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Assignment: Concept Mastery Through AI Interaction 

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Assignment: Concept Mastery Through AI Interaction 

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Note: This was an assignment shared during the A&E course. This could work well for trying out a Magic School Student Room.

PURPOSE OF THE ASSIGNMENT

The aim of this assignment is to enhance your understanding and mastery of a critical term, process, or phenomenon pertinent to our course material. By leveraging the interactive capabilities of AI systems such as ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini, you will distill complex concepts into simple language, engage in active learning through question asking, and finally, articulate your understanding in a way that can be assessed.

TASK

1. Select a Concept: Choose an important term, process, or phenomenon relevant to our course content (e.g., polarity of covalent bonds, opportunity cost, iambic pentameter). This will be the focus of your exploration.

2. AI Interaction:

1. Understand the Concept: Begin by asking the AI to explain the chosen concept to you. Engage in a dialogue with the AI, asking any follow-up questions you may have until you have a basic understanding of the concept.

2. Simplify the Concept: Next, ask the AI to explain the concept in simpler terms (e.g., "explain the concept as if I were a ten-year-old child"). Repeat this step as necessary, each time prompting the AI to simplify the explanation further.

3. Write Your Definition: After reading all of the AI responses, formulate your own definition of the concept. Make sure it is clear, concise, and accessible.

4. Get Feedback: Share your definition with the AI and ask for feedback. Be open to critique and adjust your definition based on the feedback you receive.

3. Create Questions: Using your refined definition of the concept, collaborate with the AI to create three multiple-choice questions. These questions should check for understanding of the concept and be suitable for college students in an introductory level course on the topic.

4. Deliverables:

1. Your final definition of the concept.

2. The three multiple-choice questions you created with the AI.

3. Be prepared to share and discuss these in class.

PROMPT EXAMPLES

"Explain ______ to me as if I were a ten-year-old child."

"Give me feedback on this definition of _______."

"Using this definition of _____, help me create three multiple-choice questions for college students in an introductory level course on this topic."

NOTE

While this version of the assignment focuses on simplifying concepts for clarity, you could also be asked to relate your chosen concept to others to build complexity in future tasks. Always focus on building your understanding and articulating it effectively.

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While mitigating student use of AI tools (Red Light) can help safeguard academic integrity and promote authentic student learning in the short term, and fully integrating AI into the classroom (Green Light) can offer long-term benefits, the latter often demands more time and resources than many faculty can commit.

A more practical and balanced approach for most is the supportive model (Yellow Light), which encourages faculty and students to learn together, embracing AI tools as part of the process.

This model, rooted in inquiry-led and constructivist principles, aims to foster students' understanding and spark their curiosity about AI.

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Elevate Course Work Using AI

This approach embraces AI as more than just a tool to manage or support coursework; it positions AI as a catalyst to transform assignments and activities in our classrooms. Instead of simply partnering with students in learning, faculty guide them to the cutting edge, empowering them to leverage AI to not only meet but exceed their educational and professional goals. For those familiar with Reuben Puentedura’s SAMR model Links to an external site.—a framework for integrating technology into education—this approach aligns with the “Redefinition” stage where the technology allows for new, previously inconceivable, tasks.

To paraphrase an analogy offered by Gonzalo Tudela, we are not putting wings on a car but rather taking this as an opportunity to engineer the airplane.

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Mitigation

From Product Assessment to Process Assessment

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While mitigating student use of AI tools can safeguard academic integrity in the short term, and fully integrating AI into the classroom offers long-term benefits, the latter often demands more time and resources than many faculty can commit.

A more practical and balanced approach for most is the supportive model, which encourages faculty and students to learn together, embracing AI tools as part of the process. This model, rooted in inquiry-led and constructivist principles, aims to foster students' understanding and spark their curiosity about AI.

Supporting student use of AI requires a commitment from us, their faculty, to partner with students as we learn the tools and how they can be used and misused on the assignments and activities in our courses.

Embracing a learner's mindset alongside our students allows us a unique, authentic opportunity to model learning from and with our students and to partner with them in meaningful ways to reimagine aspects of our courses.

