Create images — teacher guide

The student writes a few sentences about a subject, presses a button, and sees the image appear after a short while. What determines the result is the language: the more precise the description, the closer the image gets to what the student imagined. That is also where the pedagogical point lies.

How it works

The student goes to Create images and sees two tabs: Create New Image and My Images.

In the text field under Your description:, the student writes freely, up to 1000 characters, with a counter below the field. The placeholder text in the field is “E.g.: A yellow house located by a lake...”—meaning a full sentence, not bullet points. Then the student clicks Create Image.

Before the image is generated, the text goes through a process: the content is checked, the text is translated into English for the image generator, and the image receives a short title in the language the student wrote in. The student only sees the status messages “Checking content...”, “Translating to English...”, and “Painting the image...” while waiting. Therefore, the student can write in Norwegian—or in another language—and the image will turn out just as good.

When the image is ready, the title and the student's own description appear below it, along with the buttons Download, Favorite, and Create new image.

The My Images Gallery

The images are automatically saved under My Images, twelve at a time with page numbers. The search field Search images... searches both the titles and the descriptions the student wrote, and the Favorites button displays only the heart-marked ones. If the student clicks on an image, it opens in a larger view with its description and the buttons Download, Favorite, and Delete.

The gallery belongs to the student. You cannot see it, and other students cannot see it.

Who it is suitable for

From A1 and up. At the A1 level, it works well with short, guided descriptions prepared together with the class; from A2, students can write on their own, and at B1–B2, it becomes a true precision exercise where adjectives, prepositions, and sentence structure have a visible impact.

Be aware of what the tool does not do: it does not correct the language, provides no feedback on grammar or spelling, and does not evaluate the text. Nor is it a drawing program—the student does not adjust an existing image, but writes a new description and gets a new image. Corrections and evaluations must come from you or from classroom discussions.

Suggestions for working with Create images

1. The precision round. The student writes a short description, looks at the image, and notes what went wrong. Then she rewrites the description—with more adjectives, clearer placement, correct quantities—and generates the image again. Two or three rounds are enough to make the difference clear.
2. Build the description on the board. Start with “a house.” Let the class expand the sentence element by element: color, size, where it is located, what season it is, what is happening around it. Generate the image at the end and see which elements actually appeared.
3. The words must be used. Choose five to ten words from a list in Word lists or The Dictionary and require all of them to be included in the description. The image serves as a check to see if the student understood the words.
4. Oral recreation in pairs. Student A creates an image and describes it out loud to Student B, who is not allowed to see it. Student B writes down what she hears and creates her own image. Compare the two images and figure out where the language fell short.
5. Image first, text second. The student creates an image of a scene and then writes a story about it in Write, where she receives language feedback.
6. Discuss what went wrong. When the image misses the mark, ask why. The answer often lies in an ambiguity in the Norwegian sentence, and that conversation is language practice in itself.

Good to know

• The images are the student's own to use. Students are free to use the images, even outside of school. Details regarding rights and attribution can be found in Can I use the images I create in Språki?.
• The image does not always match the description. Quantities, text within the image, hands, and small details are frequently incorrect or strange. Use this to your advantage: the discrepancy between the sentence and the image is a great starting point for discussing what the sentence actually stated.
• The text is checked before the image is generated. Inappropriate descriptions are blocked, and the student receives a brief explanation in their native language. If this message appears for a completely ordinary description, ask the student to rewrite it with a bit more context.
• The time is counted as tool time. On Progress, Create images is categorized under tools, not under learning time, and does not count toward the streak of active days. In the group statistics, you will see the Images metric per student—the count, not the images themselves.

See also

• Can I use the images I create in Språki?
• Practice writing
• Overview of features