Tools like SchoolAI have made generative AI much more accessible to both classroom teachers and their students. These tools do much of the prompt engineering behind the scenes, allowing you to quickly fill out a few key text boxes and get to work teaching.
Among the many teacher tools provided by SchoolAI, the ability to create custom chatbots for students—called Spaces in the SchoolAI ecosystem—is the feature that is potentially the most transformational in the learning process.
By designing custom chatbots that align to your learning objectives, teachers can provide each student in their class with an AI chatbot that reinforces those objectives, guides conversations and interactions with students, and provides personalized feedback on those interactions.
How It Works
To get started, you’ll need to set up your free SchoolAI account. Once you’re logged in, click on the Spaces menu at the top.
If you’re just starting out, you may want to try some of the pre-created options that are available. You can access these by choosing Discover from that same Spaces menu at the top. Here, you’ll find a host of options. Some of the choices that you’ll find include Sidekick, which is like a student tutor; Bellringer and Exit Ticket, which engage students in activities to open or close out a lesson; and a host of others, like Video Explorer, Topic Explorer, Career Exploration, Chat Bot Tutoring Session, and Choose Your Own Adventure.
Further down the page, you’ll see chatbots—or spaces—created by other educators. If you find one that aligns with your needs, you can remix it, customizing it to meet your specific classroom objectives and saving you the work of starting from scratch. Even if you don’t end up sharing these premade spaces with your students, you can use them to give you ideas around spaces that you might want to create on your own. Browsing through these is a great way to get ideas and brainstorm possibilities.
The most powerful option might be designing your own custom space from scratch. To do that, you would again click that Spaces menu at the top, but this time, you would choose the Create option. From there, click on Create a new space.
This will bring you to a simple page that has a few easy-to-understand fields to populate. Begin by adding a title and writing your AI prompt. The directions appear right inside the box where you’ll type, so they’re hard to miss. If you’re not sure what to type in, you could go back and review some of those premade examples to get ideas. The more you experiment with this, the better you’ll get.
You can also enter your academic standards and even attach a document containing content that you want the chatbot to focus on. These two options help you better guarantee that the chatbot experience will directly support your learning targets.
After that, you can add a cover image, a subtitle, teacher notes, and a student welcome. The welcome note appears to students when they first open the chatbot.
To test out your custom chatbot, click the preview screen on the right. As soon as you do, you will experience the student view on your screen, right beside the prompt that you’ve created. If you test out the chatbot and find that it’s not quite what you want, you can revise your prompt text and test it again.
When you do have the prompt the way you want it, click the Save & Launch button at the top. That will open a pop-up menu that allows you to send the chatbot experience to Google Classroom, copy a QR code, or copy a link to provide to your students.
When students engage in the activity, you can go to your teacher dashboard to get feedback on each student’s interaction with the chatbot. This is a great way to peek into the thinking process of your students. You can get to this teacher interface by clicking on Spaces at the top and then selecting the third option, Sessions.
Overall, the process is relatively simple and straightforward. In just a few minutes with SchoolAI, you can create an engaging and interactive experience for your students to enjoy and learn from, or you can always select one of the premade spaces to use.
Integration Ideas
While you will ultimately be the best judge of what activities will meet your academic standards, here are a few chatbot ideas to get you started:
- Guide students through the creation process. That could include such tasks as writing a paper, creating a slideshow, recording a video, or generating an infographic.
- Prepare for a debate by having the chatbot engage in a friendly back-and-forth discussion with the students over topics of their choice.
- Engage in a conversation with a literary character or historical figure.
- Experience “choose your own adventure” stories, where students engage in interactive narratives and make decisions that influence the story’s outcome, promoting critical thinking and engagement.
- Help students critique and analyze a science experiment.
- Guide students through the process of designing, creating, and testing a prototype.
- Transport students through time to be a reporter at a historic event.
- Support student learning as a subject-matter expert or tutor.
- Engage in a conversation to practice a new language.
- Participate in a constitutional convention as a state representative.
To go beyond this list and find an idea that aligns with your own unique needs, ask yourself a few key questions:
- What type of interaction would you like your students to have?
- Who would you like them to talk to?
- For what purpose would you like them to engage in the interaction?
- About what?
Then, with those answers in mind, design your own custom chatbot to engage with your students to meet your desired goals. Custom chatbots can provide a great option for engaging all of your students in a personalized way, while also giving you feedback and insights into each of those interactions. This can serve as a powerful classroom experience, and with time considerations always at the forefront, it can provide efficient opportunities to engage your students.
AVID Connections
This resource connects with the following components of the AVID College and Career Readiness Framework:
- Instruction
- Systems
- Rigorous Academic Preparedness
- Student Agency
- Insist on Rigor
- Break Down Barriers
- Align the Work
Extend Your Learning
- SchoolAI (official website)