What's Flint all about? 🧐
Flint allows teachers like you to input custom learning objectives and materials to design different AI activities to guide your students in learning new topics, practicing knowledge retrieval, developing AI literacy, and more. Using Flint enables:
Productive AI Use
Safely bring AI into your teaching as an answer-seeker, not answer-giver. See all student interactions with the AI.
Teacher Augmentation
Create AI activities to guide your students through learning objectives for any subject, in any language, at any time.
Personalized Learning
Give students immediate feedback on their work that's written by AI but designed and tested by you.
Logging into Flint 🧑💻
You can access Flint by visiting app.flintk12.com and signing into your school's workspace with your school email.
You'll be brought to your Homepage where all the activities shared with you will populate. This will include ones you've made, ones that you have interacted with, and ones you have been directly invited to.
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 group or activity that you make.
Creating an activity
AI activities on Flint are customized by you, for your students to interact with. They can be given specific learning objectives 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.
1. Choose activity type
These activity types reflect the most popular use cases for Flint we've seen. Clicking on one of them will start a conversation with a Flint. Flint will walk you through the basics of what you need to create an activity of that type by asking you questions about your desired activity.
These activity-type shortcuts were built with first-time users and teachers who need a quick assignment created in mind. Further down in this guide, we'll cover creating more customized activities from scratch.
2. Answer questions and upload content
Based on the activity type selected, Flint will ask you for some context on how you want the activity to be set up.
Within this chat with Flint, you can upload additional content to further customize the AI's knowledge and the learning experience for your students. Custom content could include a rubric, vocab list, textbook chapter, etc. Details about when custom content is suggested and limitations on what can be uploaded are further explained here.
3. Preview the activity and make revisions
You can use the preview on the right-hand side to try out the activity and see if you need to make any revisions. The preview has two modes:
Automated preview: Flint will generate an example conversation between the activity AI and the student.
Manual preview: You can send custom messages as if you were the student and see how the AI will respond.
After previewing, there may be parts of the experience you want to refine. You can ask directly in the chat for Flint to make edits to the activity.
More details about previewing and editing activities can be found in the section about making custom activities below.
Share the activity link with students
Once you click "Create", the sharing panel will automatically open. The easiest way to share with students is to copy the link and send it to them. Alternatively, you can configure which group the activity will belong to, the visibility of the activity, and who it's directly shared with within this panel.
View student sessions and analytics
You can see all submitted and in-progress sessions students create in the activity overview page. You can sort this list by alphabetical name, submission time, grade, etc. When you have 3+ sessions submitted for an activity, you'll see activity analytics describing the whole group's performance just above the list of sessions as well.
Each session will save the full conversation transcript as well as audio snippets if it's a spoken assignment. You can also see the feedback the student received after the session was submitted on the right.
Pro Tips for using Flint
More advanced use of Flint may eventually include:
Creating custom activities
Creating custom activities
1. Click "Create custom activity"
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 here.
If you need inspiration for what kinds of activities can be created, check out the templates published 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.
Customizing activities by uploading content
Customizing activities by uploading content
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 April 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 150,000 words (~500 pages). You can upload around 15 large files/websites of this size. Each upload cannot exceed the 150k word 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.
Making Groups to organize activities
Making Groups to organize activities
💡 A group can be for a course, department, extracurricular, etc.
When you create a group, you become an owner of that group. As an owner, you can customize the visibility settings, see group analytics, and invite new students.
To create a new group, just click the "Add" button next to the Groups list and then click "Create in workspace" to make a top-level group. You can also create groups within groups by choosing a specific group to add the new group in rather than the workspace.
Viewing Group analytics
Viewing Group analytics
You can ask Flint to analyze student sessions across different activities within a group. Just go to the group's page, click the three dots in the top bar, and go to "View 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.
Sharing activities with colleagues by duplicating activities
Sharing activities with colleagues by duplicating activities
There are two options for sharing an activity:
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.
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 group.
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.
Publishing and viewing activities in the Flint community
Publishing and viewing activities in the Flint community
You can publish activities to the wider Flint community and browse activities published by other teachers.
The Flint template 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!
Additional Resources
Below are some resources that may help you get to know Flint and how to use it better:
Examples of Flint activities:
About Flint:
If you have any questions or feedback while on the platform, you can also reach out to our team using the built-in support chat.
