As an educator, your time is precious. Handling many administrative and operational tasks often depletes this valuable resource, leaving you with less time to do what you do best: inspire and guide your students. This is where AI can step in, streamlining processes and freeing you up to focus on what matters most. Explore some of the possibilities:
Save time on everyday tasks
AI helps educators expedite everyday tasks, such as writing communications, augmenting assessments, or providing and formatting feedback. Check out how one educator could use AI to support their communication needs and generate templates for correspondence:
The scenarios portrayed in this project are fictitious. They are intended for pedagogical purposes only.
Hi! I’m a high school music teacher. In addition to teaching music classes during the school day, I also organize extracurriculars, such as choir and band. This requires me to write numerous emails, as I’m often in contact with students’ families, other teachers, and school administrators. I realized I was spending a lot of time drafting reminder emails about upcoming rehearsals and competitions, as well as the monthly newsletter I send to our entire school with our calendar of events. Now, I love using AI to create templates that make these tasks quicker and easier, so I can focus on making music!
Learn how AI can create a newsletter template
Here’s how AI can create a newsletter template. Simply open an AI tool, enter a prompt, and review the output. A prompt is the method for interacting with an AI tool in the form of a request, a question, snippet, example, and more. And an output is the information or creative work that an AI tool produces after it is prompted, such as an answer to a question, a text summary, an image, a piece of music, and more.
Note: This example is shown in Gemini, but you can use any AI tool of your choice. Your experience in Gemini may differ from what is shown in the example.
Prompt:
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Acting as a high school music teacher, create a welcoming newsletter template for the music department with a calendar of events for families, staff, and other students to view. |
Explore the output:
Output:
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Welcome to the Harmony! A Newsletter from [Your High School Name] Music Department Welcome, music lovers! We’re thrilled to kick off the new semester with the Harmony, your one-stop shop for all things music at [Your High School Name]! Whether you’re a seasoned musician, a curious beginner, or a supportive family member, this newsletter is for you. Get ready to explore the exciting events and opportunities we have lined up for the coming months! Upcoming Music Department Events:
Stay Connected! We encourage you to stay connected and informed about all things music at [Your High School Name]!
We’re looking forward to an amazing semester filled with music, learning, and community! Sincerely, The [Your High School Name] Music Department Team P.S. Don’t forget to check out our bulletin board near the music room for additional announcements and updates! Note:
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Disclaimer: Results for illustrative purposes.
Differentiate instruction to meet student needs
Another way that AI can support your teaching practice is by helping you differentiate instruction to meet individual student needs. For example, you can modify resources for different reading levels or, as in this educator’s case, develop summaries of texts for students to review:
The scenarios portrayed in this project are fictitious. They are intended for pedagogical purposes only.
Hello, I’m a 9th grade history teacher. After just getting through another flu season, I discovered that AI is a great tool for helping me create quick summaries of what students miss while they’re home sick. (Of course, I always review the output to ensure that the information being generated is accurate!) The reviews I create with the help of AI are really valuable for getting them back on track. Best of all, my students can catch up on what was taught, and I save time to focus on preparing for the next lesson.
Learn how AI can summarize daylight savings:
Here’s how AI can create a summary about the concept of daylight savings time.
Note: This example is shown in Gemini, but you can use any AI tool of your choice. Your experience in Gemini may differ from what is shotwn in the example.
