Prompt Engineering for Educators

Prompt Engineering has come onto the scene as an important means to use generative AI to its fullest.  What and how you ask for information in a generative AI app can play a big role in the information you get.  One big suggestion by many is to just play around with it and try it out.  You can go to ChatGPT and just type in a prompt or click on one of the prompts that are listed.  Because generative AI uses natural language models, there is no learning curve for initial exploration.  It's also a good idea to compare different generative AI apps such as BIng Chat which uses the premium version of ChatGPT and can deal and has the most up-to-date information available or Perplexity.ai that includes sources with the information provided.  Another possibility is Google's AI assistant known as Bard.  The screenshot below shows how Perplexity.ai provides sources.

The next step would be to get the AI assistant to refine the information it provided.  For instance, in the above example about dolphins you might want to know more about the ways dolphins show self-awareness.  You can continue to refine content and chat assistants do remarkably well with follow-up prompts remembering the history of your interactions.

Chat assistants have proven to be quite remarkable in the education space for lesson planning, assessment construction and differentiation, and there are a number of sites that offer pre-written prompts for educators.  Code.org has two great prompt libraries the first one titled LLM prompts for educators. It offers a collection of prompts organized by beginner, intermediate and advanced and provides useful guidelines for creating prompts.  The second library include prompts for using with students called AI prompts for transforming student learning.  Another great place for educators to see a wide variety of prompts is  AI for Education's prompt library.  On this site prompts are organized by type such as lesson planning, administration and professional development.

There are also a growing number of courses available to help one learn how to write prompts.  I recommend the free course, Innovative Teaching with ChatGPT, to get started.  Vanderbilt professor Jules White uses very teaching specific prompts to show how to create and refine lesson plans and activities as well as differentiate for different types of students.  I recently took another course by White called Prompt Engineering for ChatGPT which takes a deeper dive by exploring some of the patterns that are useful in creating different types of prompts.  

AI is absolutely going to change the educational landscape and an easy way for educators to get started is to try their hand at prompt engineering.  I think they will immediately find that chat assistants have the potential to really save them time.