The toothpaste is out of the tube! ChatGPT is here and, whether we like it or not, we can’t go back to a time before its arrival. The question now is how do we, as educators, move forward? In case you’ve missed all the hubbub, ChatGPT is a new, advanced chatbot launched by OpenAI in November 2022 that can understand, respond to, and converse with users’ written input similarly to humans—it can even answer questions, tell stories, and engage in conversations.
Due to these advanced capabilities, it has been widely discussed and written about, particularly in the field of education, where some experts predict it could disrupt time-honored instructional practices. In fact, some of the more dire prognostications suggest that ChatGPT could irrevocably alter the way educators teach writing, assign and assess homework, and detect and monitor cheating and plagiarism.
ChatGPT itself is a neutral tool, and how it is used depends on the intentions of those who use it. While it’s understandable that the emergence of ChatGPT has sparked such speculation, it’s important to remember that technology is not inherently good or evil. ChatGPT itself is a neutral tool, and how it is used depends on the intentions of those who use it.
History has shown us that when used appropriately and with discretion, technologies generally enhance education rather than detract from it. One example is the calculator, which was initially feared to inhibit students’ learning and retention of arithmetic but has proven to be a valuable tool for aiding in computational thinking.
Along the same lines, we might think of ChatGPT as a “calculator for the humanities.” By automating lower-order thinking tasks (like basic recall, classifications, comparisons, and summaries), students can spend more time and effort focusing on complex, conceptual tasks and developing higher-order thinking skills such as analysis, synthesis, and evaluation.
Of course, tools like calculators should be used at the discretion of the teacher. Much like students ask their math teacher if they can use a calculator on tests or homework, they may soon be asking their humanities teacher whether they can use ChatGPT on their assignments. So, how can educators help students understand appropriate uses for ChatGPT?
Embracing ChatGPT as a Teaching Opportunity
Students tend to approach new technologies through a lens of play and experimentation, seeking to uncover capabilities and limitations through trial and error. Despite the notion of students as “digital natives,” it is important to recognize that students do not inherently understand how to use tools like ChatGPT for academic purposes….
It’s from this perspective that ChatGPT opens opportunities for educators to teach students about these tools—to have important conversations with students about the powers, limitations, and ethical uses of advanced technological tools in education contexts. Read more…
A massive amount of branded content is being published to the web every day. Every piece makes it more difficult to capture and keep the attention of your target audience.
Joe Pulizzi, Content Marketing Institute Founder, attributes this to the increasing difficulty of “content tilt.” Tilt, according to Pulizzi, is the differentiating factor that makes your brand’s content unique. When your industry is saturated with blogs, eBooks, webinars and podcasts, “tilt” can be nearly impossible to achieve.
While well-done content marketing can create synergy within an integrated demand generation program, there’s no escaping the fact that creating quality content is time-consuming. That’s why you want to get the most mileage possible out of every piece of content you create.
7 Ways to Improve Your Content Marketing for Demand Generation
1. Focus on Problems
You’re in business because your brand has a solution to your prospect’s problems, right?
If your content isn’t hitting the mark, it may be because you’re not focused on your personas’ pains at each stage of the funnel:
Early-stage prospects are just starting the process of solving a problem
Mid-stage leads are considering their options
Late-stage opportunities are looking to overcome their concerns and get buy-in from all stakeholders
Taking a solution-oriented approach to your persona’s problems allows you to position your brand as a problem solver. You can do this in a number of ways:
Creating how-to blogs for every stage of the funnel
Infusing premium content with unique, problem-solving value.
Actively listening to your prospects, leads and customers to understand their problems.
Participating on social media to answer industry questions.
Optimizing SEO for problem-oriented long-tail organic search keywords.
Creating solution-oriented lead nurturing workflows.
2. Address the Customer’s Questions
Content marketers instinctively know they should answer questions. But, answering the right questions makes all the difference.
Here are some ways you can understand what your prospects and customers really want to know:
Analyze the blogs, eBooks and content resources accessed most frequently by prospects and customers
Examine the content resources used most often by sales and customer success teams
Compile a list of questions or topics from social media interactions
Listen in on customer onboarding meetings
Pull frequent keywords or queries from your website chatbot logs
Keep a growing spreadsheet of all customer questions from before the sales process, during the sales process and after the close
3. Leverage 3rd-Party Media Sources
If you’re trying to boost the reach of your content marketing efforts – beyond what your blog, social and SEO efforts can deliver – the next logical step is 3rd-party media sources and lead generation services.
Achieving the best results with 3rd-party lead gen, in our experience, requires:
Identifying qualified media sources
Evaluating potential media partners’ audiences
Researching their account-based marketing (ABM) capabilities and targeting options.
There’s a big difference between good and bad content marketing, especially when it comes to where and how you promote your content. A bad content marketing strategy comes across as spammy and can quickly undermine your brand’s credibility. If you do content promotion well, you come across as a helpful and knowledgeable source.
What to do:
Promote your content where your personas are looking for answers
Be an active, helpful and valuable member of online communities where your personas engage
Build relationships before you link or pitch – this means having real conversations on social media post comments, and only linking to your content if it is truly helpful to audiences in the context of the original post
Don’t repeatedly post links to your own content on your personal or business social media profiles
Don’t make a habit of adding links to your content into the comment section of other blogs, Twitter and LinkedIn post – it’s transparent and annoying
Don’t feign involvement in online communities to promote your content
5. Promote Based on Funnel Stage
Content marketing is a full-funnel marketing strategy. Content drives results for brand awareness and lead generation at the top of the funnel. At the middle of the funnel, it helps nurture prospects, facilitating lead velocity, conversion rates and sales pipeline growth. At the very bottom, it supports sales enablement, resulting in more closed-won deals and revenue contribution.
You need content for every stage of the funnel. And, you need to know how to effectively distribute that content to audiences according to stage as well as all relevant stakeholders (i.e., sales and customer success teams).
Use tools to map your content to specific funnel stages and strategically promote it where it brings the most value to your prospects and customers. We’ve created several content strategy and distribution templates in the Demand Orchestration Workbook that can help.
6. Be Relevant Now
Attention moves fast. Talking about yesterday’s news gets you nowhere. In some industries, relevance is shorter-lived than in others. B2B marketers in particularly fast-moving fields, such as information security, financial technology and similar niches, need to be on top of their game.
Don’t get caught talking about issues or topics that are resolved. It won’t get attention on social media, organic search or other channels.
Creating content in the “now,” isn’t easy, and it requires a great deal of agility. But, it’s just the nature of generating demand in the digital age.
7. Use the Right Tools
Tools aren’t everything, but when you’ve got your processes and people aligned, tools can make all of the difference. Many of the tools most game-changing B2B content marketers swear by are free, easy-to-use and deliver great value.
Here are a few favorites:
Quora: Need an expert quotation fast? With 100 million users and a fast-growing segment of verified experts and celebrities, Quora is a powerful way to source personalized answers from names your audience knows.
Percent Change Calculator: Some tools only do one thing extremely well, and in the case of this percentage change calculator, that’s enough. It’s a great go-to if you need to crunch numbers quickly and accurately.
HARO: Post or respond to source requests from journalists and bloggers, including media at sources such as Reuters, Time and the Wall Street Journal or other subject matter experts.
Atlas: Atlas is akin to Google, but it’s exclusively dedicated to stats, graphs and charts, many of which are free for reuse.
Canva: Perhaps the easiest to use graphic design tool for non-designers available online.
Elevate Your Content Marketing in 2018
Content marketing isn’t simple, but it’s also not an optional component of a full-funnel B2B marketing strategy. To generate leads, nurture prospects and win deals, B2B marketers need to work smarter against increasing content competition.
By adopting the right tactics, including better empathy for your personas’ problems and a commitment to relevant and timely content creation, B2B marketers can shift from simply creating great content to ensuring it’s used to its fullest potential.
“Lemme ask one of those tone deaf economist questions that annoy almost everyone. Today, many families learned that the amount they owe on their mortgage has declined—in real terms—by 9.1% over the past year. Why do we hear so little about this? Why don’t we see folks celebrating?”
Some other economists agreed with him, at least in terms of how people think of economics. Many non-economists quickly came in to explain their thought processes—that the points, while technically correct, were out of context and touch.