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Run Your Assignment Prompts Through AI

The first step to mitigate student usage of AI is to test your own assignments, quiz or test questions, and your AI prompts to see how various AI tools perform on them.

All Apps Are Not Equal

AI tools have different strengths. For example, ChatGPT may produce more compelling personal statements, creative works, and design based frameworks while Gemini can be used to generate more factual, validated citations and references (plus a link to the source material).

AI Apps Are Constantly Evolving

AI is getting better all the time. Just because the AI might not generate a factually correct answer doesn't mean that it won't be able to so in the near future as the training data expands and improves, so recheck assignments and prompts periodically.

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Use Multiple Apps to Check Your Assignments & Prompts

In order to mitigate your prompts and assignments, the A&E course provided recommendations of AI tools to try out based on broad disciplinary categories. Some are free and some are paid. We should include Magic School too.

Humanities: ChatGPT, Claude, Google Gemini

Research Writing: Consensus AI, QuillBot, Research Rabbit, jenni

STEM: GPT-4, Wolfram Alpha

Creative & Design: Midjourney, Adobe Firefly, ChatGPT

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Collaborative Problem-Solving Using AI: Real-World Issues

Note: This was shared during the course. The instructor used it as a group project to promote teamwork, communication, and problem-solving skills.

Purpose of the assignment

The purpose of this assignment is to apply your critical thinking skills and creativity in generating, evaluating, and refining potential solutions to real-world problems, using AI tools like ChatGPT and other academic resources. This collaborative project aims to deepen your understanding of the chosen issue and expose you to the process of conducting research, assessing feasibility, and presenting recommendations in a compelling and effective manner.

Task instructions

1. Choose a Real-World Problem: In groups, select a significant real-world issue (like hunger eradication, peace promotion, reduction of fossil fuel dependence, or addressing housing insecurity).

2. Generate Solutions with AI: Use ChatGPT or another generative AI tool to brainstorm potential solutions to the chosen problem.

3. Evaluate Solutions: Discuss the feasibility and viability of each solution within your group, focusing on factors such as practicality, cost-effectiveness, societal impact, and potential obstacles.

4. Conduct In-depth Research: Select one of the potential solutions for comprehensive research. Use a combination of AI tools and academic sources to gather and organize pertinent information.

5. Develop the Project: Create a project that presents your findings and recommendations on the chosen solution. You have the freedom to choose the format of your project—it can be a formal presentation, website, poster, podcast, or video.

6. Project Proposal and Reflection: In addition to the final project, you are required to submit a project proposal at the beginning of this assignment and a reflection at the end. The reflection should articulate your learning process, challenges encountered, solutions devised, and the skills gained from the project.

7. Deliverables: Submit your project proposal, final project, and reflection on Canvas. Be prepared to present and discuss your project in class.

8. Criteria for Success: Your work will be assessed based on the originality and feasibility of the chosen solution, the depth of your research, the clarity and effectiveness of your presentation, and the quality of your reflection. Through this assignment, you should gain an enhanced understanding of the selected issue, research methods, problem-solving, and collaborative work.

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In all these applications, it's important to remember that AI is a tool to augment the skills and expertise of the faculty, not replace them. The human touch and judgement in education are irreplaceable and vital for students' learning and growth.

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Engage Students in Setting Learning Goals and Your Expectations

Ask your students how they are using AI and what they hope to learn about AI tools in your course. You can ask these questions in a variety of ways:

via formal or informal conversations

with an anonymous survey,

using email or communication tools in the LMS.

Task your class to collaborate on a course learning outcome related to AI technology as well as a course policy about their expectations about ethical usage of AI in the course that you can add to the syllabus.

This approach encourages a heightened sense of ownership, resulting in increased motivation for learning, and also cultivates critical thinking and decision making.

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Help Students Become AI Literate

Students (and we as faculty) need to understand the basic principles of AI, how AI tools function, and how they can be harnessed for educational and professional purposes.

Students must wrestle with ethical considerations and potential risks of using AI and draw their own conclusions. Teaching students to use AI responsibly, ethically, and effectively requires us to model our learning of the same.