Check out the prompt:
Prompt:
| I am a high school history teacher. Create an informative and engaging summary about the concept of daylight savings time for 14-year-olds. |
Explore the output:
Output:
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Ever Wonder Why Summer Evenings Feel So Long? It’s Daylight Saving Time! Have you ever noticed how during summer, it feels like you have forever to hang out with friends after school because the sun stays up for ages? That’s thanks to something called Daylight Saving Time (DST). It’s basically a trick we play on clocks twice a year to make better use of sunlight. Think of it like this: Earth spins on its axis, which is why we have day and night. But the tilt of the axis means different parts of the planet get sunlight for varying lengths of time throughout the year. In summer, the northern hemisphere, where we live (in the US), gets more sunlight naturally. DST takes advantage of this by setting the clocks forward one hour in the spring. Poof! An extra hour of daylight in the evening for barbecues, bike rides, or just chilling outside. But wait, there’s a catch! Just like gaining an hour in the spring, we lose an hour of sleep when DST ends in fall. We set the clocks back one hour, and suddenly, it gets dark earlier. Kind of a bummer, but it evens things out and makes sure mornings have a healthy dose of sunshine during the winter. Why Did We Start Messing with Time Anyway? Daylight Saving Time is actually a pretty recent invention. It wasn’t until World War I that countries started using it to save energy. The idea was that people would need to use lights less often in the evenings if the sun was still up. Pretty clever, huh? Debate Over DST: To Keep or Not to Keep? Even today, there’s a big debate about whether DST is still helpful. Some people think it disrupts our sleep schedules and isn’t worth the hassle. Others like the extra daylight in the summer. So, who knows, maybe someday we’ll ditch the time change altogether! So next time you’re enjoying a long summer evening, remember it’s all thanks to a little time trickery called Daylight Saving Time. Maybe it’ll even spark a fun classroom debate about whether we should keep it or ditch it for good! |
Disclaimer: Results for illustrative purposes.
Enhance lessons and activities in creative ways
Finally, AI can be an effective tool for enhancing lessons and activities in creative ways, such as by updating an existing activity to reflect student interests, applying different instructional strategies to make a lesson more engaging, or adding images to instructional materials. Here’s how an educator could use AI tools to add more variation to assessments:
The scenarios portrayed in this project are fictitious. They are intended for pedagogical purposes only.
Read an educator’s story:
I’m a 6th grade math teacher. I love writing fun quiz questions for my students, but coming up with different, engaging examples while checking their understanding can be time-consuming! I want to make sure I’m not using the same scenarios over and over again, and I also like to incorporate something students are interested in. I’ve started using AI to help me brainstorm ideas, and it really helps everyone have more fun with quizzes!
Check out the prompt:
Prompt:
| I am a sixth grade math teacher. Create an inclusive scenario about sports with a fictional dataset that middle school students can use to make a bar graph. |
Explore the output:
Output:
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Sixth Grade Math: Sports Participation by Grade Level Scenario: It’s time to celebrate participation in sports at our school! We’re running a program where students from all grades can participate in a variety of sports clubs, including soccer, basketball, and track & field. This week, Ms. Johnson, the PE teacher, wants to see how many students from each grade level are participating in these clubs. Data Collection: Ms. Johnson has collected the following data on student participation:
Math Challenge:
Bonus: Imagine we add a new club for table tennis next month. How could we update our graph to show participation in all four sports clubs? This scenario provides a real-world context for students to practice bar graph creation and data analysis. It also promotes an inclusive environment where everyone is encouraged to find enjoyment in sports. |
Disclaimer: Results for illustrative purposes.
As you’re learning, there are countless ways that AI can support your teaching practice. By the end of this course, you’ll be able to write similar prompts to create resources just like these examples for your own classroom with AI.
Tips as you get started
In addition to the activities hosted directly on the Teacher Center site, this course will ask you to practice in the AI tool of your choice, such as Gemini or ChatGPT. The instructions for these practice activities will be written for Gemini, which is freely available, but select whichever tool you like. Keep in mind that different tools may produce different results — getting an output that doesn’t match the activity is OK, as long as you review it to make sure it’s accurate and useful.
Set up your screen
To complete these activities, you will navigate to a new browser window in order to work within an external tool. Here’s how:
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Open the AI tool of your choice in a separate window.
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Split your screen with this course
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Toggle between this course and the AI tool window to reference both at the same time.
Right-click links to open other websites in a separate tab.
Locate materials to use in the course
Also note that some lessons in this course ask you to work with existing teaching material. To be prepared, take a moment now to have something ready. You might choose:
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A sample lesson plan
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An email message to a colleague
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A class syllabus
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A set of assessment questions
Simply save a digital file of your selected material so you can copy and paste it in later. Soon, you will use an AI tool to generate or refine teaching materials and understand how to apply this knowledge to all sorts of applications.