Essentially, the critics made two points as accurately as Wolfers and company related the technicalities. People are set upon from all quarters, not just housing. And the U.S. is becoming a country, not of poverty, but entrenched poorness. That is, in the sense of “small in worth” or “less than adequate” by the Merriam-Webster definition.
It is true that as inflation increases, the monetary value of a loan with terms that established lower interest rates decreases in favor of the borrower, at least while inflation is running hot. If the total remaining on the mortgage, including interest and principal, is $X, then over the last year it’s now 9.1% less expensive because the value of the dollars is falling. The mortgage likely has no inflation escalation rider.
Now, that mortgage only remains 9.1% less expensive if there is no deflation. You do get a savings even if inflation drops to a lower rate, because the value of what a dollar can buy continues to drop. As it does pretty much every year anyway. This is one of the advantages of owning a home. The amount you own drops because there is some degree of inflation in virtually every year, as, unless you have an adjustable-rate mortgage (a bad idea in the long run that might make sense in specific circumstances in the immediate future), you’ll locked in at the level of cheaper dollars.
There’s nothing new with that and it’s how a lot of people build wealth over time. Then they, in theory, pass that property down to their children, who now have greater wealth that, in theory, can get passed down in turn, and so on. The growth of wealth becomes a multi-generational process. The longer you’re around, the greater an advantage you have.
There are two other ways you build value as a homeowner. One is, on the whole, there will be some appreciation in value over time. That comes without additional payments. The other is one of those “you get a benefit because you’re not doing something else that would cost more” kind of financial planning arguments. If you don’t own, you’re a renter and the amount you pay climbs each year. If you do own, then there’s an annual additional amount you don’t have to pay, which is a savings.
That doesn’t mean that homeowners don’t pay more every year because there’s more to owning a house than the payment. Taxes, utilities, maintenance and repair, upgrades, and so on see regularly rising costs. Still, this remains a case that things could be much worse, and you are ahead in some significant ways.
So, why aren’t people dancing in the street? The first reason the critics note is that housing, while a significant cost, isn’t the only place where people are hit. For many years, important areas of living have endured significantly higher increases than income in real terms after inflation. Healthcare, childcare, education, energy (both electric and heating and cooling), all drive up everyday expenses. They leave pay increases in the dusty plains of personal financial ledgers. Personal savings rates are dropping; credit card debt has again reached new heights.
One reason you don’t see conga lines in the street is because people are anxious about the economy and their position in it. Consumer sentiment is up a touch from June, as the newest University of Michigan polling shows, but that’s still down massively from a year earlier. If a patient is in bed with a serious illness and a doctor tells them that they don’t have an additional one, they might be glad to hear it and yet not be in a position to leap to their feet.
The second criticism is even stronger, in a social sense. If housing ownership is at about 65% in the country, should people clap for joy as they see a third of the country having to struggle much harder? When many who are not in a position to own homes are their children or nieces and nephews or kids of friends or younger people they work with? You can be thankful that you weren’t part of a massive traffic accident and yet reluctant to outwardly rejoice so as not to rub others’ noses in the dirt.
My credits include Fortune, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times Magazine, Zenger News, NBC News, CBS Moneywatch, Technology Review, The Fiscal Times, and…
In the modern workplace, communication can make or break a career. High school students who develop strong communication skills early go on to nail that interview, negotiate that pay raise, or make a great case for that promotion. However, those who fail to communicate effectively often end up getting passed over–no matter how smart or skilled they are.
As an instructor, you want to ensure your kids have the best chance at success in their careers, and communication is a key element in that. But communication can be tricky to learn. What are these workplace communication skills, and where do you begin when teaching them in your career readiness course?
Many high school teachers have approached AES asking these questions, and in response, we’ve developed a list of the different types of communication your kids will encounter every day in the workplace.
In this article, you’ll discover a breakdown of the three different kinds of workplace communication and how you can teach them in a high school setting:
Verbal Communication
Non-Verbal Communication
Email Communication
By the end of this article, you’ll have a better sense of each of these three workplace communication skills and how you can teach them to your students.
Workplace Communication Skills Breakdown: Verbal, Non-Verbal, & Email
Traditionally, workplace communication is made of verbal and non-verbal communication. However, with the rise of technology, email has also taken a central role in workplace communication, and will be one of the primary methods your high schoolers use to collaborate with coworkers day-to-day.
What Is Verbal Communication?
