Here are some insider strategies that transform Flint from a simple AI tool into your own personal Teaching Assistant (TA). Think of this as your secret playbook for maximizing student engagement, streamlining lesson planning, and leveraging Flint's potential without losing the human touch of teaching. Each "cheat code" is a proven technique developed through feedback from fellow educators who have successfully integrated Flint into their classrooms, designed to help you work smarter, not harder.
Flint Chat to Activity Transition
Flint Chat is a perfect place to brainstorm ideas for a lesson plan. If you want to convert what you have brainstormed into a fun and engaging Flint Activity - simply ask Flint to provide a structured summary of your discussion. This summary can be copied directly into the Activity environment as your starting point. From there, you can refine and enhance the Activity using the Build with Flint approach."
Activity: Build with Sparky
When working within an Activity, you should always start by using the "Build with Sparky" rather than building manually. This guided approach helps create more effective activities through targeted questions and saves significant preparation time.
Start Simple, Then Try Adding on More
Begin with basic activities and gradually add complexity as your comfort with the platform increases. This approach allows you to better learn how the product works and builds confidence/ This is true for admins rolling out Flint to teachers, teachers rolling out Flint to students.
💡 Start by finding an activity in our public library and modifying it to your liking, then testing it out with your students.
Be Specific with Prompts
Include grade level, subject context, and learning objectives in your prompts. The more detailed your instructions, the better Flint can deliver what you need. Specify desired output formats (bullet points, paragraphs, tables) for consistent results. Keep in mind that if you want something in the activity but do not specify - Flint will not be aware of this.
Class Settings: Class Context
The Class Context feature allows educators to provide up to 1,000 characters of context (grade level, subject, learning objectives, class size, student capabilities) when creating or editing classes, enabling Flint to generate more relevant prompts that automatically apply to all linked activities. This eliminates the need for teachers to repeatedly add the same class context to each activity, ensuring consistent, targeted support across all content.
Learn More: Using Class Context to improve Activity Prompting
Summary/Knowledge Check
When building an activity, ask Flint to summarize what it has so far. This helps you see what's working, what needs adjustment, and ensures alignment with your learning objectives. If Flint is not creating the activity exactly as you wish, you can ask Flint directly why it is not following through. Flint will then self-diagnose and can help you brainstorm solutions.
Preview Activities!!!
Any time you write something whether it is an essay or an email, you proof-read your work—the same should be true with a Flint Activity. Always test activities before sharing them with students to ensure they work as expected and align with learning goals. This quick step prevents common implementation issues. You can use the automated simulation and review what it could look like or the manual version and go through the activity yourself. Ideally, it is best to do both.
Incorporate Multimedia Elements
Enhance engagement by including images, audio, or whiteboard elements in activities. Visual and interactive components significantly increase student participation and retention.
Include Rubrics Within Prompts
Incorporate assessment criteria directly in activity instructions for more effective evaluation. Frame how you'd like critiques to be formulated for consistent feedback. You can ask Sparky to grade an assignment based off of rubrics like the IB criteria or you can upload pre-created word documents and PDF's you already have or want to emulate.
Regular Check-ins
Periodically review student interactions with Flint to identify patterns and improvement opportunities. Ask students what types of activities they prefer and which ones they find most valuable.
Reduce Wordy Responses
LLM's (large language models), at their core, are designed to help enhance and improve writing. Flint is not built to do the work for the student; however, some of the responses can be quite wordy and can in turn provide answers to students. One way to reduce this possibility is prescribing Flint with a word limit on its response (ex. Flint's response to math problems should be 75 words or less).
Explicit in Limits
If there is something that you do not want Flint to respond with, you should state it explicitly. For example, if a student is working within an Activity to create a conclusion to an essay, you could tell Flint explicitly what NOT to do and then how to interact with the student as an alternative option.
- ex. "IMPORTANT: NEVER rewrite any portion of a student's piece. Do not rewrite conclusions, or any other sections.
- Instead:
- Explain concepts and principles
- Point out specific issues using examples from their work (e.g., identify specific instances of passive voice)
- Instead:
Class Analytics: Performance Insights
Class Analytics is a powerful tool located at the class level that provides comprehensive insights into student performance. By selecting 'Analytics', teachers can access detailed analytics of the class - as well as the ability to prompt Flint to help with summaries including class performance, student engagement, and learning progression.
This data-driven approach enables educators to identify support needs, recognize high performers, and adjust teaching strategies based on concrete insights while maintaining student privacy.
Scaffold AI Interactions
We often see teachers initially putting too much into one activity and the result is not as effective. A best practice is to scaffold and design activities that gradually develop students' ability to effectively communicate with AI. For example, if you're an English teacher having students working on an essay - rather than having them do one activity of an essay, it can be split into multiple activities: 1) Brainstorm essay 2) Outline essay 3) Introduction draft etc. This allows the students to go through the process in bite-size points and also allows the teacher to examine the collective of the work and further ensure there has been no other AI incorporation from another source.
Differentiate for Various Learners
Differentiating a lesson is always important - and with Flint you can do the same. Create variations of activities to address different learning needs and styles. Flint can help generate differentiated prompts for diverse student populations. This can also be done by incorporating accommodations within the class-level Class Context
If there is another strategy you find helpful that you would like to see added to this document, please reach out to jacob@flintk12.com.