🤖 How to plan lessons with AI assistance

👩🏾‍🏫 A Teacher’s Guide to Getting Started Using FigJam With Students

FigJam is a free online whiteboard by Figma that allows students to create, collaborate, and engage in interactive learning activities. Teachers across the country are moving to FigJam as a replacement for Google Jamboard (that goes away on October 1st).

New classroom tech tools can be exciting … but also a little overwhelming as you first learn how to navigate it yourself and then teach your students how to use it.

This video by Michelle of Pocketful of Primary includes a phased, step-by-step plan for how to start using FigJam in the classroom PLUS free templates that you can use in your classroom this year.

💡 THE BIG IDEA 💡

🤖 How to plan lessons with AI assistance

Lesson planning has always been a struggle for me.

Coming up with new ideas. Keeping my students engaged. And just finding time to get them done!

Help is on the way. Just like it says on my favorite t-shirt to wear to teachers workshops and conferences: “AI is my new teaching assistant.”

Today’s updated post is on lesson planning with AI. If focuses on two areas:

1. Enhancing your existing lessons with AI

2. Planning new lessons with your AI assistant

(Click on either of those links above to jump straight to that section.)

This post is packed with tips, tools, templates, and other resources.

Here are a few key takeaways:

• When learning new content, students’ brains love analogies. They connect new learning to concepts they’re already familiar with. We can ask AI assistants for analogies to help students understand better.

• It’s helpful to know what students might struggle with when it comes to new content. Ask an AI assistant for common misconceptions or struggles.

• When using AI assistants to plan lessons, don’t just stick to one. Write a prompt (a question or request) and copy/paste it to multiple AI assistants. You’ll get a better variety of results, and you’ll start to learn the strengths/weaknesses of each AI assistant.

• Which multiple AI assistants? The four major AI assistants are ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and Anthropic Claude.

• Work from your academic standards. Ask AI for lesson plans and teaching ideas, but remember to include specific standards to get standard-aligned suggestions.

• Constantly evaluate AI suggestions. AI gives you a ton of ideas. But it doesn’t always give you good ideas. The human teacher is key. Use your teacher brain — and check out anything that seems fishy.

There are so many practical tips here — 15 ways to enhance existing lesson plans AND 10 tips to plan new lessons!

Read: Lesson planning with AI: Save time and get ideas

🎯 QUICK TEACHING STRATEGY 🎯

The power of creativity and mindfulness

Creativity and mindfulness can be powerful forces in learning, write Michele Haiken and Mark Gura in their book, Creative SEL: Using Hands-on Projects to Boost Social-Emotional Learning.

Why incorporate creativity into learning?

“Creativity resonates with our higher, loftier aspirations and is recognized by humans as being something special,” they write.

“Thus, creative learning experiences are highly engaging, meaningful, and can result in lasting learning. Creativity is a key enabler of problem-solving and is therefore something all student should develop.”

They cite research showing how creative activities are multimodal and combine different types of engagement and associated cognitive, behavioral, and emotional responses (Fancourt and Steptoe, 2018).

Ask yourself: To level up cognition and problem-solving, how can you infuse some creativity into learning?

👋 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!