Verbal communication is any conversation that takes place vocally.
While that primarily means face-to-face discussions, it could also include phone calls, video conferences, voicemails, and voice messaging.
The most important advantage of verbal communication is that speakers can use tone of voice to help convey the context of what they’re saying.
That context could be anything from sincerity to sarcasm — but either way, it’s a major benefit that verbal communication has over non-verbal.
On the other hand, verbal communication is almost always temporary, which means it’s the responsibility of the listener and speaker to remember the discussion without any aid.
This isn’t true for voicemails or voice messaging, but it does apply to phone calls, video conferencing, and face-to-face conversations.
Because the latter three situations occur much more frequently than voicemails and voice messaging, it’s important to note that two people may have different interpretations of how a conversation actually goes.
These different interpretations — whether they’re accurate or not — can vary from mild misunderstandings to major miscommunications.
After all, with no central source of truth (like a written document or recording), any disagreements over a verbal conversation are up in the air when it comes to determining what was actually said and intended.
Fortunately, verbal communication isn’t the only method of conversing in a business setting.
In fact, non-verbal communication is becoming the preferred conversation and planning format for many companies, especially those involved in cutting-edge technology.
What Is Non-Verbal Communication?
Non-verbal communication is any form of discussion in which vocal tone doesn’t play a part.
This includes several forms of communication, like instant messaging, text messaging, note-writing, social media posts, letters, data analysis, and even email–though email is special for a few reasons.
Oftentimes, non-verbal communication entails some form of writing, which gives it one major advantage over any other form of conversation: documentation.
Documentation provides that central source of truth for what someone said, when they said it, and how they said it. This helps provide a strong sense of clarity and can resolve conflicts much more effectively than verbal communication.
However, it’s important to note that non-verbal communication entails more than just writing. It also includes crucial social cues like eye contact, body language, gestures, and even physical touch! As a result, you have a lot more areas of opportunity when it comes to non-verbal communication.
Take social cues, for instance. These non-verbal gestures and visual accents help to complement verbal communication. After all, combining the right words and gestures at the right time can make all the difference between appearing selfish or helpful!
Context is everything in this case — and social cues help establish that context when used in conjunction with speech.
Still, there’s one form of specific non-verbal communication that merits more of a breakdown, and it’s become the single most important communication method in the working world: email.
What Is Email Communication?
It’s strange to think that email was once considered a quaint or informal way of conducting business. After all, these days you’d be hard-pressed to find a business that doesn’t use it as a central pillar of their operations.
The bottom line is that email is one of the most-used communication methods for companies today. Using it, you can direct projects, hold discussions, make decisions, and grow a business to new heights!
This is why it’s so important for students to know about email, how it works, and why it requires professional etiquette.
After all, emails are responsible for individuals taking action in a company. They’re the best way to make sure people stay in the loop on different ideas and projects.
With the right email, someone can open themselves up to new opportunities that they never knew were possible. With the wrong email, they could truncate their career and end up looking for another job.
Email is taken seriously in the business world. It’s significantly different from text messaging, instant messaging, note-writing, and chat.
If a student goes into a job with the expectation that they can treat email like a messaging service, they’re starting off on a bad foot. To get them on the best start possible, it’s crucial that today’s educators teach email communication skills.
But that’s easier said than done, right? In fact, all of these communication skills can be tricky to teach. So how do you actually teach communication skills to high schoolers in the best way you can?
How to Teach Workplace Communication Skills
When it comes to teaching workplace communication skills to high schoolers, you’ll find a lot of variety in terms of approach and methodology.
That’s because what workplace communication actually entails — like many soft skills — isn’t set in stone. Many states in the US have completely different standards when it comes to communication education in general.
However, that doesn’t mean there aren’t great teaching strategies out there.
On the rest of this page, we’ll take an in-depth look into some of the most popular and successful online resources for teaching workplace communication skills in high school. These resources provide excellent guidelines to help you think about how you’ll teach these skills.
How Do I Teach Verbal Communication Skills?
The Global Digital Citizen Foundation (GDCF) is an organization dedicated to helping modern students learn in the ways that are best for them. When it comes to developing new teaching strategies, they’re always making new strides in terms of experimentation and tracking results.
