This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps.
I recently talked with Lance Eaton, Senior Associate Director of AI and Teaching & Learning at Northeastern University and writer of AI + Education = Simplified. We traded ideas about what’s actually working. We came up with 10 specific, practical ways anyone who teaches, coaches, or leads can put AI to work.
1. Spark Richer Student Reflection
Lance: Ask students to reflect through a conversation with AI rather than staring at a blank page. A well-prompted AI will keep asking follow-up questions, pushing students past “I didn’t like it” toward real analysis.
2. Strengthen Your Syllabus
Jeremy: Give an AI assistant your syllabus and ask for a critique—for clarity, inclusivity, student-friendliness, and completeness. You’ll get specific, honest feedback. The AI won’t write the syllabus for you, but it will challenge you to make yours better.
We don’t always have colleagues at our side who can offer input on our work. So this is an objective, independent, instant, constructive way to get a useful critique.
3. Make Materials More Visual
Lance: Turn your syllabus into a graphic version students actually want to read. AI assistants can help you create visual layouts and simple comics-style explanations without any design experience.
4. Improve Lesson Plans
Jeremy: Describe your learning goals, your class size, your constraints—then ask AI to generate 10 warm-up or closing activities. You won’t use most of them, and you might remix a couple. But having options means you’ll often figure out something better than what you’d have designed alone.
5. Try It Until Something Clicks
Lance: Play with AI until it does something that genuinely surprises or excites you. That moment of “Wait, I could actually use this,” is what shifts the conversation from theoretical to real.
“For some students, this is really powerful, including students navigating English as a second language or ADHD or dyslexia—these tools can unlock things.”
6. Build Engaging Class Activities
Jeremy: When you need a compelling analogy for a hard concept, or a historical anecdote, or a mini case study for a short role-play exercise, AI assistants can be helpful in expanding what we consider. If you’re teaching a subject you know well, you can set the direction and take responsibility for verification.
NotebookLM and Claude can generate examples quickly, and can search your own notes to surface examples you’ve created yourself but lost track of. The goal of using AI in this context is strengthening engagement and improving the learning experience. It’s not for whiz-bang special effects.
7. Generate “Bad Examples” Safely
Lance: Examples can be useful to illustrate what not to do, but you’d never embarrass a student by presenting their work as an example of a mistake.
“We’re never, ever going to—nor should we—ask a student, ‘This was a really horrible thing, can I use it as a bad example going forward?’”
AI tools can generate intentionally flawed examples: a weak argument, a poorly structured paragraph, or circular reasoning. Students learn what to avoid.
8. Catch What You’re Missing
Jeremy: Ask an AI assistant to review your materials for accessibility gaps, unclear instructions or areas where your material could be more inclusive. Think of it as a thoughtful colleague who reviews your work and catches what familiarity made you miss.
9. Analyze Student Feedback
Lance: Strip names and any identifying information from end-of-semester feedback, then ask AI to identify themes, patterns, and gaps. As Lance put it, “What are some things that I’m not seeing? What are some assumptions I’m making or missing? What are some ways I might redirect the course?” Instead of spending hours manually categorizing open-ended comments, you get a usable overview in minutes—leaving more time to actually act on what students told you.
10. Remember What Was Said
Jeremy: Use an AI note-taker like Granola to capture transcripts of student meetings, advising sessions, and office hours. Request permission first. You’ll have searchable records of what was discussed, questions that came up, and what you suggested. That’s particularly useful as time passes and it gets harder to remember the nuances of what you talked about.
Bonus: Lance’s free resources for Educators
Lance is unusually generous in sharing what he’s learned. A few to bookmark:
- AI Syllabi Policies Collection — 200+ real AI policies from faculty across disciplines. See Lance’s post for more context and ideas for applying this.
- Prompts for Educators — a curated tab of tested prompts on his Substack
- Faculty Cohort AI Survey — Lance is gathering data about AI training
- AI + Education = Simplified — his newsletter, worth following for insight
This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps.