Getting started with AI: Simple things you can do right now
Summary
Looking past the hype to find easy, simple ways to incorporate AI in your workflows
A bank of starter prompts that you can use to achieve different goals
One key framework for effective prompts is to define the CART for your AI:
Context, Audience, Role, Task
Suggestions on how to refine/design prompts for your own purposes
Simple and Practical uses of AI for Teachers
Let’s get right down to it and look past all the hype, ethical dilemmas, and discussion on the future of AI. Today’s focus is on what you can do right now to save yourself time and see if AI has a place in your workflow or planning process. Given that this is the getting started post, let’s talk (very briefly) talk about why having a solid framework is a crucial step in generating useful AI content. Despite being in its nascent stages, AI is an incredible tool so long as you know how to “talk” to it. If you have broad, vague, or confusing prompts then the outputs you receive are not going to be very good. Here is one possible framework.
Context: Explain your grade level, content area, goals, desired outcomes
Audience: Are you writing for students, teachers, parents, or staff?
Role: What “persona” should the AI adopt? Teacher’s assistant, troubleshooter, student, or something else?
Task: What do you want your AI to produce for you?
We Talking about Practice ?
Now let’s walk through an example. Let’s say we’re a middle school social studies teacher who wants to create a lesson based on state standards. Below is a prompt that you could copy and paste into your AI of choice. Note, remove the parenthetical information as that is just there to help you.
(Context) I am a middle school social studies teacher, I want to create an engaging lesson.
(Audience) I want an assignment for my students
(Role) Act as my teacher’s assistant
(Task) Help me create an assignment based on Washington state standards in social studies.
Now what?
Now that we have a decent starting point, we can begin to refine ideas with our AI. You don’t need to fill out the CART framework after every prompt as most AI models have a (limited) capacity to remember your conversational parameters.
If you’d like an editable file, this link should work
Conclusion
The better and more specific your prompts, the better your AI output
Use the CART framework to tailor your prompts
Context, Audience, Role, Task
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