GDCF has a brief–yet effective–suggestion for how to teach verbal communication to students of any age: have them watch videos that demonstrate conversational skills.
For the videos themselves, you can use clips from popular movies that your high schoolers know, like The Avengers, or even popular YouTubers who work in groups, like The Slo Mo Guys. This may help engage them further by making each lesson focus on characters or people that your students love to watch.
Regardless of what you choose to show, the goal is always the same. You want your students to demonstrate that they’re aware of what conversations look like along with positive communication traits and negative communication traits.
During the videos, you have students take notes that:
Summarize/paraphrase the dynamic between the speakers
Pull direct quotes from the conversation
Mark interesting responses or replies
Delve into the vocal tone of each speaker and how it affects the conversation
After the video is over and the students are done taking notes, you can ask them questions about key parts of the conversation: Why did the vocal tone of one speaker change at a certain point? How did the other speaker reply? How did it impact the conversation as a whole?
Asking these kinds of questions helps students engage with verbal communication in a way that’s relatable and fun — especially when compared to learning from a textbook.
How Do I Teach Non-Verbal Communication Skills?
Non-verbal communication skills are just as important as their verbal counterparts, and it’s essential you use the best resources available to teach them to your high schoolers.
Upbility, an education thought leader on speech therapy, offers several suggestions to help you get started with teaching social cues.
One of the most direct ways they recommend is through simple roleplaying. This is where you create conversational scenarios in which one student says something, another replies, and the rest of the class takes notes on what they observe.
For this roleplay scenario, it’s key that you highlight the subtle areas where social cues add emphasis to a conversation. These areas include:
Facial expressions
Body language
Gesturing
Eye contact
Personal touch
Personal space
Physical appearance
Have your students take notes, and after each exercise, you can ask the participants and observers to discuss what happened, why they interpreted a conversation a certain way, and how that interpretation could’ve changed based on non-verbal factors.
As for written communication, your options are surprisingly more limited than when dealing with social cues.
That’s because “writing skills” are an enormous category that includes career readiness, creative thinking, problem solving, and more.
However, there is an excellent resource provided by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), which is a branch of the US Department of Education. This thorough guide offered by IES details every step you can take to teach writing skills to teens and adolescents–perfect for high schoolers.
We recommend downloading the guide yourself (it’s free) and following its information as closely as you can. There’s a lot of good information in there!
How Do I Teach Email Communication Skills?
Email–simply put–is one of the most powerful and convenient tools for modern communication. That’s why it’s essential that high school students learn how to write emails effectively and intelligently before they enter the workforce.
This includes understanding the principles of business writing in general, like common questions and implied tone. It also requires students to practice writing emails of their own — especially emails that they send in response to others.
However, this is all easier said than done, and these concepts include a lot more information than they may seem at first.
But when you approach email communication with an effective teaching strategy–like the Four Phases– you can take that complicated topic and make it understandable for students of any age.
One way to get your high schoolers thinking is to include an activity in which they need to decide if an email is formal or informal. This takes some prep up front, but it’s a great way to mix up your lesson.
Write 5-8 examples of both formal and informal emails and distribute them to your students. Pick students to read each email aloud, and then ask the class if they think it is formal or informal and why they believe so.
Depending how the activity goes, you may be able to start a class debate or discussion about which emails are appropriate for which setting.
Once you’re done with that part of the activity, have each of your students compose both a formal and informal email using school email accounts. This will be a great way to give them hands-on practice with effective email.
Need More Lesson Plans to Help You Teach Communication Skills?
Workplace communication skills are essential for your high schoolers to learn. After all, soon enough they’ll be joining the workforce full time, and if they find they can’t communicate in a professional setting, they could end up falling behind–or worse.
In this article, you’ve learned about the three main methods of workplace communication and strategies you can use to teach them in your high school course. If you use these strategies well, you’ll be providing your kids a solid foundation for effective communication.
However, these activities and strategies are just the beginning when it comes to teaching these skills to your students. If you need even more material to teach your students workplace collaboration and communication, check out the Business Communication module in our catalog.
Within this module, you’ll receive valuable lesson plans, assignments, eLearning material, and engaging exercises that will turn your high schoolers into professional communicators.
Credit: GoodStudio / Shutterstock
Embracing ChatGPT as a Teaching Opportunity
