A familiar challenge for teachers, especially for a subject like Geography with its trips, is the need to set cover lessons. Providing something meaningful for students often takes a huge amount of time in the planning, which can often result in frustration that not all students fully engage with what you’ve left behind. With some IB fieldwork scheduled, I thought this could be another brilliant test for AI.
My current large language model (LLM) of choice is Claude. I find its capabilities impressive and I also like Anthropic as a company. I stopped using ChatGPT months ago and spent some time with Google Gemini. I still like Gemini. I don’t see too much difference between Gemini and Claude, so switch between them and not especially methodically. Anyway, I turned to Claude and provided some context. Then, well within thirty minutes, I had two high quality cover lessons set up. I’d have never expected these to take the form of bespoke websites which incorporated interactive activities together with weblinks, different forms of stimuli and a set of questions which students would answer ‘the old fashioned way’ in their notebooks.
They say a huge part of successful AI usage is in the prompts, so I’m sharing those: https://claude.ai/share/c16e6419-def8-423e-a8b1-562ff90bc2d6
As part of the prompting, I provided as much context as possible. In some cases I uploaded schemes of work and resources so that Claude ‘understood’ where the cover lessons would fit in the sequence of learning. One of the things I like about Claude is the way it asks clarifying questions and offers options. This helps me to have a dialogue with the AI and to refine what I get back rather than just taking the first output.
Take a look at the websites which Claude generated for my Year 9 and Year 10 lessons.
You’ll see as part of my conversation with Claude, not only did it generate the two web pages for me, it also recommended Netlify as a free and effective way of publishing these sites so that I could share them with students. All I then had to do was share the links via our learning management system, ManageBac.
I am genuinely fascinated by AI but recognise that so many people are writing about AI all over the place: Substacks, LinkedIn, articles, books, etc. I’m sharing this usage case because I think it may be useful to teachers and I’ll leave you to judge that.
I’ve dabbled with Substack, both as an education-related newsletter and also for my general interests. Following Oliver Burkeman’s metaphor of viewing our ‘to read’ pile as a river rather than a tower, I see Substack as a raging stream. To that end, I’m doing something a bit different and I chose to put this article out on my WordPress site instead.
A couple of other bits which have sparked my curiosity:
- This article from Dr. Ian Kelleher at the Centre for Transformative Teaching & Learning, at St. Andrew’s Episcopal School in Maryland, frames our questions around using AI in education in the science of learning.
- Following a similar theme of going back to key principles, I really enjoyed this post from Jody Chan at Durrington Research School on how we maximise participation in lessons by being explicit with students on how we want them to participate. Chan’s post refers to Durrington’s Principles In Practice which are also well worth looking at for the same focus on teaching’s essentials.
- From reminders of the important to something slightly superficial and most definitely a ‘first world problem’, I know that going between different devices, personal and professional, with different browsers and accounts, it is sometimes frustrating to keep track of all my different bookmarks for websites. So, as is increasingly the case, I asked AI and it suggested Raindrop. I now use this browser plug-in across my different devices, accounts and browsers to ensure that all my bookmarks, professional and personal, are organised in one place.
Commonplace 