I have been an avid adopted of AI, but at the elementary level of chatbots and Notebook LM. Claude Code is not something I’ve played around with yet very much. I thought I’d shard a few ways I have been using AI to either improve my teaching or help with an interest of mine.

  1. Asking questions while reading: I really enjoy being able to get context, word definitions, and descriptions of people or events while I am in the middle of reading something. This helps me better understand what I am reading, but I’ve found it also allows me to follow tangents that the book I am reading isn’t necessarily going to satisfy. At this point, I have a Project in ChatGPT called ‘My Reading’ where I ask all my questions. The idea is that the AI will start to understand both what I am reading and what I am interested in and eventually make it’s responses more personal. That said, of late I have been using Gemini and Claude much more than ChatGPT, and I haven’t yet made the equivalent Gems or Projects in those apps.

  2. Creating tailored short readings for my classes: I organize my teaching around a specfic framework that includes what called an ‘IN." This is the part of the lesson where I am introducing the topic to the students. Sometimes my INs textual context descriptions. AI is great for producing these because I have gotten good at proving precise prompts that explicitly describe grade level, topic, length, as well as weather or not I want certain key words bolded and then defined. I can also pinpoint the context since I already know where I am going with the lesson. See example below.

  3. Diet and excercise evaluation: I have gotten into the habit over the past few years of keeping a Google Doc where I record a few details about my day, including my Oura ring score, when I start and stop my food consumption every day, what food and drink I consume, as well as my steps, mediation details, and exercise details. I have created a custom Gemini Gem that I have called my ‘Health Advisor.’ It knows my health goals and every morning I give my daily log and have it give me a score, along with notes and recommendations for the new day. I love it. Not only does is nudge me to make better choices, but I love that I get a daily score based on a specif rubric that I created (and can tweak anytime I like).

I have other use cases to share, but these are the most important for me at the moment.