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Top 10 AI tools for planning EFL lessons. As you probably know, AI (Artificial intelligence) has been creating ripples across the EFL sector since the emergence of ChatGPT in November 2022. This has brought a wide range of reactions from teachers, teacher educators and EFL publishers with some hailing it as being a complete game changer and others panicking about their jobs and how they will ever be able to tell if their students did their homework or got an AI chatbot to do it.
As Amy Lightfoot, Director of Insight and Innovation, British Council, says “When it comes to AI, everything, including the term itself, seems up in the air and no one can be sure how things will play out in the future.”
In this article I’d like to take a more level-headed and practical look at my top 10 AI tools for EFL lesson planning. We will see how we can use these to help save time with planning EFL lessons and improve the quality of the materials we develop for our EFL students.
In this article:
You’ve probably heard a lot about ChatGPT even if you haven’t used it yet and for sure a lot of what you have heard will be hype, but a lot will also true. ChatGPT is controversial but it is also a very powerful tool that both we and our students can access for free, so let’s look at what it is and how we can use it in a productive and helpful way to produce EFL lesson plans and materials.
ChatGPT is a generative AI chatbot, this means at the most basic level you can chat with it using voice or text and ask it to do things for you, such producing scripts for role-plays or creating example materials.
This process of interacting with AI is called ‘prompting’ and prompts can be anything from casual chat messages to complex sets of instructions that get the AI to behave like a computer program and carry out more complex interactive tasks.
So, here’s an example prompt template that you can use to get ChatGPT or any other chatbot to write an EFL lesson plan for you.
👉🏻 All you have to do is edit the parts in the brackets [ ] and then copy paste it into your chatbot and wait for the lesson plan to emerge (this usually takes about thirty seconds.)
Act as an EFL Teacher.
Write a [time] minute lesson plan to teach EFL students at level [ CEFR level] of the Common European Framework of Reference.
The aim of the lesson is [aim of lesson].
Rules:
You should use [type of approach].
👉🏻 Why not give this example a try and see what you think of the lesson plan? You can reuse the same prompt multiple times, and the AI will usually produce a different lesson plan each time.
Act as an EFL Teacher.
Write a 60-minute lesson plan to teach EFL students at level B1 of the Common European Framework of Reference.
The aim of the lesson is to develop their understanding of email communications in English.
Rules:
You should use guided discovery approach
👉🏻 If you need some kind of text or content to go with your plan just edit the parts of this template and it will produce a text that you can edit to use with your students.
Act as an EFL materials writer.
Write an example of [text type]
The aim of the text is [aim]
The intended reader is [the authentic reader]
Follow these rules when creating the text.
Rules:
The level of English should be [level] of the Common European Framework of Reference.
The style should be [formal/informal/very informal]
It should have [word count]
It should be suitable for [describe the learners]
👇🏻 Here’s an example that you could use to produce materials for business English students.
Act as an Business English materials writer.
Write an example of a business letter.
The aim of the text is to ask for a meeting to discuss investing in a new startup company.
The intended reader is a wealthy investor.
Follow these rules when creating the text.
Rules:
The level of English should be B2 of the Common European Framework of Reference.
The style should be formal and polite
It should be suitable for Business English students who are around 20 years old.
As you’ll see in both examples, I’ve started the prompt with ‘Act as…’ this is to tell the AI what field of knowledge you want it to draw on, and I’ve also added a section with rules.
You can add rules to more accurately outline the type of content you want the AI to produce. This helps improve the quality of the content that the AI produces, after all it can’t read your mind (yet).
Producing a great EFL lesson, especially from scratch isn’t just a matter writing a lesson plan and creating a text. You probably want something a bit more visually attractive. Gamma is a great tool for quickly creating visually rich presentations.
These are especially useful for topic-based content or even grammar presentations.
👉🏻All you need to do is tell Gamma what topic you want your presentation to be about and then it will show you an outline with the topic for each slide. You can edit these suggestions and when you are happy you can click a button to generate the presentation.
