Tips for Using Khanmigo Lesson Hooks Image: You Gotta Have a Hook! from Science Teaching Junkie Tips for Using Khanmigo Lesson Hooks We've been trying the various AI-powered tools available through Khanmigo Tea…

 

Image: You Gotta Have a Hook! from Science Teaching Junkie

Tips for Using Khanmigo Lesson Hooks

We've been trying the various AI-powered tools available through Khanmigo Teacher Tools in the YC Canvas instance. Sometimes, the tools are not very intuitive. This month we'll look at how to get the most out of the Lesson Hook tool, which offers to "Plan compelling lesson starters to engage students."

A lesson hook can be any form of lesson starter, such as a provocative question, puzzling statistic, or personal anecdote, that is designed to engage students' interest in the content they'll be learning. Recently, we tried using the Khanmigo Lesson Hooks tool to generate a lesson hook for Nursing Pharmacology. Our lesson topic was Medication Dosage Calculations and Conversions. For lesson context, we entered "Understanding how the application of clinical decision-making and critical thinking impact safe and accurate medication dosage calculations."

Screenshot of the initial prompt.

Initially, Khanmgo came back with three really good ideas for activities:

1. A real-world case study where a medication dosage error due to miscalculation occurs. Students work in small groups to identify what went wrong and propose strategies to prevent similar mistakes in the future.
2. Provide students with data on medication dosages and patient outcomes. Ask them to interpret the data and identify patterns and anomalies. 
3. A simulation activity where students use a computer-based model to calculate medication dosages for virtual patients with varied conditions, followed by an instructor-facilitated debriefing.

OK, but where is the lesson hook? We didn't need an activity. We got a pop-up prompt to "Select text, then ask Khanmigo for changes." When some output text is selected, three icons appear: 

1. ✎ Make changes to this
2. 🔄 Try something different
3. 💬 Discuss this

We kept trying "Make changes to this," and "Try something different." But we kept ending up with more activities. Finally, we watched Melissa Higgason's quick demonstration video and realized we should try "Discuss this." Bingo!

Video: Khanmigo Lesson Hooks with Mrs. Higgason! (2:59)

 

By selecting an entire activity and asking Khanmigo to "Create a student-facing document with the lesson hook story described and add group discussion questions at the end." This prompt resulted in a useful scenario and five group discussion questions. While we would tweak the title and possibly the medication dosage, the discussion questions were really good. They touched on how a nurse's emotions after making a life-threatening error might impact their ability to respond to the situation, what actions could be taken to prevent the mistake, and further reflection about a time students made a mistake, what they learned, and how it changed their approach in the future.

Unfortunately, when we exported our Lesson Hook to a Word file, it only contained the original activity idea. But with the Chat still open, it was easy enough to select the scenario and questions, paste them into the Lesson Hook document, make a few edits, and export the Word file again. From there, it can be entered in Canvas as a discussion prompt or printed and provided to students during class.

Screenshot of the Khanmigo Lesson Hooks user interface with our results.

Minus our time learning the interface and discovering how to get Khanmigo to write the actual lesson hook instead of suggesting activities, getting the scenario and discussion questions took about one minute. We'll spend a couple more minutes removing fluff from the story ("Once upon a time..." really?), but otherwise, our lesson hook and bonus group discussion questions are ready to go.

Once we mastered some minor quirks of working with the Khanmigo Lesson Hooks tool, it proved very useful and time-saving. We hope you'll give this a try if you find yourself seeking ways to drive student interest in a topic.