That’s Not Crazy, That’s History!

This is a episode #3 in the AI Toolkit for Teachers series where we learn to use AI in our classrooms.

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Chapters w/ timestamps

00:00 Introduction to AI in Education
00:08 Mastering AI Skills for Teachers
00:44 Mindset Over Skillset
02:17 The RAFT Prompting Framework
05:57 Iterating on AI Outputs
06:42 AND WHAT ELSING Your Prompt
08:41 Split Testing and Guardrails
10:15 Citing AI Sources Correctly
11:28 AI Transparency in the Classroom
13:57 Conclusion and Next Steps

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Creators & Guests

Host
Aaron Makelky
Teaching ⭐️ AI Education ⭐️ Content Creation ⭐️ Entrepreneurship

What is That’s Not Crazy, That’s History!?

We don’t learn history, we do history! Chronicles from Mr. Makelkys World History Classes. We go through history in reverse-chronological order, we learn by doing, and we are the only history class that MAKES HISTORY!

3 AI Skills Everyone Needs in 2025 (Teacher Edition) #yt #ai
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[00:00:00]

Aaron: Are you overwhelmed by shiny AI app syndrome? Seems like there's a new AI app every day or a new model that's getting better. Before we even worry about what app we're using, we need to know what skills should I be mastering so that I can teach and help my students learn with AI.

Aaron: I'll help you make it simple. I'm going to break down my go to prompting framework Smart ways to improve the outputs from your AI tools. And how to use AI transparently with your citations.

Aaron: When you start practicing these three skills that I'm going to teach you today, you'll go back to your classroom and be a pro in no time and model those for your students.

Aaron: There's no need to be intimidated or overwhelmed by AI as a teacher, so let me show you how. Let's go.

Aaron: The first skill we need when using AI is actually about mindset, not about skillset. Here's what I tell teachers. If you had an intern student teacher who read every book in the library, every blog online, every textbook about everything, who [00:01:00] didn't sleep, who always wanted to make you happy and did things way faster than you could, what jobs would you give them?

Aaron: it starts with probably something I know well, so I can check their work. For example, when I have a student teacher, I might ask them to grade papers, but I don't trust that they're good at that yet. I am, so I could check their output. Or if I was going to have them do a lesson plan on a topic, I'd make sure I knew a good way to teach it before I had them do it for me.

Aaron: That's called a mastery led approach. I want to view my AI tools as these overly eager student teachers trained on everything that want to make me happy. But I don't know if I trust him, so I start by giving them tasks that I'm an expert in and I know what a good product looks like.

Aaron: Just like a human student teacher, communication with them is key. If I don't give them context and detailed instructions, how do they know if they're doing it right? And remember, AIs want to make you happy. They don't want to look stupid. They don't want to say, I don't know. They want to give [00:02:00] you something and say, see, look, I did how you said.

Aaron: We have to be specific, since our AI tool or student teacher is trained on 500 billion words. We've got to narrow down what we want it to look at, how we want it to write it, what direction or grade level or analogies it uses.

Aaron: We're going to use a framework that's easy to remember. Raft your prompts. When we raft a prompt, the first thing we're going to do is give the AI tool a role. And here's the simplest way to think about this. Who would you go to for help on this task? If you were writing an email to a parent, you would say somebody who's an expert at writing emails to parents. If you were trying to explain something to your students, you would say a master level history teacher.

Aaron: All we're doing is narrowing the context to our AI trained on everything student teacher by saying here's the role I want you to take. You can list this out or you can do narrative form. You can also think about, [00:03:00] besides just being a teacher, what specific content area, grade level, style, or experience level do you want the AI to take on and it will mimic.

Aaron: For example, I'm a history teacher. I might ask for a historian as the role, but I could be even more specific and say an expert world historian or an expert historian who specializes in international relations in the post World War I era.

Aaron: with the audience, who are they creating this content for? Who are you going to serve this up to? Who's going to use it? We want to start with a level. A beginner, experienced, college level. Usually this is what your students are. Let's say I have an eighth grade student who's on an IEP and struggles in my content area.

Aaron: I could say you're a master history teacher who specializes in World War II. Your audience is an 8th grade student who reads and writes well below grade level and they're on an IEP. You could also do, be my co teacher, be my partner, be my [00:04:00] colleague, be my mentor. When it comes to the F, that's just the format. Most people realize very quickly, Chet GPT is very wordy, and it loves to use colons, semicolons, bulleted lists. that can be helpful, but if you don't tell it a format, it's usually going to default to that. Like you're more than eager to do everything, Student Teacher wants to make you happy.

