🗑 Make any Google Slides template work using AI

🙈 Connect with your quiet students

Ever wonder about your quiet students — your shy ones?

Do you worry that their voice won’t be heard … that they won’t be noticed or will slip through the cracks?

There’s a teacher tech tool that can help — Vivi for Teachers.

It brings students from the back row to the front row by letting them share their device digitally to the big screen in front of the room.

They don’t have to get up. They just connect and it shows up.

Best of all, this teacher tech tool is completely FREE!

Sign up for your FREE Vivi for Teachers account and get started now.

PS: I talked about it in this TikTok video.

💻 TECH TIP 💻

🏀 Get March Madness teaching ideas from ChatGPT

March Madness is here! If you’d still like some creative teaching ideas to capture the excitement, use this copy/paste prompt with an AI assistant like ChatGPT. (Make sure to customize the parts in bold before you submit it!)

I'm a high school science teacher. We're learning about molecules in our current unit. Right now, the NCAA basketball tournaments are starting and I'd like to use it as a way to engage student interest and make learning relevant to this thing that students love. Help me brainstorm several ways that I could teach about molecules -- that's relevant to our grade level and content area academic standards -- that would make class feel a little more like March Madness. Please give me 10 quick summaries of teaching ideas -- and one fully developed idea for the idea that you think is best.

My example was high school science studying molecules. For the 10 quick summaries, here are a few ideas it came up with …

• Molecule Madness Tournament: Assign molecules to student teams. They present and vote … and the best ones advance.

• Bracketology of Bonds: Use a bracket format to explore the hierarchy of chemical bonds. Bonds advance based on strength and properties.

I don’t teach science so I don’t know if any of these ideas are any good! But even if they aren’t, they might spark an idea of something that DOES work.

And in the fully developed idea I asked for? It breaks it down into “Selection Sunday,” “Practice Week,” “Tournament Rounds,” and “Championship Analysis.” Pretty impressive!

💡 THE BIG IDEA 💡

🤖 How AI can make any template / teaching idea work

Whenever I create a new Google Slides / PowerPoint template an share it here, it’s inevitable …

I’ll get an email from a teacher saying …

• “How can I use this in a third grade class?”

• “How can I use this to teach science to middle schoolers?”

• “Could you use this in ninth grade English?”

I’ll usually reply back and try to offer some ideas. (Even though I’m thinking, “I taught high school Spanish and you know your content way better than I do … but I’ll do my best!”)

Now, we ALL have an AI teaching assistant that can offer us those ideas.

All you have to do is ask an AI assistant like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, or Anthropic Claude.

The trick? If you’re new to AI assistants, it can be tough to write a prompt with the necessary context to get what you REALLY want.

That’s why I’ve written the prompts for you.

In today’s new post — How AI can make any template work for your class — I’ve written prompts that you can copy/paste into an AI assistant like ChatGPT.

Customize it with your grade / content / teaching material.

Then submit it.

I have pre-written copy/paste prompts for the following fun teaching ideas:

• the Instagram Stories template

• the Yelp review template

• the Spotify Wrapped template

• the Amazon product page template

• the Amazon home page template

• the Amazon product search template

• inspiration from popular video platforms (YouTube, TikTok, etc.)

• inspiration from a specific type of video (unboxing, top 10, etc.)

These are some of my favorite templates from our free templates library …

… and some of my favorite fun teaching ideas from my book, Tech Like a Pirate.

Use the red button below to jump over to the post and copy/paste those prompts into the AI assistant of your choice …

… then see what fun, creative teaching ideas you can come up with — using AI as your teaching assistant!

👋 How we can help

There are even more ways I can support you in the important work you do in education:

1. Read one of my six books about meaningful teaching with tech.

2. Take one of our online courses about practical and popular topics in education.

3. Bring me to your school, district or event to speak. I love working with educators!