In my counseling office, I dipped my toes in the world of Artificial Intelligence several times last year when my school building began discussing AI and its use at school.  It began as a curiosity to see what tools were even applicable to me as a School Counselor. I realized several tools within AI can help me streamline administrative tasks to increase my productivity so I have more time to spend on direct student, teacher, and parent support. I am excited to dive in and share with you my top ways to utilize productivity tools using Artificial Intelligence. 

Productivity Shortcut #1: College Admission Forms One productivity challenge for me is completing the required counselor recommendation forms for students’ college applications. As someone who enjoys writing, I love to accept the challenge of summarizing a student’s four-year journey into a 1” margin letterhead Word document. However, as the college application season wears on, I can grow weary in describing a student’s attributes in new ways that will catch the eye of the admissions reviewer. Last year, when I was stuck on a sentence, instead of deploying a thesaurus, I created a prompt in ChatGPT to improve the sentence. As the Counselor, I still had to provide baseline knowledge of what was important to include in a section about a student’s extracurricular activities and included specifics I wanted to highlight, but AI came to my rescue to help me smooth out the sentence. I equate the use of AI in this situation to using a calculator – I had to know what to put in the AI prompt and be specific about what I wanted to generate – AI just helped me create the output more quickly. As someone who loves to write, I cannot fathom using AI to write an entire letter of recommendation and I think there are ethical considerations as well, but it was helpful when I needed to smooth out a paragraph to best capture a student’s journey while in high school. Special Considerations: I would note that you should never include a student’s name in the prompt that you enter due to confidentiality concerns. 

Productivity Shortcut #2: Journal Prompts & Social Stories In my small groups, I often gave students a journal prompt each week to expand on our weekly discussion. I would spend time combing books and resources for the right journal prompt that helped the students explore our topic further. Using AI, I was able to develop several new prompts within seconds that I was able to sift through and utilize. Additionally, there are several AI tools targeted specifically to educators. In Magic School (an AI application targeted to educators), there is a tool called Social Stories where you can create a grade-level social story for students to utilize to understand a different point of view or to understand what to expect in a certain situation. As we navigate many students who struggle with anxiety, social stories are great tools to help students manage expectations. I recently used this tool to see how AI would help develop a social story for a student wanting to get her driver’s license. I entered the specific situation and chose the corresponding grade level to create a developmentally appropriate response. Magic School created a social story that not only encompassed the facts of working toward getting a driver’s license but also included how to handle possible issues that could arise in the process. The social story even included an emotional viewpoint regarding the student gaining independence and the benefits of this independence. The social story that was generated was not utilized verbatim, but it served as a starting point for me to generate a social story to help a student manage expectations for an event. Additionally, the content that is created includes two follow-up questions for the social story. 

Productivity Shortcut #3: Video Questions & Prompts Utilizing videos in small groups or guidance lessons can be extremely helpful in creating engagement or making an anticipatory hook. However, taking time to source a video, review the transcript, check the source, and then create discussion questions or prompts can be a lengthy process. While I still took time to do many of the steps above, recently, I used AI to create discussion questions based on the selected video. Magic School has a tool that allows you to plug in a YouTube video link and it will create discussion questions based on the content of that video in mere seconds. I was able to guide Magic School to create discussion questions based on a specific grade level, question type and number of questions. The more information you enter, the more specific content will be generated. When the app generated the questions, I narrowed down the two questionsI wanted to use and then created a few more of my own. This example is what I view as the power of AI – generating content and then using your professional lens, background and goals for the content to adjust it to meet your student needs. 

Productivity Shortcut #4: Pre and Post-Test Questions Do you ever struggle to create relevant pre and post-test questions for guidance lessons or groups? Utilizing tools, like Magic School and Chat GPT, allows me to create questions quickly and efficiently that can then generate data to inform my school counseling practice and departmental goals. Through AI tools, you can generate information by including what you want in the questions – like the number of questions, developmental level, certain questions to include or exclude, and much more. I always want to collect data from my groups and lessons, and through the use of AI, I can spend more time on the content of those lessons instead of creating pre and post-test questions from scratch.

Productivity Shortcut #5: Resource Matching As the School Counselor, you may often be surprised at the randomness of the questions you are asked. In one day, I may be asked how to sign up for driver’s education, how to complete a job application, how to register for the SAT, where to enter attendance information on Skyward and the list goes on and on. While Google has often been a great resource for me, I’ve been pleasantly surprised in how much more specific and concise information I can generate through an AI-assisted search. Through my year-long exploration of AI, I checked my answers to various common questions against AI to see how my answers differ or align. One such example came to my office this year when a student asked me what I thought was the best way to study for the SAT. I was ready to quickly respond regarding Khan Academy, taking full-length practice tests, creating a study plan, etc. However, I typed this question into ChatGPT and confirmed some of my strategies and also learned of new resources and additional strategies.