5 Ways Your Dyslexic Student Can Use ChatGPT Right Now!

Everyone's talking about ChatGPT right now, and today we're going to talk about a few ways that it can help with a dyslexic person's learning.

Hey everyone, we're Nick and Sonja, and this is Dyslexia Journey, where we help you support the dyslexic kid in your life. And welcome today to our first in a series about ChatGPT, both about the potential usefulness of it for dyslexic people, and we'll get in a later episode into some of the potential problems as well. Okay, so let's jump in. For today's episode, we're going to talk about five specific ways that you and your dyslexic student can use ChatGPT right now to help your dyslexic student or a dyslexic person in general with their school, academics, and learning in general.

So to start with, what is ChatGPT? This has been obviously talked about quite a bit over the past few months, and I think some of you are going to be very familiar with it. Some of you may have just heard of it but don't really know what it is, so let me just give a quick overview before we dive into the specifics. So ChatGPT, it's basically a general-purpose artificial intelligence chatbot. And by chatbot, we mean something that is interactive, that you can type questions, and it will give you written responses.

It was developed by a company slash non-profit. I'm not sure the exact way that the structure of this entity, but it's this organization called OpenAI, and it is available at chat.openai.com. And that is actually a free version that you can get there. You do have to create an account, and there is a premium version as well that does cost, but we found that the free version was really good, and that's what we're talking about today.

Yeah, so this is something that you can start using right now completely for free. All right, so let's jump in. Our, I guess, as I said, we have sort of five tips, five suggestions about how you can start using ChatGPT to help with your dyslexic students' schoolwork and so on. So tip number one here is you can ask ChatGPT to explain concepts or historical events or really anything on a wide range of topics.

And ChatGPT just has this incredible knowledge base sort of built in that it can explain, you know, almost any topic you ask it in almost any field in pretty great detail or in simplified form. And you kind of have to know what to ask for in order to get sort of the level of response that you want. But the nice thing, I was going to say, the nice thing is that you can adjust that as you go.

Like if you feel like the response, you can tell it wasn't quite right. You can keep asking it either, you know, just to do it in a different way or a different level. Yeah. And so as an example query, you could say, can you explain the Spanish-American War in one paragraph? And that's sort of limiting the scope. So like you're asking for a pretty concise summary. Or you could say something like, can you explain DNA replication to a middle schooler?

And then that will get it to try to adjust, not necessarily the length, but the sort of level, the vocabulary and the tone of what, of how it's explaining it. Right. And I also asked it to explain quarks, you know, the scientific, scientific thing there to a kindergartner's because I wanted to try like, you know, that level. And it was really interesting because it used very concrete metaphors, like it said building blocks like Legos, and it said about one of the forces, it's like a glue holding them together.

So I was really impressed by how it was sort of trying to engage a kindergartner. There's maybe one little thing it said that I didn't think that they would know. I think it said positive and negative at one point, and I, you know, the kindergartner wouldn't know that. But overall, it was absolutely trying to explain in a way that a kindergartner could understand. And not only that, but it tends to, you know, the way it's toned, like Nick said, it also puts that way.

So like it had one part that was like sort of an excited exclamation point kind of a sentence in there. And so it was like in that sort of engaging tone that you'd think of, like that a kindergarten teacher would have, which I thought was really interesting. Yeah, and one, I guess, sort of additional point to make about this tip is that this is really useful for kind of supplementing stuff that you're supposed to be reading or that you're supposed to be understanding from a teacher.

Because as we know, all students, dyslexic or not, learn in very different ways and require kind of different types of explanations sometimes to understand something. So if a teacher explains something, you know, maybe half the kids in the class will understand it, but maybe the other half won't and just need it explained in a slightly different way. And the nice thing about ChatGPT is you can actually get it to explain things to you in different ways.

And not just a single way, like you can ask it will explain that to me again differently, and it will do that, right? So it's kind of like, you know, going to office hours or talking to your teacher and trying, but having a teacher who can really try to sort of shift the way they're explaining stuff. Yeah. And then the second way that we want to talk about today that ChatGPT can help your dyslexic student is you can actually feed it a chunk of text and ask it to, for example, summarize it.

So it could be from history or from something else. And this can be really useful if something is, you know, maybe worded in a not straightforward kind of way. And this is classic stuff, right, that dyslexic people have trouble parsing, you know, they have trouble often with just like, you know, maybe it's like a more formal way of talking, but it can sometimes be an awkward phrasing and things like that too.

And so it can really help to unpack some of these sentences and some of these paragraphs that are like that. And I think just on a personal note, like a lot of what the homework help is that I do personally is like reading aloud like this. And, you know, sometimes it's to help with understanding, but often, you know, when I read it out loud, there's the tone comes across and in a way where the meaning becomes clearer.

So this is a different way that could be helpful, you know, other than having to necessarily, let's say, read something out loud. Yeah, definitely. I guess I'll talk about a couple of examples that I played with for ChatGPT. One is I gave it a pretty dense scientific article from a magazine called Quantum Magazine, which is written for like a college educated audience. And I asked it to summarize it for a fifth grader.

