5 More Ways Your Dyslexic Student Can Use ChatGPT Right Now!

The more we use ChatGPT, the more impressed we become at its uses for all students, but especially dyslexic ones. Today we're going to talk about five more tips for how you can use it.

Hello, we are Sonja and Nick and this is Dyslexia Journey, where we help you support the dyslexic kid in your life. Today we are revisiting a topic we covered pretty recently about ChatGPT, and we've actually been using it even more since we filmed the last episode, and we've become even more impressed by how useful it is. And so we wanted to share five more ways, five more tips that you can use, how you can use ChatGPT to help your dyslexic student.

And the tips today are more around communication and content, written communication specifically. So let's just get started. Tip number one is to ask it for feedback on your writing. And to test this, we tried putting one of our daughter's essays in to ChatGPT and asking for some help to make the writing better, just to see what it would say. And I was really impressed with kind of the range that it gave while still sounding specific.

So, for example, it gave five fairly general suggestions, but they also included specific examples from the essay. And the five things that it gave in this particular instance were organization, clarity, supportive examples, analytical depth, and a conclusion, tips about the conclusion. And so, and I just want to say also sort of from my teacher perspective, I really appreciated that it gave the advice, even pinpointing some of the places to look in the essay, but it didn't really like, it wasn't like it was rewriting the essay at all.

It was definitely a guidance kind of thing. So I felt like it was actually a teaching tool rather than just giving the students something to copy, for example. And you can also dig into each suggestion. So, and this is kind of a general tip for when working with ChatGPT, is that it's not going to tell you everything it knows all at once. That would be overwhelming, right? And so, you know, it started with these five suggestions, but then you can dig in and say, well, can you give me some more specific help with the organization?

And then it will actually provide more specific feedback about the organization or, or can you, you know, help me a little more with the transitions, for example. Yeah. And I do have a caveat about that because what I just said about it not writing for the student, I didn't feel quite the same way when it got as specific as right as the transitions part, because it did provide an example of how it could be rewritten.

So that starts to get into the territory of wanting to, which we'll get covered in our caveats, about wanting to make sure that it's still the student's work. Yeah. I mean, that was an interesting case because it didn't, it didn't say anything new, but it reworded it in a clearer way.

It's probably not that different than the help that a teacher or a parent might give a student, but it's definitely questionable about whether that would be considered cheating or not, I think. I think it, so it seemed to be just as an overview right now, my guess based on playing around with it so far is that the more specific you get, the more likely it will be that it actually generates a sentence that you would potentially, you know, use or not use and then have to decide, you know, if that's cheating.

So, but when it's giving the more general advice, then it's really doing it much more as a guide, as a teacher would for sure. So our second tip is simply to use it as a grammar check, particularly if you're already working with it, it's an easy thing to just do right in there. And I actually found it to be more effective than some of the other grammar tools that I've used before.

It was quite good and it, I didn't ask it about catching spelling, but it caught that too in the couple of sentences I fed it that were purposely a slightly wrong grammatically. And so it's just so comprehensive, right? It just catches like all the grammar. Good. and I guess one other thing actually is that it, again, it was kind of, it was like a guide or teacher along the way because it did also say why.

It didn't just correct a sentence, it gave an explanation about the grammar too. Yeah, that's really key, I think. and I think this goes, again, to our general point is like when, when used the right way, a chat GPT can really give you the guidance that, a good teacher would give you or a really helpful parent. and, you know, again, we'll talk about some more caveats, but like, like any tool that can be abused.

And so, it, it is a fine line, but we, but we do really believe that this can be useful. Right. okay. So for the, third point, or the sort of third tip here is to use it as kind of a brainstorming assistant. so, one thing that I actually remember struggling with when I was in school was just, coming up with the topic for my, like for my research paper or for, or for my, my thesis for my book report or whatever.

and, so I tested this out. I asked chat GPT, to give me some ideas for a research paper for us history, where you had to pick, someone or something that was the best at something. and, and that was actually similar to a prompt that our daughter. And so, or a research, paper topic, I guess, not a prompt. and so it came up with some good suggestions and then I, I'd narrowed down the search in various ways.

so you can say, okay, how about between the time period of 1900 and 1930? and then I said, well, I really like music. Can you give me, some ideas around music? and so it came up with some really good, ideas around the birth of jazz and ragtime and things like that from that particular era that would be really interesting research topics. Yeah, in my assessment of it, it had a couple that were maybe, you know, they just weren't quite right.

but I think that, you know, anyone would see that right away. What I think was, what was such an advantage here is just like any brainstorming. And if you're trying to bounce ideas off of someone, it helps you broaden your own range. So even not necessarily that you're going to pick that exact example, but I felt like, especially before we narrowed it down, even after actually, I felt like, oh, I hadn't thought of that kind of whole area.

Right. Like that whole sub area. So I feel like it was definitely effective at generating brainstorming ideas. Yeah. okay. So, point number four, shifting gears a little bit here. this is less about content generation and more just about communication. and to start off this tip, I actually want to quote, this is actually an anonymous user on Reddit, that I found recently wrote, I've been using chat GPT to write responses to formal emails.