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With a Magic School Room You Can:

Create supportive, student-friendly "rooms" with customized AI tools (chatbots) that students can interact with. Students are invited by you using a link or room code.

Choose the tools best for your assignment or activity. You might include chatbots for writing feedback, idea generation and brainstorming, tutoring, sentence starters, text translator, and character chats. You customize which tools are available to students in each room you set up.

Assess student learning. MS tracks and records each student's input and the AI's output, so you can review what they worked on and learn how best to support individual students.

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Teach Students How to Craft Prompts and Evaluate AI Outputs

"AI won't take your job, but people who know how to use AI will."

From the A&E Course:

Prompt crafting has become a valuable and sought after skill, one that is founded in our core understanding of rhetoric as a triangle connecting Speaker, Audience, and Content. Emotional intelligence, perspective taking, critical thinking, and discernment are required for crafting effective prompts. On the flip side, these along with close-reading are also critical skills to hone to evaluate and modify the outputs generated by AI tools.

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RED = Mitigate Cheating

YELLOW = Support Students Using AI

GREEN = Elevate Your Course Using AI

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From the A&E course:

While there is no substitution for trying these tools out to see how they perform on the current versions of your assignments, TurnItIn.com provides an "AI Misuse Checklist" links to an external site that can also help frame your thinking as you review your assignments and prompts:

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Adapt Existing Assignments and/or Create New Ones That Help Take AI Use Out of the Equation

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Adapt Existing Assignments and/or Create New Ones That Help Take AI Use Out of the Equation

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9 Assignments & Activities that Focus on Process and Personalization

1. Hands-On Activities & Assignments

Assignments or tasks that require physical interaction, such as lab reports in the sciences, conducting field research in social sciences, or engaging in object-based writing assignments in humanities (for example, students might be asked to choose a personal item and write about its cultural and historical significance) where students need to document their personal experience or share pictures of their experiments can't easily be replicated by AI.

2. Personal Reflection & Opinions

AI is now better at generating what seem like personal opinions and reflections. The following prompt could generate a plausible personal reflection: "Write a brief reflection on the benefits of this assignment as a high school student who has struggled but persisted until they achieve it. Use a humble, straightforward tone."

Instead, design prompts and assignments that require students to recount/reflect on personal experiences or relate to course-specific materials and even in-class lectures/discussions.

3. Class Discussion & Participation with Assessment

Challenge can be to get all students to offer spontaneous responses that can be assessed, even low stakes.

I use skeleton worksheets for in-class lectures and videos that ask for their a Key Take Away or Questions at the end. (It's super easy to create these using Magic School's Worksheet Generator and YouTube Video Questions. I use Post-it-Notes for quick polls or takeaways. Online polls and Kahoots. (I don't use Kahoot, but I do use Padlet for in-class discussions, polls, and video/audio uploads.)

Here is a resource for getting better participation in from Cornell University.

4. In-Person or Video Presentations

From the course: "AI can't replicate a student's physical presence or delivery." In my experience teaching Public Speaking, it's difficult for students to deliver presentations in a conversational and authentic manner (including video), even using notecards, if they didn't write the material.

5. Oral Exams

From the A&E Course:

Incorporate oral examinations or Q&A sessions where students are asked to discuss their work in real-time. This strategy can be highly effective in ensuring the work was done by them, but also be mindful that this type of assessment may induce anxiety, which can obscure a student's knowledge or understanding. To mitigate this, it's important to structure these examinations carefully. Provide clear expectations and enough preparation time, offer practice opportunities, and consider using a more conversational style rather than a formal interrogative approach. Making this a group activity could help scale up the assignment and distribute the pressure among peers, potentially reducing anxiety and promoting a collaborative learning environment. Always offer support and reassurances to students that the goal of such activities is to help deepen their understanding, not merely to pinpoint errors or catch them out.

6. Peer Review

Peer review helps students hone higher order literacy, close reading, and analytical skills. It also provides authentic opportunities to deliver feedback and learn from, and with, fellow students. It encourages collaboration, develops critical thinking, and is hard to fake with AI especially if the written review is paired with group or paired talkback sessions.

