While instructional technology coaches are amazing assets to a school, they are busy people and may not always be available when that inspiration strikes or at the moment you need them. For those moments when your tech coach is unavailable, generative AI can help fill the gaps.
Four Ways to Leverage Generative AI as a Virtual Tech Coach
1. Lesson Design
Perhaps the most popular use of AI by educators is collaborating with AI as a lesson design partner. This is one of the easiest ways to get started using AI.
Because generative AI is trained on billions of pieces of data, it can draw upon ideas shared by countless educators from across the world. It can make connections for you based on content that you would never have the capacity or time to complete on our own. You can take advantage of this great database of knowledge and call on the chatbot to help you brainstorm ideas for delivering your lesson.
For example, in this scenario, you might enter a prompt such as: “Design a three-day lesson on ecosystems for fifth graders that integrates digital research and a multimedia presentation,” or “Suggest ways to use collaborative documents to support group work in a high school history project.” AI will respond with ideas that you can review, revise, and use as desired.
It’s important to note that AI isn’t perfect. It’s simply predicting what content and connections you may want based on the text in your prompt. If you see something that you don’t like, don’t hesitate to tell AI to generate something different. If you are presented with a list of examples and you like one best, then ask the AI to expand on that specific option.
Similarly, you can ask AI to integrate specific tech tools that your students have available by indicating that your students have access to, say, a Chromebook, the internet, Google Workspace, Canva, or potentially research databases. You can guide the chatbot to provide examples that are most relevant to your students and your available resources.
As you go through the process, you may also discover that the AI will prompt you about follow-up questions. It has become quite common for chatbots to ask questions like:
- “Would you like me to format this into a one-page document that you can download?”
- “Would you like me to generate an assessment that can be used with this lesson?”
- “Do any of these examples sound especially on target for your needs?”
It’s helpful to engage with AI as if it were a human. Answer its questions. Have a conversation. Share what you like or what you don’t. Provide follow-up details to help refine the response you’ve received.
And remember, you are always the final judge of the information that is provided. Just like with humans, AI can make mistakes. They can give us ideas we don’t like. They can misinterpret our questions or go down the wrong path. Through thoughtful follow-ups, however, you can generate content that will meet your needs.
2. Differentiation and Support
Rather than using AI to generate a lesson from scratch, you can also use it to help refine lessons that you’re already using or have planned.
For example, you might have a digital storytelling unit that you’ve designed. Let’s say you like most of it, but you’re concerned that it’s not very differentiated to the various reading proficiency levels of your students. In this situation, you might paste in your lesson plan and then request something like, “Provide three ways to differentiate this storytelling assignment for students reading below grade level.”
Similarly, you might ask for ways to extend learning for your advanced students. For example, a math teacher might prompt AI with: “Suggest extension tasks for advanced students in a unit on algebraic expressions using online digital tools.” To improve the quality of the results, you may again want to input a copy of the lesson being used or a description of the achievement levels of the students in the class.
AI can propose scaffolds, enrichments, and accessibility features, often including strategies that you may not have considered.
3. Assessment and Feedback
Assessment and feedback are critical to the learning process. They are also very time-consuming tasks.
AI can again help here, as it’s often really good at designing assessments and streamlining feedback channels.
When generating assessments for a project where students are engaged in creative efforts using technology, you might prompt with something like, “Create a rubric for a collaborative science video project.” To make the rubric most useful, you want to include details about the project as well as content standards being addressed. Sharing the grade level is also very helpful.
When looking for ways to provide student feedback, you could enter a prompt such as: “Generate reflection prompts students can respond to after completing a digital research task.” Again, providing more specific details will improve the outcome. The chatbot might suggest formative check-ins and digital tools that make collecting student thinking faster and easier.
Another option is to leverage tools like SchoolAI, which have student-facing chatbots that can be customized to your lessons and are actually used by the students to get real-time feedback on their work. If you’re not sure how to do something like this, it’s a perfect opportunity to ask your AI chatbot for step-by-step directions for how to set this up.
4. Creativity and Inquiry
One of the benefits of tech-rich instruction is that it often facilitates student problem-solving, inquiry, and creation. AI chatbots can help you think beyond traditional learning tasks and aid with sparking creativity and inquiry-driven learning.
For example, you might prompt: “Generate student inquiry questions for a unit on climate change that lead to authentic research projects.” You could also type in: “Suggest ways students could use technology to present their understanding of historical events beyond slide decks.” This type of open-ended prompt can reveal ideas that you may not have considered, such as podcasts, infographics, videos, websites, and interactive exhibits—all powered by student choice and creativity.
Four Tips for Building Your Virtual AI Coaching Workflow
Whether you use one of the four integration suggestions listed in this article or pursue other areas in which you have classroom needs, the following four tips can help you develop a quality AI workflow.
1. Start with small tasks.
This will help you get comfortable with the process. Rather than generating full lesson plans, perhaps begin with parts of a lesson, like lesson hooks, discussion questions, or project ideas, to make the experience more digestible and accessible.
2. Layer in details.
As you generate your prompts, specify grade-level learning goals and how you want the tech used. This will ensure that the outputs you receive are more targeted to your specific needs.
3. Iterate.
Don’t expect perfect output based on your first prompt. Keep refining prompts and following up until you get more targeted results that will work for you.
4. Save your best prompts.
This tip can save you a lot of time in the future. If you find a prompt that works really well for one lesson, you might be able to reuse the format of that prompt by switching out the specific details and then generating another lesson idea.
You can then build a virtual coaching bank of your best prompts to be referenced later. You might even exchange these lists with your colleagues.
While AI won’t replace the expertise of your instructional tech coach, it can extend their reach and give you just-in-time coaching whenever you need it. It can be a partner who is ready to help you innovate, differentiate, and empower students with technology.
Generative AI won’t replace your IT team, but it can give you a powerful new ally at your fingertips. It’s your patient and always available tech assistant that can save you time, reduce stress, and get your classroom up and running again in minutes. And for those situations where the AI-generated steps don’t lead you to a solution, you can still reach out to your trusted IT team for support.
AVID Connections
This resource connects with the following components of the AVID College and Career Readiness Framework:
- Instruction
- Systems
- Break Down Barriers
- Collective Educator Agency