AI

AI Class Notes #13: Ground It Before You Generate

Thanks so much for your patience! Please find a revamped AI Class Notes focusing on the kinds of topics you shared in your response to the recent poll. That is, top ranked areas you voted for included 1) AI Productivity; 2) Resource Shares; and 3) Quick Tips. These issues will appear once a week, so check back next Wednesday.

1. AI Productivity

Drop your district's unit rubric (PDF) into NotebookLM. Have it convert the rubric into a student-friendly checklist with kid-language descriptions of each criterion. This can reduce a 30-minute rewrite to under five minutes.

Prompt:

Create a student-friendly checklist from this rubric. Use plain language at a 6th-grade reading level. Turn each criterion into one row with a "Looks like / Sounds like / Feels like" example. Add a final row for student self-assessment.

Source: https://alicekeeler.com/2026/04/11/5-amazing-features-of-notebooklm/

Want access to a 50 image prompt library appropriate for K-12? Check out this free resource compiled for you. Here's an image generated from a rubric prompt in the collection

2. Resource Shares

Matt Miller's free AI Teacher Toolkit, a 25-page PDF with copy-paste prompts, lesson ideas, parent-communication scripts, and student "by the way" lessons. No tool to learn, no account to build. Open the PDF, grab a prompt, paste it into whichever AI assistant your district has approved. Email signup required to download, but the resource itself is free and works in ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or Copilot.

Source: https://ditchthattextbook.com/ai-toolkit/

But wait, here's another resource for you:

See the rest online

3. Quick Tips

Open any NotebookLM notebook → Chat panel → Configure Chat. Drop in a one-line teacher persona: who you teach, what unit you're on, what tone you want. Every Studio output after that, including quizzes, study guides, audio overviews, follows that frame instead of giving generic responses. Two minutes of setup, every output sharper from then on.

Sample instruction:

You are helping a 9th-grade biology teacher mid-unit on cell respiration. Match a high school reading level, prefer concrete examples over abstract theory, and end every response with one comprehension-check question.

Source: https://www.jeffsu.org/notebooklm-changed-completely-heres-what-matters-in-2026/

“I used to be motivated to learn, and now there’s just really not much to be motivated for when you feel that school is more about just receiving a grade than learning, and there’s such an easy way for people to do that and cheat through that,” Pennington said.

Students said that they work less hard now than they did earlier in high school. They reported that the rigor of some of their courses has dropped to meet students at their diminished level.