Aaron: And if you don't give it a specific format, it's going to do lists. Here's a bunch of different ones you can do, usually we're doing things like graphic organizers, charts, narratives, bulleted lists, tables, and email.

Aaron: A paper, a memo, then the topic, which is obvious, what are we talking about? as a teacher, it might be the curriculum, the unit, the theme, the reading.

Aaron: You can also use certain frameworks or processes that you've already taught When we put it all together, we raft this prompt and you can paste this in just like this role, expert instructional coach and [00:05:00] curriculum designer.

Aaron: Very specific. My audience is for an eighth grade algebra teacher. The format is I want a clear, step by step workshop outline. I'm gonna get bullets here, but that's what I want. And then the topic is a project based learning unit on linear equations where I want my kids to understand real world applications of this math.

Aaron: You can see right here, I put in that word for word prompt, and here's what I get. An outline, with bullets, it's got goals, the rationale, the components, very detailed and specific to what I want.

Aaron: When you raft a prompt, you get a very specific and useful output.

Aaron: Now, I strongly encourage you to pause the video and take the raft that I pasted in the description, put it into ChatGPT or whatever tool you're using, tools don't matter yet, and try an example of something you are already going to do this week that you would consider yourself a master of. You know what a good product looks like, and try being specific and raft a prompt.

Aaron: no matter how precise and specific you [00:06:00] are in your prompting, don't make this mistake and think, wow, whatever the AI output there the first time is all it knows or all it can do. Why? because that's the initial prompt. That helped us narrow the context down with a good rafted framework, but it's not the best that it can give us. Think of it like a first draft from your students. No matter how well you taught the content or how good a writer they are, their first draft is never the best they can do. What do you do with that draft? You iterate on it. That's what we're going to do with our prompts. Here are three iteration strategies that will make you better at using AI quickly.

Aaron: The first iteration strategy actually comes before we even tell the AI tool to generate a response. I call this AND WHAT ELSING your prompt. Think of your student teacher. You give them really clear instructions. You're intentional about your communication. no matter how well you try to explain stuff, they have questions.

Aaron: But they don't want to look stupid. So they just go and do the task, even though you didn't give them some [00:07:00] important context. Like, how long is the class period? To what reading level do you want me to write this on? How interactive do you want the lesson? Oh, well now that I hear those questions, I can give you better instructions, right?

Aaron: We can ask the AI tool to do the same thing by simply putting, what else do you need to know for me in order to execute this successfully? And you can even say, according to this rubric, or according to this outcome, or according to this exemplar, and paste in an example of what you want.

Aaron: By asking it what else it needs to know, it's going to give you a whole list.

Aaron: Let's take our previous rafted prompt and add the blue text for an example. I think I have good instructions, but I bet the chat GPT is going to give me some questions and say, Actually, I could do a better job if you told me these things. Because I asked for that before I wanted an output. As you can see right here, I didn't want to get overwhelmed, because sometimes it'll tell me ten different things that I forgot. I said, only ask the three most critical questions to help ensure the best quality of your output. Here's what [00:08:00] it told me. I need to know how much time do you have available for this What technology or classroom resources do you have that can make this interactive? So say, do you have a whiteboard versus a smartboard? In other words, three pretty important things, but not a list of ten, that I could go in and answer and say, Oh, it's a 90 minute lesson.

Aaron: My students have Chromebooks with Wi Fi, and I have a smart board, and they've never done project based learning before. Now give me an output, and I'm going to get an even better output, because I iterated on that prompt before I even sent it in by asking, what else?

Aaron: The last iteration strategy we're going to use to improve on outputs, once we've already generated them and used our raft, is we're going to split test. And one of the things people get so wrong about AI, they go, Oh, that's the wrong answer. What if you didn't ask it for the right answer?

Aaron: What if you split tested responses and said, Give me two different ways to do this. Give me five different ways I could approach this. You can even level those and say, give me [00:09:00] an A B version where one is simple and one is complex. Give me three of them at increasingly complex levels of explanation or vocabulary.

Aaron: Or just say, give me three totally different approaches to this. And then I'm the expert, because it's a mastery led domain for me, and I pick the best one, and it's presenting me with a menu of options, not the right answer.