7. Custom-Course Materials

Develop some course materials that are unique to the class, like readings from unpublished works, guest lectures, or your own writings. Then, create assignments that require specific references to these materials.  Alternatively, invite students to create custom course materials that pair what they are learning with their personal experiences and interests.

8. Project-Based Assessments

Tied to real-word issues, problem solving or tasks related to the field of study. Often group/team collaborations.

9. Personalize Assignments

Assignments that are unique to students are hard to replicate when they rely on personal detail and context. For example when teaching Intercultural Communication, students had to interview a parent, grandparent, aunt... in order to gain insight into their personal heritage and ethnicity.

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More Ideas to Mitigate Assignments & Activities 

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More Ideas to Mitigate Assignments & Activities 

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Students Create a One-Slider

An instructor shared her One-Sliders and the English-teacher blog where it originated. Instead of a lengthy presentation, students create one slide. Here are her guidelines.

Use One-Sliders when you want students to demonstrate their ability to:

Be focused and organized

Do literary analysis or research

Support their ideas

Carefully select quotations

Understand how images can be used to represent ideas

Think critically

The final product looks very different than a written analysis, but the skills students need to use are the same. These one-sliders are also a great way to add in some visual literacy to your course - while also circumventing AI use by your students.

The best part? Students LOVE doing these assignments, and they are easier to assess, especially if you have a rubric ready to use.

Students can create these on a platform like Canva, or you can grab one of my resources. Each one guides students through the brainstorming process and helps them get focused and organized. You can check out my ready-made one-sliders for any text here and the ones for research here. You'll get instructions, templates, samples, assessment checklists, and more!

Not mentioned in the A&E course, but University of Nevada's Digital Learning Page:

Instructor-Student Conferences

Provide personalized feedback and support to students, deterring unauthorized use of AI by fostering direct interaction and accountability. By scheduling one-on-one or small group conferences, instructors create opportunities for in-depth discussions, clarification of concepts, and guidance on assignments. Conferences promote student engagement, confidence, and academic integrity, leading to deeper learning and greater success in the course.

Schedule short one-on-one conferences or meet with small groups during class time while students are working independently. Provide specifics on what you expect from such a meeting so students are clear on deliverables and the grade.

Short Video Reflections:

Students record a 1-2 minute video answering prompts like:

What surprised you about this topic?

How have you/will you apply what you’ve learned?

What would you tell a friend about this idea?

You can watch at 2x speed to speed up grading.

Source: Teaching Entrepreneurship

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Assess the Process, Not Just the Product (a.k.a. Show Your Work) 

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Assess the Process, Not Just the Product (a.k.a. Show Your Work) 

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Note on Follow the Bread Crumbs:

Encourage students to document key insights from class discussions, collaborative group tasks, and solo activities that occur within the classroom setting. Incorporate these gathered insights into a comprehensive project or final examination, demonstrating the progression and maturation of their critical thinking skills. This process not only exhibits their grasp of the course material but also provides a chronological reflection of their evolving intellectual journey.

A note on Reflective Journals:

In my Leadership & Adv Com course, I use reflective journals. Last year, I felt that a few students were using AI but couldn't prove it. Their reflections seemed very surface, like three of them literally wrote: I used my communication skills to listen to a friend who was upset.

Grading Rubric Update:

Your reflections must go beyond the generic and explain the detail and context. If the assignment is worth 30 points, 15 will be personal reflection, detail, and context.

For example:

Why was your friend upset? How long have you been friends? Is this a person who gets upset a lot or very little?

What was easy for you as were listening?

What was challenging for you as you were listening?

Looking back, what did you handle well? What would you do differently now?

Changing the Rubric:

Student Feedback when I suspect AI was used: "I'm not saying AI wrote this, but I am saying that AI could have written this because it is very generic. It lacks depth, personal context, and detail." -15/30

Be specific on length: 5 or 6 paragraphs (a paragraph is 3-4 sentences.)