Instead of being put on the back burner and fobbed off, I noticed my emails get taken a lot more seriously. Maybe it's a confirmation bias, but up until this point, I think being unable to write a formal email has seriously hindered me. The contrast in response between an email that is filled with grammatical errors and not structured correctly to a chat GPT structured email has been insane. and I forgot to mention that this was a dyslexic person who was, who was writing this post.

and so that, so our tip is, is obviously here, use chat GPT to, help you compose your formal emails, whether that's to a teacher asking for an extension, whether that's to a potential, job, you know, applying for a job, anything like that. it's, it's very helpful. and again, this probably applies to older children, more high school age. but even as a parent of a dyslexic kid, I think you can use it, to help compose an email.

Like if you're feeling angry or you're feeling, emotional about a particular topic, it might help to have chat GPT, chat GPT give you an sort of unemotional objective email that you can at least start with. Right. Yeah. And I mean, like all the other examples we've given, it's, it's really good to work with it a little, like it really be engaged with it because, so the, we did an, our, as our example, the one that Nick was talking about, where it was about asking for an extension from a teacher.

And, it came across pretty formal and long to start with. So we just simply said, can you make the shorter first? And then we said, can you make it more casual? And it felt more like that level. So I think a willingness to work with it also helps to come up with the best content. and, and also as always, you could just pull a sentence or two from it, right? It's not like you have to use the whole thing.

Yeah. and I think I can, again, to emphasize what the anonymous user, wrote that, that I just read that it's, I think maybe we all still even underestimate how even subconsciously people respond to, reading an email or something that is, has mistakes in it. like they're not supposed to, and they're supposed to understand that you have an IEP or whatever in the school setting. but, I think it never hurts to, to, you know, to have this extra help basically.

Yes. Cause that's definitely true. If you think of advice, right. For any formal writing or resumes or anything, you know, it's kind of like mistakes, equal carelessness or something in people's minds. And I think there's still that automatic, prejudice about it. So that's why I think this can be really useful to consider and people should seriously consider using it. all right. So our tip number five, last, last tip for today, is you can use chat GPT to, provide arguments for a debate.

So often you have to argue one side or another particular topic. This is again, more of a time of middle school or high school. usually language arts and, and, social science. Yeah. Yeah. So it's, it's something that comes up quite a bit. and, you know, you can just ask GPT, chat, chat GPT to say, Hey, give me the top three arguments, like in favor of this or, or against this. yeah. Yeah.

No, I was going to say, this is actually where we had the biggest discussion among ourselves though about this, because my first reaction was, well, okay. This case probably like, is this really the learning then you're supposed to be thinking about the topic yourself and coming up with the arguments. However, having a child, another child who participated in debate, it's also par for the course when preparing for a debate to do some research ahead of time on, right.

On the topic. So by that argument, chat GP is just a much more efficient way of pulling in lots of different things from the internet. Right. Right. I mean, let's be honest, like kids who are assigned a debate topic in school, are going to come home and just type that question into Google first off. Right. and so, the way that I see it is chat GPT is helping, especially a dyslexic student, get the information that they need quicker than having to laboriously read through a lot of content in the Google.

Google search results that are going to get you to the exact same arguments that you're not coming up with yourself. You're just finding them on Google. Chat GPT is just presenting them to you in a way that's easier for you to parse and understand as somebody with dyslexia. Right. And ideally, I guess this is the teacher side of me coming out again. Ideally, I think you would have a student think through it first on their own to see what they come up with, partly so you don't narrow your down your own ideas that maybe are new ideas.

and then even after finding out those ideas would really like assess them and consider sub points of them and like really chew through them like in their own reasoning and logic as well. Yeah. But this is probably a good place to start maybe into our caveats. Yeah. I mean, so I guess this leads into the one, I guess perhaps most important caveat here is that you really, really, really need to make sure that what you're doing is not going to be considered cheating by your teacher or your school.

and so, you know, you don't want, I don't want anyone taking our advice and then being, accused of plagiarism by their teacher for sure. Like, like you need to make sure that this is going to be, considered okay by, by whatever class you're in. Right. And then also one of the other caveats is related to, which is just to not become too dependent on it. The goal always would be to continue to think critically yourself and to be really engaging with it.

Yeah, for sure. and then I guess to repeat a couple other caveats really quickly from our previous episode, in case you missed that one is, is, it's sort of implicit that using chat GPT, at least the interface that we were using does require reading and writing. So it's not, it's not a panacea for dyslexic students because they still have to, to parse through that reading and writing, or have someone read it to them.

I, we believe that it has a lot of benefits and can certainly help dyslexic students, but it's not perfect. Right. And then somewhat along those lines, you have to work with it to get the best results. At least you, you get, you can get some results even without tailoring it, but you know, as you heard, when we were talking about the different examples, we kept asking questions to get it more to what we were really asking and really wanted from it.

Yeah, just, just, just don't be afraid to play around with it and, and keep asking you questions. I wanted to add, again, all of our examples that we talked about today were from the free version of chat GPT. again, there is a premium version, that does, give you, access to the more improved model. But, the, the version we were using, the free version on chat GPT 3.5, is, very helpful. Yes. And we'll put the information about how you can access that in the notes.

So that's, that's our tips for today. again, we'd love to hear how you're using chat GPT and other, AI to help, your dyslexic student. Let us know.