You’ll need to choose a design template and then in under 2 minutes you’ll have a complete digital presentation that you download or share online. If you aren’t 100% happy with the content you can edit the text and change the images and even add videos, forms and other kinds of interactive media.
Here’s an example of a presentation I create in under 4 minutes when I wanted to design a lesson on Growth Mindset for my EFL students. This is literally as it came out based on just the topic suggestion, and with no editing.
👉🏻Example in Gamma: Ten tips for changing your mindset
You can get 400 free credits by signing up for Gamma and if recommend others to sign up you get an additional 200 per person (It take about 40 to generate a presentation). You can find out more about pricing here: Gamma pricing.
One of the big challenges of creating our own EFL materials for lesson plans is getting good quality audio. Teacher made audio doesn’t usually sound too great and it doesn’t offer students the range of voices and accents that EFL students need to hear in order to develop their listening skills.
Commissioning voice over artists to produce audio can be extremely time consuming and expensive, but with Audyo you can create your own audio files with multiple voices in just minutes.
👉🏻All you need to do is produce your script, you can do this using ChatGPT, then sign up at Audyo, hit ‘Create’ and copy paste in your script. Then you select the voices you want to add to each part and click on generate. There are a wide range of voices and accents, including those of a few famous people!! Once you have generated your audio you can download it as an mp3 or get a link and play it directly from the site.
👉🏻Here’s an example I created for short story lesson plan I wrote for a kid’s class.
Audyo gives you 15 minutes of free audio each month, or you can sign up for a paid account and create much more and remove the audio branding. Audyo Pricing.
If you’re a worksheet driven type of EFL teacher and you like giving your students lots of different types of worksheet activities as part of your lesson plan, then you should really try Twee.
Twee was designed for EFL teachers and it’s a great tool for quickly creating a sequence of activities. These could be based around a text, a YouTube video or script that you generate based on a topic.
One of the many great things about Twee is that you can select the level according to the Common European Framework of Reference and then once you have your content you just click the types of activities you want to create to go with it.
There’s a wide range and when you have the ones you want you can copy paste them into a document or export them as a PDF. This makes it possible to generate complete EFL lessons in just a few clicks.
Twee has a useable free account that gives you 20 activities each month, but if you want to take things seriously you can upgrade for a reasonable price.
Diffit is similar to Twee, but it was developed for mainstream education rather than EFL, so you choose grades from K2 to K11+ rather than using language levels. It does have some advantages though over Twee. It creates a complete sequence of activities in a single click.
Just type in your topic and set the level and you’ll see the text and all the activities appear. You can then edit them if you wish. When it produces factual (you can also choose fictional) text you can also ask it to add the sources of the information it includes, so it’s great to promote sound practice in this way.
The other nice feature of this platform is that once you have your sequence of activities you can export them to Google Drive, and they appear as nicely formatted and designed worksheets that students can make a copy of and complete on whatever device they work on.
👉🏻Here’s an example of one I created: 3-2-1 Reading Summary Workbook
Diffit is free for teachers, but there is an enhanced offer for schools.
Another of the great challenges of creating great EFL lesson plans is finding appropriate images. I’ve spent many hours searching through stock photo websites full of anodyne smiling, usually white, faces in bland homes or offices, trying to find something that looks vaguely like the real life of my students.
Now though I can use tools like Ideogram to produce unique images based on a text description. I’ve used these AI generated images for EFL book designs and lots of different types of EFL activities.
One of my favourite things about AI generated images is that you can create things that would be almost impossible to find or create by any other means.
👉🏻Here you can see a series of images I created to help students remember common idioms.
Creating images with AI can be very simple or very complex depending on how deeply you want to get into the design aspects, but by basically by describing what you want to see you can usually get something close within a couple of attempts.
There are lots of AI image generators around, but Ideogram has some distinctive features.
Firstly, it handles text well, so if you want an image with a caption or a poster with text, Ideogram should be able to cope with that (most AI image generators don’t) another nice thing about Ideogram is that you can also see what others have been creating and by clicking on the image you can find the prompt they used to create it. This makes it easier to learn about and adapt prompts to get the results you want.