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Here are two examples from the A&E course of converting traditional assignments in various disciplines into multimodal assignments:

STEM:

Traditional Assignment: Lab Report

Multimodal Assignment: Video presentations of lab procedures and results, annotated with diagrams and text

Humanities:

Traditional Assignment:

Textual Analysis Paper

Multimodal Assignment: Digital Collage with a mix a text, images, video analyzing a text

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Evaluate Your Assignments - AI Misuse Rubric 

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Evaluate Your Assignments - AI Misuse Rubric 

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Sample Personal Selling Assignment (from Auburn University Prof) 

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Sample Personal Selling Assignment (from Auburn University Prof) 

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This assignment is a useful example of (1) teaching students professional use cases for ChatGPT, (2) encouraging students to critically reflect on the material that is outputted from ChatGPT, and (3) highlighting the importance of understanding going beyond just generating information from ChatGPT (i.e., students need to have an understanding of the material in order to reflect on ChatGPT's output). This example is specific to MKTG 4390, but the structure could potentially be adapted for your own course assignments.

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Example Assignment with ChatGPT.HopkinsPersonal Selling (1)

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Common Sense Education

Course: ChatGPT Foundations for K-12 Educators

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According to the Four Pillars of Effective Prompting from the University of Texas Center for Online Learning:

There are four key elements to consider when crafting these prompts to ensure the AI produces the desired outcome:

1. Task: Clearly state what you need the AI to do. Use specific action words like 'create,' 'translate,' or 'analyze.' These action words tell the AI precisely what work you're asking it to perform.

2. Format: Describe how you want the AI's work to be presented. For example, if you want a poem, report, or diagram, state the format. This helps the AI shape its output to fit your requirements.

3. Voice: Indicate the tone or style of the output. Whether it should be formal, casual, persuasive, or neutral, this guides the AI in matching the voice to the intended audience or purpose.

4. Context: Give as much background information as necessary. If the AI is to mimic a particular writing style or consider specific facts, providing examples or detailed descriptions can lead to more accurate results. For instance, I can provide the criteria for a particular assignment by uploading a rubric or provide feedback examples by providing a writing sample for the generative AI to consider.

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MIT Sloan Teaching & Learning Technologies

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Let's look at the foliage season example above. Once AI generates the response tailored to the kindergarten audience, you can simply add a follow-up. For example, instruct it to "make it funnier," or "explain it to college students who are English majors using analogies they will understand." There is no need to repeat the context and other parameters. You can continue to build upon AI's responses just by adding other prompts. This reiterative process unlocks more potential from AI (Neil, 2023). Additionally, most AI systems will allow you to generate a new response if you'd like to see a different version without entering another prompt.

Limitations

While prompt engineering can improve the outputs from AI, there are some limitations to bear in mind.

Focus More on Problems, Less on Prompts

AI platforms and the models they are based upon are rapidly evolving, reaching more advanced levels of sophistication. For that reason, some experts doubt whether the importance of prompt engineering will be long lasting. Smith (2023) predicts that AI models may be able to write prompts themselves.

Acar (2023) foresees a future where advanced AI systems will be able to intuit our intentions without deliberate prompts. He calls for our attention the difference between problems and prompts. "Prompt engineering focuses on crafting the optimal textual input by selecting the appropriate words, phrases, sentence structures, and punctuation. In contrast, problem formulation emphasizes defining the problem by delineating its focus, scope, and boundaries." (Acar, 2023). In the long run, it may be more important to develop skills in crafting problems as compared to mastering prompt engineering (Acar, 2023).

Entering a prompt and receiving an output is much like the process of having a conversation with another person. But just like a conversation between two humans, interacting with AI can sometimes be complicated and AI may forget where it was in the conversation. This is another reason focusing more on the problem may be a more helpful approach than repeated attempts at crafting perfect prompts.

Be Aware of AI's Flaws

Despite rapid advancements, AI isn't flawless. Concerns around factual accuracy persist, as highlighted by a CNET incident in 2023 where AI-generated content was found factually incorrect (Thorbecke, 2023). Similar cases where AI generated factually false information can easily be found in many different settings, too, including academia. AI's production of content that is inaccurate, misleading, and even completely made up (even if it may seem perfectly coherent and believable on the surface) is called AI hallucination (Weise & Metz, 2023). It is important to keep in mind AI's limitations when formulating your prompts and always look at results with a critical eye.