And it came up with, like, I was very impressed. It was like a one paragraph summary of this very dense article that captured the essence of it and used vocabulary that a fifth grader would understand. So, you know, one key benefit there that I think you're saying is that one problem that dyslexic students face is just the volume of the reading. It just takes so long to read a long article. And so if you can sort of get the essence of something by reading a one paragraph summary, that's just a lot less reading, a lot less time they're going to have to spend on it.

Right. And just to add in there, you know, if you're wondering if, you know, you might miss something in the detail or whatever, I think most of the time you don't need that. Even if you did, though, I think often what's helpful to a dyslexic person is to make sure they're getting the gist of it to start with. Like having that context of what the gist is then can be helpful for going back in and reading in more detail if they needed to.

Exactly. And then the other way that I was playing around with this that I think can be super useful for dyslexic students is often by the time you get to high school in like history class mostly, you're asked to look at kind of primary sources, you know, articles, contemporaneous articles and sort of interpret them. And so I, our daughter, who we've talked about many times on this show is in high school now.

And so I fed ChatGPT one of the primary sources that she was recently looking at, which is, it was an article or a letter about the air traffic controller strike in, I think, 1980. And I asked ChatGPT several questions. And at first I said, can you just summarize it? And so I came up with a pretty good summary. But it was kind of lengthy. So I said, can you summarize this more concisely?

And it came up with a still very accurate, just like one paragraph summary. Then I said, can you talk about the style of this letter? Because that's often something that they're asked to do. And it came up with very intelligent sort of analysis of the rhetorical style of the letter. And then lastly, I said, can you put this letter in historical context? And ChatGPT then, from its own knowledge base, was able to provide a very sort of accurate and helpful summary of the whole air controller strike of that era and, you know, how this letter actually related to it.

So I was pretty impressed with that. Yeah. And I think that can be useful, I mean, really for any student, too, where there's been anything missed, right? Like in a context. Like I think of a lot of students actually have that sometimes where maybe some little piece of the learning was missed or not picked up. And so to be able to have that capacity to add the context around something, it's really important.

Yeah. So the third way that your dyslexic student might benefit from ChatGPT is in using vocabulary and learning vocabulary. So just kind of a simple thing that you can do with ChatGPT is ask it to use a word in a sentence. And again, you could do this with multiple sentences, which is super helpful because, you know, let's say your dyslexic student didn't fully understand that sentence. Then they can get lots of variations.

And so hopefully by, you know, they'll find some that they really connect with and can understand the word well from. So I think that ability to provide so much variety is a lot of what's useful there. And just to give you an example, you know, I put in the word irate, I-R-A-T-E, and it came back with the customer became irate when her order was wrong and started demanding a refund. So it's just like one example of what might come up.

But let's say I hadn't, that hadn't been clear to me still, or I wanted to get more of the feel of the word. I could have asked it for more sentences, and it's practically endless on what it could come up with. Yeah, and you can also use it, I think, in more advanced ways. So often you get, often students will get a vocabulary list that they have to learn for the week, like 10 words.

And sometimes there'll be words that are kind of similar that they have to learn how to distinguish. And so I think ChatGPT can be useful there as well to kind of ask for like, you know, show me these two kind of similar words in sentences and show me how they're similar and how they're different. Right. Yeah, so really getting at the nuances there. Yeah, exactly. Okay, so moving on to more like the math and science topics for our tip number four on how your dyslexic student might use ChatGPT.

It's just simply in sample problems. Yeah. And so I was last week helping our daughter study for a physics test, and we were doing some practice problems. And so I was asking ChatGPT to solve these word problems, both in math and in physics, actually. We had some word problems in both of those. And what I really like about the way that ChatGPT presents answers to math and physics problems is, first, it'll have a short couple sentences giving an overview of the problem.

And sort of saying like, okay, well, this is, you know, in order to solve this problem, you're given this, and we need to figure out this, and you do this by applying this principle, which I think is super helpful for everyone. But I've noticed, especially for dyslexic kids, to have that really overview of like where you're trying to get to before you jump into a problem. Because often there's that holistic thinking that's part of the learning style.

Yeah, exactly. And then secondly, it doesn't just give you an answer. Obviously, that wouldn't be very helpful. It really goes step by step and shows the intermediate results at each step and explains the principle behind each step that it's solving. So, you know, we're going to get into some caveats around using ChatGPT at the end here. I just wanted to say one thing while we're on this topic, which we'll probably reiterate at the end, is that when it comes to math and physics, actually ChatGPT only got the final answer correct, at least in the problems that I was working on with my daughter about half the time.

So you need to be very careful about not just trusting the calculations. But in terms of sort of ways to approach problems and the concepts and how to like parse a word problem and step through it, it's super useful. Okay, so for our fifth and final tip for today, ChatGPT can actually be super useful for helping your child study for exams. And this can be done in a few ways. So going back to our previous tip four, I mean, obviously just asking ChatGPT for help working through problems and understanding how to approach problems is one way that you can study for exams.