Using Ideograms free subscription, you can produce up to 10 images a day, if you want more then you’ll need to upgrade: Idedograms pricing.
HeyGen was one of the first AI tools I started using and it has been around since before ChatGPT burst onto the market. You can use HeyGen to create videos for EFL lesson plans and materials.
HeyGen produces talking head avatars that can be used on instructional videos.
You can choose the look of the person as well as the voice and then just add your own script. You can also choose a presentation template which you can edit with your own content. The quality of the voices and the appearance is remarkable, and the avatars really add a sense of ‘human’ presence to the materials.
👉🏻Here’s an example of a video I create for a Business English lesson on networking tips.
Just a few years ago creating a video like this would have required a huge budget and weeks of planning, but using HeyGen you can create up to 3 minutes of video for free each month or pay for a subscription and create unlimited amounts of video. You can see pricing here: HeyGen pricing.
Lumen5 is another video creation tool that has been around for quite some time and it’s great for quickly creating instructional video based on text. You can take a text you wrote, or from some other source such as ChatGPT and then paste it into Lumen5.
Lumen5 will analyse the text, break it into chunks and highlight keywords. It will then add images and convert the text and images into scenes. You can then edit these scenes, change the highlighting add images, background music and even a voiceover if you wish.
👉🏻This is an example of a video from a lesson I created about preventing students from using AI to cheat. It has ten tips for teachers. The text was generated using ChatGPT and then I pasted it into Lumen5 to create the video. The whole thing was created in under 20 minutes.
Once you have created the video it can be shared with a link, or you can download that file and add it to your own EFL materials. The free subscription offers you upto five 2-minute videos each month with branding. You can upgrade to get more and better quality.
One thing that I never thought I’d be able to create for EFL lessons is songs. Here I don’t just mean the lyrics, but also the musical accompaniment. Udio though allows you to do just that. You can either supply your own lyrics or have them generated by the AI based around a topic or description prompt. You can choose the musical genre too, from jazz to pop to rock.
👉🏻This is an example I created based on a prompt. I asked for a song about the health benefits of chocolate to use as an introduction to the topic in a lesson. This was automatically generated by the site in a about 2 -3 minutes.
On a free subscription you get 10 credits per day. If you need more, here you can check out Udio pricing.
Pretty Polly is slightly different from the other tools we’ve been looking at because it is designed to help students practice and learn languages. This is something you can use to develop the speaking part of your EFL lesson, and it’s a great way to get students practicing speaking at home in a quiet and safe environment where they don’t have to worry about making mistakes.
Pretty Polly contains a number of theme-based chatbots that students can voice chat with. You or they can select one, or you can design a chatbot based around a profile. The students can then practice speaking with the chatbot. They can also track and get feedback on their performance.
Especially if you have large EFL classes getting the time to listen and give feedback to every student is very demanding, but with a tool like this, students can work more independently to develop their speaking and listening skills. PrettyPolly is also free so that’s another great bonus.
Well, that’s about it for this post. I hope you enjoy using at least a few of these tools.
I also hope you can see the potential of these tools to create EFL lessons, activities and materials that are more personalized for our students without having to compromise on quality or spend days of our own time producing them.
You should however also see the limitations. As stated in the recent British Council publication in its 2nd edition July 2024 , Artificial intelligence and English language teaching: Preparing for the future 2024: “It’s important that practitioners should be realistic about the current limited capabilities of AI and cautious about the hype.”
These tools can do some amazing things very quickly, but in order to make a good EFL lesson plan with suitable materials you still need to have a good understanding of the students you are working with, their needs and preferences and the ability to deliver that lesson with enthusiasm and awareness and that takes experience and training.
You may also be interested in:
Five ways to revolutionise your English language School with AI
5 digital tools to enhance your English teaching lessons
6 tools to help you discover the metaverse and what it can offer teachers
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