Flint Tips: Admin & Teacher Guide

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."

When working within an Activity, you should always start by using the "Build with Flint" rather than building manually. This guided approach helps create more effective activities through targeted questions and saves significant preparation time.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Enhance engagement by including images, audio, or whiteboard elements in activities. Visual and interactive components significantly increase student participation and retention.

Incorporate assessment criteria directly in activity instructions for more effective evaluation. Frame how you'd like critiques to be formulated for consistent feedback. Additionally, you can upload pre-created word documents and PDF's you already have or want to emulate.

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.

LLM's, at their core, are designed to help enhance and improve writing. Flint is built to not help fully; 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).

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.

Group Analytics is a powerful tool located at the group (class) level that provides comprehensive insights into student performance. By selecting 'View Analytics', teachers can access detailed analytics of the group - 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.

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.

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.