signed up for any of our paid options can email support@teachermatic.com
You can consider the outputs from the generators to be the ‘first drafts’ of what your are preparing – learning activities, classroom discussion, lesson plan or whatever. So you need to take the output and ‘make it your own’, edit it, correct it, add to it. Sometimes the output will give you almost everything you need with almost no changes, sometimes you might need to work a little harder on the output. But whatever you are working on, the teachermatic generators will save you a significant amount of time.
Sometimes you will get what you want first time from the TeacherMatic generators, sometimes you will need to tweak your input phrase to get an outcome you’re happy with. Try to be more specific and provide some context in what you ask rather than something too general. For instance, if you using the Course Description generator, rather than use ‘The use of AI in education”, try ‘The use of AI in education for new teachers”. Maybe your new course is a year long module or maybe it’s an intensive two week programme, whatever it is add this context to your input phrase.
If you are unsatisfied with the initial results, you can press the Dismiss button and then the Regenerate button. You can do this as many times as it takes. You can also modify your input phrase. It is important to keep trying until the AI engine gives you a satisfactory response.
