Get Started with Flint (for Teachers)

Flint allows teachers to use AI for themselves and with students:

• Flint chats help you with your own tasks as a teacher, like creating materials and writing feedback.
• Flint activities are interactive, AI-powered experiences you can design for your students, like problem-solving, language practice, and debates with AI.

With both chats and activities, you can input custom guidelines and materials. Using Flint enables:

Teacher Augmentation 🧑‍🏫

Leverage Flint as a teaching assistant who can help you brainstorm, create, and refine your own teaching materials, feedback, and more.

Productive Student AI Use 🧑‍🎓

Safely bring AI into your teaching as an answer-seeker, not answer-giver. See all student interactions with the AI.

Personalized learning 🧠

Create AI activities to guide your students through learning objectives for any subject, in any language, at any time.

Immediate feedback ⚡️

Give students immediate feedback on their work that's written by AI but designed and tested by you.

Detailed Overview of Flint Features

You can access Flint by visiting app.flintk12.com and signing into your school's space with your school email.

You'll be brought to your Homepage where you can start new chats and activities.

Your students can log in at the same link above using their school email address. You can also send them a link to a specific class or activity that you make.

NOTE: If you see {your name}'s School in the top left corner, this means you are not affiliated with your school's paid account. Click on {your name}'s School and then switch to your school's name — as seen below.

Before diving in, it's helpful to understand how Flint is organized:

• School: Your school's Flint environment containing all teachers, students, and content.
  • If you created activities in a personal space, you are able to move those into your school
• Terms: Academic time periods like semesters or quarters (usually managed by admins). Your previous term activities will always be available — just click on your school name in the top left corner.
• Classes: Classes, clubs, or other organizations you create or are assigned to
• Activities: AI-powered learning experiences you design for students (assignments, practice, tutoring, etc.)
• Sessions: Individual student interactions with an activity
• Chats: Your personal conversations with Sparky (Flint's AI) for teacher tasks

Chats with Flint allow you to use the latest AI models to supercharge your own work. Some of what these chats can do include:

• Adjusting the reading level of a text for your students.
• Creating teaching materials like worksheets and lesson plans.
• Generating content like report card comments and emails.

Any conversations and materials you upload within Flint are securely kept within your school's Flint school.

You can view all the chats you've had with Flint in the "My chats" tab in the sidebar.

AI activities on Flint are customized by you, for your students to interact with. They can be given specific teaching guidelines and materials to follow and can assess your students or give them extra help. Check out our use cases page to see more about how activities could look for different subjects.

Tips for Great Activities:

• Be specific: Clear learning objectives lead to better AI responses
• Upload materials: Especially important for obscure topics, specific viewpoints, or current events
• Test thoroughly: Use the preview feature to see how students will experience it
• Iterate: Your first activity won't be perfect—that's okay! Revise based on student feedback

Explore the School or Public Library. Here, you will find activities that have been created by fellow teachers within your school or across the globe! By exploring the library, you are able to...

• See what's possible
• Learn from others' designs
• Avoid common mistakes
• Understand different activity capabilities
• Explore activities from a student perspective
• Save time by editing an activity as opposed from starting from scratch

How to duplicate

1. Browse the Public Library or your school's library for activities in your subject area
2. Experience the activity as a student to understand the student experience and identify what you like and don't like
3. Click the three dots and select "Duplicate" to make a copy you can edit
4. Customize the activity by telling Sparky what you want to change. Example: "Turn this Spanish restaurant roleplay into a French café conversation"
5. Preview your changes and iterate until it's perfect
6. Click "Create" when ready

Classes are one of the most powerful tools in Flint. They centralize your class, reduce repetitive prompting, and provide insights into student progress.

Why Classes Matter

• Class Context: Set once in Class Settings—Sparky remembers it for every activity in that class. Reduces time typing context repeatedly.
• Gradebook: Centralized view of all student grades across activities. Filter by student or activity, download as CSV.
• Class Analytics: Comprehensive analysis of all activities. Ask Sparky custom questions like "Give me strengths and growth areas for parent-teacher conferences."
• Moderation Settings: Customize which categories trigger email alerts. Add colleagues as moderators to receive notifications.
• Subclasses: Create nested class for differentiation. Example: A subclass for English language learners with specialized learning goals.
• Centralized Hub: Single location where students access all class activities and track progress throughout the term.

