This tip continues the focus on using AI to assist in your teaching practices. It covers some starting points for writing successful AI Prompts.
Remember, this tip and all other like it can be found here.
- A successful prompt is halfway between a conversation and a google search request.
So your ideal prompt uses natural language with complete sentences, elaborates on the specifics of what you want, but is also as succinct as possible.
For example… “Create a multiple-choice quiz with 5 questions that assesses students’ understanding of photosynthesis at a 9th grade level. Include 4 possible answers per question and indicate which is the correct answer.”
- Whether you are asking for the AI to generate written content or an image, give specifics about the outputs you want.
You can specify if you want dot points, or a table, or how long you want the output to be. You can ask it to be concise, or detailed. You can ask it to provide the content in a particular tone, like simple, academic or personal, or to be tailored for a particular audience like fellow teachers, or students. If you’re after an image, you should not only specify the desired image content using multiple adjectives, but include a style, an artist, a rendering process, the level of quality and even the type, eg. Painting, photo, lino print etc.
For example… “Generate a formative assessment activity for a Year 10 Maths class on quadratic equations. Create two word problems that students will need to solve using their understanding of quadratics. Use terminology and language that is appropriate for ESL learners who have just completed 5-week unit on this topic. Create a rubric in table format for this same task which uses the MYP standards and criteria that students’ can use to self-assess against the activity.”
- The best way to get started is to simply try out a prompt of your own and see what results you get.
Don’t be afraid. Just write your prompt in natural language, being as specific but concise about your requirements as possible.