Avoid AI's Potential Harms

AI can perpetuate biases. Many at MIT may be familiar with a controversy where an MIT student of Asian heritage asked AI to turn her photo into a professional looking headshot (Buell, 2023) only to find that it generated an image of her with bright blue eyes and a lighter skin tone. Sam Altman, CEO of ChatGPT, recognizes that AI falls short of removing biases and producing non-inclusive language, and advocates for iterative development that solicits broader public feedback to counter such challenges (Yu, 2023).

Conclusion

As users seek to harness the power of AI, crafting the right prompt becomes an essential skill, guiding AI towards desired outcomes and ensuring optimal results. The promise of AI systems like ChatGPT, Claude, and others lies in their ability to adapt and learn from your carefully crafted inputs, mimicking human conversation and generating pertinent outputs. Yet, we must remain vigilant about potential flaws, biases, and the implications of over-relying on these systems without critical scrutiny.

References

Acar, O. A. (2023, June 8). AI prompt engineering isn't the future. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2023/06/ai-prompt-engineering-isnt-the-future

Buell, S. (2023, August 24). Do AI generated images have racial blind spots? See an example. The Boston Globe. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/07/19/business/an-mit-student-asked-ai-make-her-headshot-more-professional-it-gave-her-lighter-skin-blue-eyes

Cook, J. (2023, June 26). How to write effective prompts for ChatGPT: 7 Essential steps for best results. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jodiecook/2023/06/26/how-to-write-effective-prompts-for-chatgpt-7-essential-steps-for-best-results/?sh=5a76b51e2a18

Johnmaeda. (2023, May 23). Prompt engineering overview. Microsoft Learn. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/semantic-kernel/prompt-engineering

Liu, D. (2023, June 8). Prompt engineering for educators: Making generative AI work for you. LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/prompt-engineering-educators-making-generative-ai-work-danny-liu

Mollick, E. (2023, January 10). How to. . . use ChatGPT to boost your writing. One Useful Thing. https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/how-to-use-chatgpt-to-boost-your

Mollick, E. (2023, March 29). How to use AI to do practical stuff: A new guide. One Useful Thing. https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/how-to-use-ai-to-do-practical-stuff

Neill, J. (2023). Enhance your ChatGPT prompts. Dr. Jeffrey Neill, Ed.D. https://www.jeffreyneill.com/blog/2023/6/30/prompt-magic-enhancingprompts

Smith, C. S. (2023, April 5). Mom, Dad, I want to be a prompt engineer. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/craigsmith/2023/04/05/mom-dad-i-want-to-be-a-prompt-engineer/?sh=206f254359c8

Thorbecke, C. (2023, January 25). Plagued with errors: A news outlet's decision to write stories with AI backfires. CNN Business. https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/25/tech/cnet-ai-tool-news-stories/index.html

Urban, E. (2023, July 18). What is intent recognition? Microsoft Learn. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/ai-services/speech-service/intent-recognition

Weise, K., & Metz, C. (2023, May 9). When AI chatbots hallucinate. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/01/business/ai-chatbots-hallucination.html

Wu, Y., Mao, W., & Feng, J. (2022). AI for online customer service: Intent recognition and slot filling based on deep learning technology. Mobile Networks and Applications, 27(6), 2305-2317. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11036-021-01795-5

Yu, E. (2023, June 19). Generative AI should be more inclusive as it evolves, according to OpenAI's CEO. ZDNET. https://www.zdnet.com/article/generative-ai-should-be-more-inclusive-as-it-evolves

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Effective Prompts for AI: The Essentials - MIT Sloan Teaching & Learning Technologies

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Unlock the potential of AI by crafting effective prompts. Learn how prompt engineering can optimize your AI interactions, enhance output quality, and understand its limitations.

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Teach Students AI Citation Practices

While thinking on this topic continues to evolve, it's important that we engage students in thinking about when and how to cite AI tools in their work.

Collaborating with colleagues and the library on modules or sessions on AI citation can help us share the workload and ensure that students are well-versed on these issues via a consistent message across courses in our departments.