Setting up Classes

1. Click "New Activity" within a class

2. Talk to Flint about what you want to make

Explain what topic you want the activity to cover with students and any details about how you want them to interact with the AI. Flint will ask follow-up questions to gather all the right context to create an activity for you.

You can also upload custom teaching materials to further guide the AI. More details about when custom content is important and what can be uploaded are in the "Customizing activities by uploading content" section below.

If you need inspiration for what kinds of activities can be created, check out the published activities shared by other teachers or use cases curated and explained by the Flint team.

3. Preview the activity (and revise as needed)

You can manually try out the activity in the preview on the right or play a grade-level preview to see an example conversation that the activity and student could have.

After previewing how the activity will respond and evaluate students, you might want revisions to the activity behavior. You can type in the change you want and Flint will rewrite all relevant settings for you.

Optional: Build manually

With every activity, there is the option to manually review and edit the settings. You can view and change them in the "Build manually" tab.

When you upload materials to Flint, the AI will prioritize drawing information from the materials provided, but still contextualize and draw from its large language model (LLM) training data to fill any reasoning or knowledge gaps as it interacts with students.

Flint will view the content you upload as the primary source of truth before using information from its training, thereby minimizing hallucinations and guiding students in a way more similar to how you would teach the topic.

Thus, uploading materials is extra important for any activities involving:

• An obscure topic for which the AI may not have training data.
• Adopting a specific point of view on a topic.
• Covering a current event/emerging topic (because the AI model Flint uses only has data up until October 2024).

Regarding what materials you can upload:

• Any website links or files, including PDFs, documents, excel sheets, images, audio files, etc.
• YouTube videos can be added, but Flint can only access the transcript and not interpret the visuals.
• Math equations, code snippets, photos, whiteboard drawings, and rich text can also be attached.

The limit on content that can be uploaded is 100 pages double-spaced. You can upload around 16 large files/websites of this size. Each upload cannot exceed the 100 page limit.

Generally, adding materials is always better than not because the materials you add can also implicitly hint to the AI about the reading level, knowledge level, and learning expectations you have for students. Think about it as if you were training a new teaching assistant to guide your students on a new topic. The TA may possess basic knowledge, but, with materials you provide, they can better guide students in the way you prefer.

💡 A class can be for a course, department, extracurricular, etc.

When you create a class, you become an owner of that class. As an owner, you can customize the access permissions, see class analytics, and invite new students.

To create a new class, just click the "Add" button next to the class list and then click "Create in school" to make a top-level class. You can also create classes within classes by choosing a specific class to add the new class in rather than the school.

You can ask Flint to analyze student sessions across different activities within a class. Just go to the classes page, click on "Analytics"

Here you can see overall statistics and snippets from student sessions and ask Flint to analyze anything from an individual student's performance over time to where students improved from one activity to another to what skills or topics students consistently struggle with.

Additionally, you can view how your students work compares to Bloom's Taxonomy as well as your course curriculum.

There are two options for sharing an activity:

1. Duplicating: best for if you want to share a copy of an activity and don't want to combine submissions with theirs or let them edit your original activity directly.
2. Adding an owner: best for if you want to co-create an activity or co-administer an activity.

To duplicate: You can click on the three dots at the top of an activity page to duplicate your activity. After duplicating, you can share your activity with other teachers or assign it to a different class.

If you want your colleague to be able to edit the activity and view all submissions, make sure you add them as an owner in the "Share activity" panel.

You can publish activities to the wider Flint community and browse activities published by other teachers.

The Flint Public Library consists of activities published by the Flint team and teachers at other schools worldwide that are using Flint. These activities are all free for you to use and remix!

What is it?

Gradebook is a centralized source that provides you with all of your students' grades within a class. It's a powerful tool that allows you to get a quick overview of your students' grades and makes record keeping easy.

Why is it important?

Gradebook helps teachers track student progress, inform instructional practices, and find trends throughout their classrooms. It'll save teachers time on grading without needing to go into individual activities to see their student's progress.

It'll also help teachers individualize student learning by allowing them to target specific skills. Whether it's additional scaffolding or enriching activities, you can use your Gradebook to support all of your learners!