Exploring AI -- Prompting

 One of the keys to making AI work for you is being able to tell the AI very clearly what you need from it. After all, no matter how smart AI is, it's only going to be as smart as you tell it to be! Telling an AI tool what to do is called prompting, and that has spawned a new term -- promptcrafting. The book The AI Classroom: The Ultimate Guide to Artificial Intelligence in Education has probably the best framework I've seen for creating a prompt. It's called PREP:

• P -- PROMPT: introduce the question to the AI tool with a prompt, what you want it to do.
• R -- ROLE: give it a role.
• E -- EXPLICIT: be as detailed as you can in what you want it to do.
• P -- PARAMETERS: set up the parameters of the answer.

Here's a rough example. Let's say I want to create some study questions for the novel Fahrenheit 451. I could go to a tool like ChatGPT and ask it to write some discussion questions for the novel, but I may not get great results. A better way to ask would be something like this: "Create a list of discussion questions for the novel Fahrenheit 451. You are a teacher who wants to be sure her students understand the novel and can think critically about it. There should be at least 20 questions at all different levels of Bloom's taxonomy. The questions should be answerable by 8th grade students. Provide suggested answers for the questions as well." By giving all this information, you are more likely to get useful results. The great thing is that if you feel like you didn't get what you wanted, you can regenerate a response or refine it!

If you're interested in getting really good at promptcrafting, here's a self-directed lesson from Code.org, Khan Academy, ISTE, and ETS that will walk you through promptcrafting for novices all the way up to experts! What I have discovered is that the more I practice writing good prompts, the better I am getting at it and it is saving me so much time!

Do you have a promptcrafting story to share? If so, I'd love for you to drop it in the comments! Did you write a good prompt, lousy prompt, revise a prompt? How did you like your results? The more we can share, the more we can learn from each other and become really skilled at leveraging AI tools!