How I Use Gen AI to Enhance My Work and Productivity

By: Michael McVey

When my colleague Jeff Bernstein asks for a brief article on how AI has been woven into my work, who am I to refuse? However, to make my case, you will need to join me for a one-mile jog around my neighborhood while I dictate this article into my phone.

Since GenerativeAI and tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and many others have entered the common vernacular, as a professor focusing on emerging technologies in the classroom, I have devoted myself to learning what they can do. I have joined and led book groups and participated in learning communities both at Eastern and nationally through the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE). I have attended AI summits, listened to AI webinars, and read reports, studies, and books on AI. I have also tried many, many tools. So many tools. I have created agents, developed bots, and integrated AI into my classes, starting gently and then taking increasingly larger leaps.

My students, under my direction, have compared tools, generated images and videos, made music, and explored what AI could and couldn’t do for us as well as what it should and should NEVER do. We have moved beyond fears of plagiarism to a whole new set of concerns, including cognitive offloading, environmental degradation, deepfakes, and a host of unanticipated outcomes and potentially existential threats.

Three Things I Use AI for in My Work

1. Summaries

Our attention spans have definitely shortened over the years, and I am reminded of it every time I find myself frustrated when my microwave takes 30 seconds longer than I expect. I have given students 15-minute videos that feel almost unbearably long. I’ve been able to generate summaries of key points simply by uploading a YouTube URL to an AI tool. When I post these transcripts or lists of key points, I make sure to tell my students how I used AI to create them. I have also shown my students that they can use this method to generate questions and answers as a study aid for any video they upload to an AI. Personally, I also used this technique to master new and complex terminology for projects I am working on. By uploading video URLs (or sets of them) to notebooklm.google.com (for which EMU is licensed), I have developed quizzes, flashcards, and mind-mapping visualizations of complex articles. I even used the “Audio Overview” feature to generate a podcast I can listen to while driving.

2. Reading Lists

I will readily admit that I have a problem with making lists of things I want to read. My “to be read” book list is over 600 items long. My “books read” list from last year was over 150, and I sometimes forget their plots. To address that problem and serve as a reminder, I have fed my list into an AI and asked it to verify that my genres are correct and to provide a one-sentence synopsis for each book. This is where I used to stand up to get a cup of coffee or make tea, only to discover the list had been generated before I even got out of my chair. The synopses are helpful when I review my list at the library, so I don’t check out the same book with the intriguing-sounding title. I shared this AI use with a colleague, who revised the prompt and requested a list of books she should read next, along with the reasons. I did the same thing with the books in my class and was provided a list of supplementary texts that aligned with my course objectives.

3. Transcription Correction

We now turn to the reason I am running and dictating. As much as I enjoy writing a rough draft, I enjoy dictating a draft even more. I get bored very easily when running, so if I’m not listening to a book or music, I use the time to dictate initial drafts. When I finish the run and my dictation, I simply click “send” and deliver it to my email so I can work with it later. The first step is to send it to an AI of my choice. I usually use copilot.microsoft.com, since EMU also has a license for it, when my dictation contains sensitive information or personally identifiable data. I ask the AI to correct spelling and grammar and to expand any acronyms I’ve used. I specifically ask it not to clarify the writing because I have seen AI suck the soul out of some of my best writing when it does that.

Sometimes I let the AI generate a style and structure for consistency. I once dictated a set of AI-related challenges to my college colleagues. After I finished the dictation, I pressed the send button and initiated the drafting of 10 AI challenges to be shared via email, one per week. These were simple and straightforward, and the structure was consistent across the challenges.

You might be interested to learn that colleagues who had never used AI tools beyond ChatGPT found themselves generating images of themselves and friends, creating picture books with Gemini tools, creating snippets of music, and using AI to explain complex topics in ways a five-year-old would understand. The lesson I learned from that experience was to reach out to colleagues to encourage them to try new approaches. Even if they don’t work, or your colleagues don’t find them valuable, you will find that conversations are initiated and may even help develop a strong sense of belonging to your impromptu learning community. Based on ideas I have gathered from colleagues across my college and around the country through these learning communities, there are myriad ways to use AI to improve lesson planning and research methodology.