How to Use AI for Lesson Planning

Today I want to share a walk-through of how to use GenAI chatbots for lesson planning, one of the best and most popular ways for a teacher to take advantage of the current capabilities of AI.

A key to getting the most out of these tools is to remember you are the expert!

GenAI is great at approximating an answer, but it isn't thinking. So when you use expertise-driven prompting, you can lean into the best parts of AI: creativity, speed, and refinement.

In this video, I walk-through:

⭐ How to use our Prompt Library as a starting point to springboard your lesson planning
⭐ How to use chatbots to create engaging, customized lessons more efficiently
⭐ The strengths of different chatbots and how to use them together to get the best results
⭐ How to leverage your experience and expertise to get the best out of GenAI

We know that AI can be revolutionary for teachers, but without our expertise, AI is just another tool.

• Video Transcript

  Hi, I'm Amanda Bickerstaff, the CEO and cofounder of AI for Education, and today I'm going to talk about prompting, specifically how to use prompting for lesson planning. So this is a part of our our prompt library. Let's focus on lesson planning.

  What you'll notice is we have everything from admin work to assessment to helping and supporting students' special needs. But I'm going to focus on lesson planning today because I know that we spend a lot of time as educators doing this.

  And so I'm going to start with one of my favorite prompts to start seeing the possibilities of AI. To help us not only speed up what we do, but tailor our lesson planning for our classroom and our lesson tech is really important to get kids really engaged. It could be a lesson, it could be a unit.

  And the way that our prompt library set up is you've got the lesson hook prompt where you can change all of these brackets to make it work for you, an example prompt that you can just cut and paste and then opportunities to keep going.

  And so for the example prompt, I'm going to use both ChatGPT and Claude to show you the differences. And we've built all of these tools only with free chatbots. So you should be able to find a really good output from GPT 3.5 and Claude.

  So I'm going to do is I'm going to start a new context window and I'm just going to cut and paste and you're going to notice that it's about recycling for 7th grade students. It should be 5 or 10 minutes long. And my students love fashion and sports and provide options for both subjects in your response.

  And what's going to happen is there's some very, very fast output. And so you're going to see there are five fashion themed activities and then five sports themed activities. And so this is the thing where we can keep going and ask it to create ones that are more connected, but we're going to look at this and see what looks good.

  So we've got a fashion show, a quiz, a collage, an accessory design, you've got a relay race and equipment showcase, a trivia challenge, recycling and extreme sports, but let's see what seems pretty interesting.

  I think that I like this idea of the collage, so I want to build: "Create a lesson book activity plan for #3 including objective materials and student facing directions. Simpler is better, so it fits into 10 minutes of class time."

  So I'm giving you some more information about to do so we can see that it's given me a title, objectives and materials and then we've got an introduction, some exploration, the images themselves and the creation.

  And so this is like pretty robust and what I would say is it's probably too much and probably what we want to do is: "Reframe this activity plan to have the discussion be the final step and fit the 10 minutes" and I'm using my own knowledge of what's going to work within a classroom.

  So This is why it's really important that you're using your creativity and knowledge to see what's possible. And in this case it doesn't still quite hasn't got it because remember this is not a thinking tool. It is a computing tool. So it's still giving you what it thinks is best but it's a really good start of how we can do this and so I'm probably going to cut and paste this out keep working with it within Chat GPT or I can just you know, take the pieces that really work for me and I would have done is I've come to a much quicker resolution than it would take me normally.

  I'm just going to quickly do this again with Claude and see what it comes up with. And so Claude, I find Chat GPT to you to be better for lesson planning. But Claude is also really good at communication.

  And what we're going to see is - I love "trashion trends" - so to show photos of cutting edge fashion made from recycled materials and there's actually a lot of that there. So I love that idea.

  So what I often do is I kind of play the two tools off each other where "Trashion Trends" is really great and what I would want to do is since neither Chat GPT or Claude are connected to the Internet, what I can do is I can go to Perplexity which is another AI tool and I can say "find images of fashion created out of recycled materials."

  And now what I've got is I can get into this answer and it does a really good job of it should do a good job of the sustainable drive... There we go. So we see some really cool examples of recycled materials. You can do the same thing with Bing.

  But as you can see what I've done in just a short couple minutes, I've started with our prompt library. I've found some ideas, maybe this one's really good, but I also really like this one.

  And So what I'm going to do is I can just kind of cobble together these different pieces with the ultimate goal that I'm creating something that really matters for my students, and I'm using my ability and knowledge to make these outputs better.

  Because remember again, these are not thinking, they are computing, so they're going to give me a probability of what they think is the best answer.

  And So what we really hope that you do is you're able to use this prompt library to help you build your own practice to create speed and efficiency where it hasn't been before, but also create really engaging lessons for your students.

  So we hope you enjoyed this and join us again for one of our prompt reviews.Description text goes here