Here are some resources:

Citing AI in MLA

Citing AI in APA

Purdue Resource for Citing AI

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Google Your Test to See if It's Online. For online exams, make exams unique (using technology tools) to each user so if something gets leaked you can trace it back. Be transparent with students that this will happen to deter cheating on the front end.

Use Open Book Exams to focus on deeper, conceptual information

Use test banks and randomized parameters for all questions on exams

Use high level randomization and "middle warnings" (have a random warning pop up in the middle of an online test or deliver a verbal warning during an face to face test) that reminds students not to cheat. There is research that indicates this is much more effective than a pre-test warning or contract.

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Students are looking to us as role models for responsible AI use. They observe how we integrate (or choose not to integrate) AI into our teaching and research practices.

Our approach to AI can significantly influence their attitudes and behaviors. If we demonstrate thoughtful, ethical, and critical engagement with AI tools, we can inspire our students to do the same.

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In guiding our students, we must also acknowledge our own learning journey with AI. Being transparent about our own process of understanding and adapting to AI can create a collaborative learning environment. It shows students that engaging with new technologies is a lifelong process and that it's okay to approach these changes with a mix of curiosity, caution, and critical thinking.

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Schools and Teachers Must Create Digitally Literate Students 

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Schools and Teachers Must Create Digitally Literate Students 

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Digital literacy is the ability to effectively find, evaluate, create, and communicate information using technology, while critically assessing and understanding its broader impact.

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The course had many useful modules. This Padlet focused on sharing what I learned from Module 2: Rethinking your Projects & Assignments and introduced the helpful Traffic Light Analogy for Incorporating AI into coursework.

Module 1: What do I need to know about AI

Module 2: What Do I Need to Rethink in Terms of the Exams, Papers, or Projects I Assign?

Module 3: How are Students Using AI Tools and How Can I Partner With My Students?

Module 4: What are the Ethical Considerations of AI in Our Higher Ed Context and Beyond?

Module 5: How Do I (Re)Design Courses in the Wake of the AI Disruption?

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Personalization is a goal many teachers strive for, but actually delivering it consistently for every student? That's the hard part. Time and bandwidth are the biggest barriers. We want to customize activities, differentiate, and support diverse needs, but too often those plans get left behind in the rush of day-to-day demands. That's why I turned to AI. It didn't just save me time-it helped me design classroom activities that truly connected with my students where they are, while amplifying their learning in ways that surprised even me.

Curious? Here are five simple ways to use AI to tailor learning activities you may already be using in your classroom to the needs of your students. Skeptical? Start small by just trying one and see how that works.

The Great Debate

Debates can be a powerful assessment tool-allowing students to express themselves while strengthening their critical thinking and communication skills. The social pressure of speaking aloud in front of the class, though, can fill students with dread. Plus, conversations are limited to students' perspectives and evidence they deem helpful. AI can assist them when preparing so they feel ready for the big day, and it can push them to think more deeply and critically than a peer.

After choosing a debate topic, assign or allow students to pick a character (real or fictional) to portray. Say, Thomas Jefferson versus Alexander Hamilton. Have students research their character's perspective and prepare arguments.

Use an AI chatbot (like ChatGPT or Gemini) to simulate the opponent. Here's a sample prompt base you can add on to: "You are Alexander Hamilton and I am Thomas Jefferson. Let's debate the role of the federal government. You open the conversation."

Encourage students to pause and ask the AI clarifying questions mid-debate to deepen their understanding. After the debate, ask the AI to analyze student responses for clarity, adaptability, evidence quality, and persuasiveness. Check out this sample debate where Jefferson (student role) and Hamilton (AI role) debate about the role of the federal government in our new nation (scroll up to the top to read the exchange).

Wrap up with class reflection or a quick write: What did you learn? How did your perspective shift?

Story Collaborator

If the goal is to get students to write more-which ultimately leads to their becoming better writers-sometimes they may need a little jolt to spark the process. Writer's block can stop students in their tracks, but AI can help generate targeted writing prompts or ideas that keep their creative juices flowing.

