If you’ve been meaning to try AI for a while but every tutorial you find seems to assume you already know what you’re doing, this post is for you. No jargon, no list of ten tools to compare, just three practical things you can do this week, starting from nothing, using a tool you almost certainly have access to already.

Why It’s Worth Ten Minutes of Your Time

Before we get into the prompts themselves, it’s worth being honest about where AI is actually useful for teachers, because it isn’t useful for everything.

The tasks where it genuinely earns its place are the ones that eat your planning time without requiring much professional judgement: writing a first draft, generating a set of questions, simplifying a chunk of text. These are tasks where the blank page is the problem, not the thinking behind it.

Writing a set of differentiated questions on a topic used to take the better part of 40 minutes. With AI, the same task takes around three. The questions aren’t perfect straight away, but they’re most of the way there, which means the work left is editing rather than starting from scratch. A sensitive parent email that might take 20 minutes of careful drafting can have a solid first version in about 30 seconds. A revision resource for yesterday’s lesson, something students can actually use, takes roughly four minutes to produce. Those are the kinds of tasks teachers find themselves reaching for AI to help with most.

The Tool to Start With: Google Gemini

If you search “AI tools for teachers” right now, you’ll find about 40 different recommendations and a fair amount of debate about which is best. Ignore all of that for now.

There is one tool worth starting with, and the reason for recommending it is straightforward: you probably already have access to it. It’s called Google Gemini. If you have a Google account, you have access. Many schools run on Google, so it may be available through your school account. If you have a personal Gmail, that works too. There is nothing to download, nothing new to set up. Go to gemini.google.com, sign in, and you will see a large text box. Type in what you want it to do, press enter, and it responds.

That really is the basic idea. It is a conversation. You type a request, it replies, you can reply to that reply, and the process continues until you have something useful.

Prompt One: Multiple Choice Questions

Type something like this into Gemini:

“Write five multiple choice questions about the water cycle for Year 7 students.”

In around 15 seconds you will have five questions with answers and a brief explanation for each. Check them through, because AI does occasionally get things wrong or produce questions that are slightly off for your context, but the blank page has been filled. You have something to work with.

You can change the topic, the year group, the number of questions, or the format. Ask for short answer questions instead. Ask for ten questions rather than five. Ask it to focus on a specific aspect of the topic. Once you have run through this once, adapting the prompt takes about five seconds.

When you want to move the content elsewhere, there is a copy button at the bottom of the response. Paste it into Word or whichever document format you work in.

Prompt Two: Simplified Text

Go to a source of information on your topic, An online textbook you have access to, or maybe try BBC Bitesize, and copy a chunk of text. Then paste it into Gemini with an instruction like:

“Rewrite this for a student who finds reading difficult. Keep the key information, but use simpler language and shorter sentences.”

You can specify the reading level, the year group, or any other requirements. The result won’t always be perfect, but it gives you a starting point that would have taken considerably longer to produce by hand. Edit what needs editing, and you have a differentiated resource in a fraction of the usual time.

Prompt Three: The Parent Email

This is the one that teachers tend to share with colleagues.

“Write a polite but firm email to a parent explaining that their child has been struggling to submit homework on time. The tone should be professional and non-confrontational. The student’s name is Jamie.”

You will get a draft back within seconds. Read it through, personalise the details, and adjust anything that doesn’t sound right for your school’s context. If the tone isn’t quite right, you can ask Gemini to adjust it: “make it slightly warmer” or “add a line about wanting to work together.” It will revise accordingly. The sentences you might have spent ten minutes agonising over are already written. You are refining rather than starting from scratch.

Two Things That Trip People Up

Vague prompts produce vague results. If you type something like “write me a lesson plan,” you will get something generic that probably isn’t much use, and you might conclude that AI isn’t worth the effort. The tool isn’t the problem. The more specific you are about year group, subject, time available, and what you actually need included, the more useful the response will be. Compare “write a lesson plan” with “write a 50-minute lesson plan for Year 9 science on the structure of DNA, including a starter activity, a main task with differentiation for lower ability students, and an exit ticket.” Same tool, very different output. This guide covers better prompting techniques.

The first response isn’t the final version. Don’t hand in the first draft of a report you’ve written, and the same principle applies here. Ask it to make the response shorter, change the tone, add something specific, remove something that isn’t right. The back and forth is where most of the value actually comes from.

Classroom Application: Three Steps to Try This Week

1. Start with one task, not several. Pick one thing on your to-do list this week, a worksheet, a set of questions, a letter home, a revision summary, and ask Gemini to do it. One task, done. See how it goes before adding anything else to the process.

2. Practise adjusting your prompts. Once you have a first response, ask Gemini to change something about it. Make it shorter. Change the reading level. Adjust the tone. Getting comfortable with this back-and-forth is what makes AI genuinely useful rather than occasionally helpful.

3. Check everything before it goes anywhere. AI makes mistakes. Questions can be inaccurate, emails can miss the right tone, simplified text can lose important nuance. Build in a quick read-through as a habit before anything goes to students or parents.

A Reasonable Starting Point

AI will not transform your workload overnight, and it is worth keeping expectations realistic. What it does is reduce the time spent on specific, repeatable tasks so that you can focus on the parts of the job that require your professional judgement.

Three prompts. One tool. That is a reasonable place to begin.

Beginners Guide Videos

For a useful set of tutorials that will get you started with AI, I’ve put together this playlist to guide you.