Get Started with Flint (for Teachers)

Everything you need to get started with Flint and bring AI into your classroom.

Written by Lulu Gao
Updated this week

📋 What You'll Accomplish

By the end of this checklist, you'll have:

• ✅ Logged into your school's Flint space
• ✅ Set up your classes (or confirmed they're synced from your LMS/SIS)
• ✅ Understood the power of classes and how to configure them
• ✅ Created and shared your first AI activity
• ✅ Explored Flint chats for your own teaching tasks

What's Flint all about? 🧐

Flint allows teachers to use AI for themselves and with students:

• Flint chats help you with your own tasks as a teacher, like creating materials and writing feedback.
• Flint activities are interactive, AI-powered experiences you can design for your students, like problem-solving, language practice, and debates with AI.

With both chats and activities, you can input custom guidelines and materials. Using Flint enables:

Teacher Augmentation 🧑‍🏫

Leverage Flint as a teaching assistant who can help you brainstorm, create, and refine your own teaching materials, feedback, and more.

Productive Student AI Use 🧑‍🎓

Safely bring AI into your teaching as an answer-seeker, not answer-giver. See all student interactions with the AI.

Personalized learning 🧠

Create AI activities to guide your students through learning objectives for any subject, in any language, at any time.

Immediate feedback ⚡️

Give students immediate feedback on their work that's written by AI but designed and tested by you.

Detailed Overview of Flint Features

Step 1: Logging into Flint 🧑‍💻

You can access Flint by visiting app.flintk12.com and signing into your school's space with your school email.

You'll be brought to your Homepage where you can start new chats and activities.

Step 2: Understanding the Basics 🧠

Before diving in, it's helpful to understand how Flint is organized:

• School: Your school's Flint environment containing all teachers, students, and content.
• Terms: Academic time periods like semesters or quarters (usually managed by admins). Your previous term activities will always be available.
• Classes: Classes, clubs, or other organizations you create or are assigned to.
• Activities: AI-powered learning experiences you design for students (assignments, practice, tutoring, etc.).
• Sessions: Individual student interactions with an activity.
• Chats: Your personal conversations with Sparky (Flint's AI) for teacher tasks.

Step 3: Starting a chat 💬

Chats with Flint allow you to use the latest AI models to supercharge your own work, including:

• Adjusting the reading level of a text for your students.
• Creating teaching materials like worksheets and lesson plans.
• Generating content like report card comments and emails.

Step 4: Creating an activity ✨

AI activities on Flint are customized by you, for your students to interact with. They can be given specific teaching guidelines and materials to follow and can assess your students or give them extra help.

1. Create an activity

You can create activities by navigating to your class or you can duplicate and edit the work of someone else.

2. Answer questions and upload content

Within this chat with Flint, you can upload additional content to further customize the AI's knowledge and the learning experience for your students.

3. Preview the activity and make revisions

You can use the preview feature to try out the activity and see if you need to make any revisions.

4. Share the activity link with students

Once you click "Create", the sharing panel will automatically open.

5. View student sessions and analytics

You can see all submitted and in-progress sessions students create in the activity overview page.

Tips for Great Activities:

• Be specific: Clear learning objectives lead to better AI responses.
• Upload materials: Especially important for obscure topics, specific viewpoints, or current events.
• Test thoroughly: Use the preview feature to see how students will experience it.

Step 5: Explore the Library 📚

Explore the School or Public Library. Here, you will find activities that have been created by fellow teachers within your school or across the globe!

How to duplicate

1. Browse the Public Library for activities in your subject area.
2. Experience the activity as a student to understand the student experience and identify what you like and don't like.
3. Click the three dots and select "Duplicate" to make a copy you can edit.
4. Customize the activity by telling Sparky what you want to change.
5. Preview your changes and iterate until it's perfect.
6. Click "Create" when ready.

Step 6: Set Up Your Classes 👥

Classes are one of the most powerful tools in Flint. They centralize your class, reduce repetitive prompting, and provide insights into student progress.

Why Classes Matter

• Learning Goals and Background: Set once in Class Settings—Sparky remembers it for every activity in that class.
• Gradebook: Centralized view of all student grades across activities.
• Class Analytics: Comprehensive analysis of all activities.
• Moderation Settings: Customize which categories trigger email alerts.

Setting up Classes

Option A: Classes Already Synced (LMS/SIS Integration)

If your school admin has set up an LMS or SIS integration, your class rosters may already be in Flint. Check the sidebar on your homepage under "Classes" to see if your classes appear.

Option B: Create Classes Manually

If you don't see your classes, you'll need to create them:

1. Click the "Add a class" button next on the left sidebar.
2. Click "Create in school".
3. Add your class name and description.
4. Go to "Class settings" and add Learning Goals and Background (up to 1,000 characters).
5. Configure Moderation Settings to customize which categories trigger email alerts.
6. Click "Create".
7. Share the class by copying the link or adding student emails directly.

🎉 You're Ready to Go!

Congratulations! You've completed the essential setup. Now it's time to take your Flint skills to the next level.

Pro Tips for using Flint

More advanced use of Flint may eventually include:

Creating custom activities

1. Click "New Activity" within a group.
2. Talk to Flint about what you want to make.
3. Preview the activity (and revise as needed).

Customizing activities by uploading content

When you upload materials, the AI will prioritize drawing information from the materials provided, minimizing hallucinations and guiding students in a way more similar to how you would teach the topic.

Viewing Class analytics

You can ask Flint to analyze student sessions across different activities within a class. Just go to the classes page, click on "Analytics".

Sharing activities with colleagues by duplicating activities

1. Duplicating: best for if you want to share a copy of an activity.
2. Adding an owner: best for if you want to co-create an activity or co-administer an activity.