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 emails. 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 have been drawn from the most popular use cases for Flint we've seen. Clicking on one of them will start a conversation with a Flint activity creation helper that will walk you through the basics of what you need to create an activity of that type.
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.
There may also be space to upload additional content, which can 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. OPTIONAL: Preview the activity and make revisions
If you want to preview the activity and make revisions, you can do so by clicking into the activity settings.
More details about manual vs grade level previews and using the revise feature to quickly make changes are covered here along with how to make custom activities.
Share the activity link with students
Click "Share activity" to open the sharing panel, where you can determine which group the activity will belong to, the visibility of the activity, and who it's directly shared with.
Most importantly, you can copy the link to share with students here.
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. Enter your objectives
Explain what topic you want the activity to cover with students and any details about how you want them to interact with the AI.
This is also where you should 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. Choose from the activity types generated by Flint
Flint will brainstorm 3 different types of activities that could achieve the objective you put in. Choose one of these and click next to have Flint automatically write a set of rules for the AI and a grading rubric to assess students with. These and other settings are all further customizable by you and give you an activity that you can use immediately.
4. Preview the activity (and revise as needed)
You can manually try out the activity in the preview on the right or click on 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. The easiest way to achieve this is using the revise feature. You can type in the change you want and Flint will rewrite all relevant settings for you.
5. Click create and share with students
Once you're happy with your activity's behavior, make sure to click create to save the activity and be able to share it with your students!
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 GPT 4o 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 only has data up until October 2023).
Regarding what materials you can upload:
Any website links or files, including PDFs, documents, excel sheets, images, etc.
YouTube videos can be added, but Flint can only access the transcript and not interpret the visuals.
The limit on content that can be uploaded per AI activity is 96,000 words (~300 pages).
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.
Sharing activities with colleagues by duplicating activities
Sharing activities with colleagues by duplicating activities
An activity that you share with someone or that someone shares with you can be duplicated to a new group. You can use this duplicate feature to share your activity with other teachers or assign or duplicate it to a different group.
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:
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.