Have students ask AI to provide an interesting opening line or first few sentences of a short story. For example: "No one believed that Leo's cat could talk-until it demanded pancakes at breakfast." Students then use this as a jumping-off point, continuing the narrative in their own tone and style, developing their own characters and determining how the story progresses from there. This activity is about overcoming the initial hurdle of starting a story, not about having the AI do the writing. Students build confidence and improve their writing skills by taking AI-generated ideas and making them their own. The more they practice, the more they'll develop their writing style and voice.

Alternatively, consider a more call-and-response activity (scroll up to the top to read the exchange). As they're writing, students can ask AI to periodically introduce an unexpected twist that prompts the story to go in another direction, then adjust their story in response to the AI's suggestion.

Mock Career Interview

Access to real-world experts is powerful-but often limited. Finding the right people, coordinating schedules, and ensuring that every student gets personalized time? Tough, even on the best day. While nothing replaces real human connection, students can flex their career-readiness muscles by using AI-generated simulation interviews tailored to their desired careers. Want to be a nurse? Interview with a digital hospital administrator. Want to be a journalist? Chat with a news editor bot who wants to test your research skills and reporting instincts.

Students choose a career and role they want to be interviewed for. Creating a sample prompt that students can edit and input into their chatbot is helpful here. For example: "I'm a high school student interested in becoming a nurse. Can you act like a hospital administrator and give me a practice interview to see if I'm ready for a future health care career?"

Students respond to and ask their own questions by typing or using the voice feature in a tool like ChatGPT. Have students reflect on the feedback they receive and write a reflection on what they learned, as well as a plan for how they would improve in a real interview setting.

Study Buddy

Students aren't always the best study partners for each other. Some overestimate what they know, others would rather chat about nonacademic topics, and few are trained in using evidence-based study strategies like retrieval or spaced practice. An AI study buddy, though, never gets tired, distracted, or off-topic. Whether students need help quizzing themselves, breaking down complex topics, or identifying where their understanding falls short, AI can provide real-time support. Ideally, for this task, they're using a teacher-created chatbot that you specifically instruct to only provide hints without directly giving the answer.

Students choose a concept to start with. Using a chatbot, they can ask the AI to generate open-ended or multiple-choice questions to help them better understand the topic.

Alternatively, students can ask the AI to simplify and explain tricky concepts using terms they'll understand. For example: "I'm a fifth grader who loves baseball. Can you explain photosynthesis to me in terms I'll understand?"

Consider asking students to explain a concept to the AI. If the AI gets confused, the student revisits and clarifies: "I'm a fifth grader and I'm going to explain [INSERT CONCEPT HERE] to you. Listen carefully, and if I get something wrong or seem confused, ask me follow-up questions to help me understand better."

After the session, encourage students to reflect on what they've mastered, as well as what they misunderstood and still need to review.

Call-In Radio Show

Deep understanding comes from asking great questions, challenging assumptions, and digging beneath the surface. This activity turns your classroom into a radio talk show, where students don't just listen, they investigate and participate. After feeding curated sources (like articles, YouTube videos, and websites) into Google's NotebookLM, the AI turns them into a podcast-style summary with an interactive host. Students can practice crafting and asking effective questions while dissecting the host's answers, and they can surface misunderstandings of their own in the process-all using content you've vetted and selected.

Choose your sources. You or your students collect primary and secondary sources-think: articles from History.com, PDFs of scientific research, YouTube explainers, encyclopedia entries or textbooks, and even class notes or slides.

Upload to NotebookLM. Add a prompt like this: "Summarize the major causes of World War I using these sources. Include insights about alliances, militarism, imperialism, and the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand." Hit Generate, and NotebookLM creates a custom podcast-style summary based on your sources and prompt. Engage in Interactive Mode.

While students listen, have them jot down questions they'd ask the host, fact-check and critique the explanations, and identify gaps or biases in what's shared.

If you're ready to dive deeper, check out my growing collection of AI Activity Cards -21 classroom-ready ideas (and counting) built to help you make the most of AI, without the overwhelm.

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5 Engaging AI Classroom Activities to Try With Your Students

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From targeted writing prompts that get pencils moving to an interactive radio show where students join as the co-host, these AI classroom activities help students take learning to the next level.