TeacherMade Support

How Do I Use the Prompt Assistant?

Do you use ChatGPT, MagicSchool, or other AI tools to write materials for your classes? If so, TeacherMade's Prompt Assistant can instantly convert the results of your chat sessions into interactive activities to give to your students!

Use your chat tool to create text with questions, then paste it into TeacherMade's Prompt Assistant. The Prompt Assistant will process your chat results, find all the questions within the text, and automatically create interactive, autograded TeacherMade questions in your activity. It will even set the answer key for you. You'll be able to create an interactive, instructionally robust activity in seconds!

Starting the Prompt Assistant

The Prompt Assistant appears in TeacherMade's activity editor, so your first step will be to create a new activity. Since the Prompt Assistant will generate a new slide every time you ask it to convert your chat results, you'll want to select the Slide View for your activity. And you probably want to start with a blank activity, rather than uploading a background. Click here for more help on creating an activity.

To start the Prompt Assistant, click this button in the editor.

A dialog box will appear. Copy and paste your chat results into the large text box.

PRO TIP: Many chat tools provide a convenient Copy button that may look something like this:

Set the point value per question, font and font size as you wish.

Then click the "Go!" button:

The system will process the input for a few second (magic takes time!) then insert a new slide into your activity. The questions will be included with their answer keys already set.

PRO TIP: If you'd like questions to be on individual slides, copy and paste each question one at a time. TeacherMade will insert a new slide every time you use the Prompt Assistant.

How To Prompt Your Chat Tool

Each chat tool works a little differently, but in general, you should inform the tool what you are intending to teach, then ask it for specific types of questions.

For instance, the quiz above was generated with this prompt to ChatGPT:

I teach tenth grade physics. I need a quick quiz about the first law of thermodynamics. Generate two multiple choice questions with a single correct answer, two multiple choice with two answers each marked with asterisks, two fill-in-the-blank questions, one numeric answer, and an essay question.

It helps to begin telling the chat bot what you're teaching, both subject and grade level. That will help the bot generate questions with the appropriate reading and complexity level.

PRO TIP: Chat bots these days can interpret requests that include specifications about Bloom's Taxonomy and Webb's Depth of Knowledge. You can try adding guidance to your prompts to achieve those levels of rigor.

It's important to tell your chat tool which types of questions you wish to generate and how many of each. The Prompt Assistant will create the following question types:

TeacherMade Question Type	How to Write Prompt
Multiple Choice	"Multiple Choice with a single answer." Some chat tools will generate Multi-Select/Checkbox questions if you don't specify "with a single answer." Note: TeacherMade will read the question and attempt to identify the correct answer for you. You can always override the system's interpretation by changing the correct answer after the import.
Multiselect / Checkbox	"Multiple choice with more than one correct answer." It's better to specify the number of correct answers. You can also ask the bot to mark correct answers with asterisks.
Short Answer	"Fill in the blank." TeacherMade will do its best to create the correct answer during the import.
Number	Any time TeacherMade recognizes a question that can best be answered with a number, it will create a Number question type. The Number question is more mathematically friendly than the short answer type.
Algebraic Expression	As with the Number type, TeacherMade will automatically recognize complex algebraic expressions and create the appropriate question type. TeacherMade will handle LaTex coding (a standard for rich formatting) in both text and questions.
Open Answer	"Essay question."

Check Your Work

SUPER PRO TIP: Do not trust AI to get everything right.

Chat tools represent the cutting edge of current Artificial Intelligence technology. They unquestionably have flaws:

They may generate language that is misleading.
They may invent factual information that has no basis in reality.
They may generate repetitive content such as questions with two answers meaning the same thing.
and so on.

ALWAYS CHECK YOUR WORK BEFORE GIVING IT TO STUDENTS. TeacherMade's preview feature will let you see the activity as a student would and test the scoring and correctness of the generated questions.