EdTech Sandbox Series: Build Your Own Teaching Bot – My Story of Creating CITE GPT as a Teaching Tool [Jan 21, 2026]

**BCCampus Event**

EdTech Sandbox Series: Build Your Own Teaching Bot – My Story of Creating CITE GPT as a Teaching Tool

January 21, 2026 | 10:00 am – 11:30 am
Online Event

Registration Link: EdTech Sandbox Series: Build Your Own Teaching Bot – My Story of Creating CITE GPT as a Teaching Tool Registration

Learn More: EdTech Sandbox Series: Build Your Own Teaching Bot – My Story of Creating CITE GPT as a Teaching Tool

This session will explore the design and use of CITE GPT, a custom AI (Artificial Intelligence) chatbot created as a project in the UBC Master of Educational Technology ETEC 511 class, to support students and educators with academic writing, citation formatting, and ethical information use in a reflexive way. The aim of this session is to demystify the design process, showing our successes and failures, which may lead to participants being better informed or trying this skill themselves.

Developed using OpenAI’s custom GPT framework and grounded in the principles of reflexivity, digital literacy, and educational usability, CITE GPT serves as a model for how AI can be thoughtfully embedded into academic practice.

Participants will be led through the coding process of creating a chatbot, engage in hands-on experimentation with the chatbot, be encouraged to make a chatbot of their own, and explore how the system-level prompt and knowledge base can shape user experience, all while reflecting on how AI can support, not shortcut, learning. This is done by emphasizing critical thinking, ethical engagement with technology, and student agency.

Together, we’ll reflect on how to use AI tools responsibly in our teaching and help students develop agency, not dependency. By the end, participants will leave with a concrete sense of how to evaluate, adapt, or build their own tools to support academic success.

EdTech Sandbox Series Sessions

January 21, 2026 – Build Your Own Teaching Bot: My Story of Creating CITE GPT as a Teaching Tool

February 18, 2026 – Re-imagining the Past: Deepfake as a Tool for Creative Storytelling and Visual Literacy