Aaron: The next iteration strategy we're going to use is called giving the AI guardrails. In other words, tell it what not to do and say, stay between the lines. Here's some examples. Maybe I don't want a bulleted list. Maybe I don't want a certain framework or perspective. Maybe I don't want a style that it typically gives out.

Aaron: Like, don't use academic words. don't use language over an 8th grade level. Or, I could even say, don't search the internet, just use this source that I pasted in or upload. And you could say, ignore certain things. What that does, again, is further limit the context of what it's looking at. Since this AI powered student teacher [00:10:00] is trained on 500 billion words, it's really helpful to tell it what not to do in addition to what it should do.

Aaron: That's the power of guardrails.

Aaron: If this is bringing you value, make sure you subscribe to my channelso I can bring you more content about learning how to use AI.

Aaron: Now that we have a prompting framework with Raft, and three really effective iteration strategieswith and what else, guardrails, that is what not to do, and split testing, which will give me a menu of options, not one right answer, Now we have to build a research and cite AI and teach our students to do that, especially as a history teacher. We used to have to teach kids the Dewey Decimal System, and then we had to teach them how to Google search, which they never really learned.

Aaron: Now we have to teach them how do I interact with sources via AI instead of just Google search in my browser, and how do I cite those? Let's start with what not to do. Please, teachers, do not have your students cite The website that they're using for their AI tool. [00:11:00] ChatGPT. com claude. ai Don't cite the tool.

Aaron: That would be like citing the public library. Or the high school library down the hall from you. That's not helpful because that's a collection of sources. Not a specific source. You wouldn't say wikipedia. com had the info. You'd say, which page on Wikipedia, can I get a link, please? That's how we need to use AI with our students.

Aaron: But the problem is, how do I know where the AI is getting the information? If I'm doing research with AI, which you can do, you must have one that has internet accessibility. In other words, it needs to be able to give you links to websites in real time. At the time of recording, Chat GPT Search does this.

Aaron: Perplexity does it. I think the best. Some Google Gemini models also interface with Google Search. Claude does not in early 2025.You can ask it for a source. You can say, search the internet, find me three articles on this topic, and it should be giving you links.

Aaron: But, beyond that, I [00:12:00] can share links from my chat. Here's an example in chat GPT of how you can share a link to your chat.

Aaron: I'm in ChatGPT, but this works the same in pretty much any LLM. First, make sure I'm signed in. If you're not signed in, it will not let you share a link to your chat.

Aaron: Up by your name, there's the share button. We want to click that and make sure that our link works before we turn it into our teacher. You'll know with ChatGPT because behind the com, you'll see a slash share. We're going to hit create name. Now people can't tell who I am in this chat.

Aaron: I won't have my name or my account, but it will let them interact with it. So they could ask the next question in a row or go back to something I put in. What I do is just say, Hey, copy that, paste it in another tab and make sure it works before you turn that in or show that to whoever you're trying to be transparent about your AI use with.

Aaron: So let's test this link. I'm going to paste it in. Instead of just ChatGPT. com, I should get the whole conversation that I was having with the AI tool. I said [00:13:00] this, here's what it said back, back and forth. Here it is. I was talking to AI about 19th century Asian colonialism and you can see exactly what I was doing.

Aaron: That's how your students need to be citing AI. That's AI transparency. You as a teacher have to model that, but you also have to set an expectation of if you're using AI in my classroom, you need to share a link to your chat. Don't put, I use chatgpt. com to write my paper. That's not what I want. I want to see the actual chat log.

Aaron: One of the tools many students use is Snap AI. The biggest problem with Snap AI is you can't get a link to your chat log. If you have a student who wasn't signed in and they're trying to share something, the next best thing you could do is say just copy and paste everything that you did into your Google Doc or whatever product you're submitting to me so at least I can see that, or you could screenshot it.

Aaron: It's way easier though to just get a link to their chat.

Aaron: This AI Teacher Toolkit [00:14:00] series is designed to give teachers the knowledge and skills to be effective in the post generative AI classroom. Because AI is here, it's not going away. We have to learn how to teach with it, not ban it. Now that we have the fundamental skills of prompting, iterating, and citing AI, what apps should we be using?

Aaron: Especially in the classroom, especially with students. In the next video from this series, the AI Teacher Toolkit, We'll learn about the best tools for you, the teacher, and your students to use in the year 2025. I'm Aaron Makelky, your AI teacher. Thanks for learning with me and subscribing to the channel so I can keep sharing helpful AI tools and strategies with you in the future.

Aaron: Make sure you check out my next video which is all about tools.