But even more interestingly, you can use ChatGPT to generate content for you to study. So, for example, sticking with math and sciences for the moment, you can ask ChatGPT to give you example problems to practice on. And so, for example, you could feed it a word problem and then say, can you give me a practice problem that is similar to this one, but with different numbers or something like that. And then it'll come up with not only a problem with different numbers, but like a slightly different scenario.

So if you say, you know, if the problem you gave it is like a car is moving at a certain speed and then it takes this long to stop or whatever, it'll come back with something like a, you know, a crate is being pulled at this speed and takes a certain amount of time to stop, which is kind of what trips up a lot of students in word problems. But I think especially dyslexic students who have more trouble reading and parsing the actual English content is the sort of those kind of differences that don't actually affect the numbers.

Right. So it's good to be able to practice just kind of like reading different kinds of word problems. Yeah. Yeah. I was just going to say, too, that and that's something that's like pretty tedious to come up with as a parent. You know, we can try to do it and it's certainly possible to do it. But the time savings on that is like huge for this kind of exam prep stuff. And another big category of that that I'm going to talk about now is foreign language help.

So ChatGPT does know other languages. We haven't explored all of the languages that it has. We were mainly looking at French because that's what our daughter studies. But it's definitely a useful resource just in general for learning, but, you know, particularly for exams, because, again, it can come up with those sample sentences to, you know, perhaps to do a verb. If you're practicing a verb conjugation, that it can help you practice sentences to where you'd be filling in the blank, for example, along with other ways that it can help with foreign language.

And then coming back to English, it can also just do things like quiz you on vocabulary words. Yeah, I mean, you can ask ChatGPT for, you know, in French or English, like, can you give me some sentences where I have to fill in the blanks? And, like, it'll actually do that for you. Yeah. And, I mean, I guess, you know, everyone can benefit from this, right? Yeah. And not just dyslexic students.

But I think sometimes because we're doing more homework help with them than average, that's why it feels extra important and useful in this particular case. All right. So those are our five tips for today. Look out for some ones in future episodes as well. But we do want to end with some caveats, some of which we've touched on already, but just to summarize. So a big number one is that, you know, at least as of right now, this requires still reading and writing, you know, typing in what you're trying to ask ChatGPT or, and then, you know, when you get the response, even if it is more simplified, still reading it.

So in many cases, you may still want to support your student, you know, in using this with homework. Yeah, definitely.

I guess caveat number two is you don't want your child to become too dependent on it in the sense that, obviously, we always want our children to be able to think critically for themselves. So if you're asking, you sort of, if you're just, you know, asking it for the key points of an article and then copying those points down, you know, and not sort of thinking critically about it, then that's not going to be probably true learning.

Right. Although I want to point out that really, that's no different from anything else. I mean, you always want that level of engagement, right? I mean, you could be doing the same thing, trying to help your child understanding, understand something. And if they're not really taking it in, it's not really helping them. So it's kind of true of all learning. And then the third one is, like we mentioned, being wary of asking it to solve those math and science problems in terms of the answer.

It's very useful for generating problems just to come up with them, you know, in terms of like, that's just useful for time-saving technique for having problems to solve. And it's very useful for going through the steps and the real understanding of it. But trusting the answer seems to be a different story at this point. Right. And it's kind of interesting to play around with, actually. I mean, so for one thing, it's just, it's just kind of bad at calculation.

Like, it's not, it wasn't trained to do math, particularly. Like, it's a language model, not math, not thematical. So it kind of can make some mistakes in that way. But what's interesting about it is that you can actually interact with it. So if it gives you an answer that you don't think is right, you could say, like, I said things like, oh, well, that's not what I got. And then, and then ChatGPT will kind of go, well, kind of like rerun the problem.

And it'll say, oh, I apologize for the error. Here's how you actually do it. And sometimes it'll actually correct itself. Which is interesting that it can do that. Yeah. I find that fascinating. Yeah. Okay. So our fourth caveat is, is a huge one here, which is you need to make sure that your child's teacher and school, you need to, you need to understand the rules around using ChatGPT and what is allowed and what is not allowed.

So like, this is, you know, like any sort of use of the internet in general, you just, your child and you need to really understand what, what is going to be allowed by, by that teacher in that class. Right. And then our final caveat for today is that you need to know kind of the tips to work with it that will help it to function best to help you. So an example of that is what we talked about earlier, like you need, maybe want to ask what level of response you want.

And this can be interactive. Like I said before, it's not like you can only ask it one time. So if you realize that it was too complex for what you wanted or you wanted it in a different way, you can keep asking it. But you do have to have that engagement of trying to sort of get it to come out with, with what you're after. Yeah, exactly. All right. Well, those are our tips and our caveats.

We'd love to hear your experiences using ChatGPT with your dyslexic kid. And if you haven't tried it yet, it's super easy to set up. Just go to chat.openingai.com, create an account and jump in.