5 Engaging AI Classroom Activities to Try With Your Students

Personalization is a goal many teachers strive for, but actually delivering it consistently for every student? That’s the hard part. Time and bandwidth are the biggest barriers. We want to customize activities, differentiate, and support diverse needs, but too often those plans get left behind in the rush of day-to-day demands. That’s why I turned to AI. It didn’t just save me time—it helped me design classroom activities that truly connected with my students where they are, while amplifying their learning in ways that surprised even me.

Curious? Here are five simple ways to use AI to tailor learning activities you may already be using in your classroom to the needs of your students. Skeptical? Start small by just trying one and see how that works.

The Great Debate

Debates can be a powerful assessment tool—allowing students to express themselves while strengthening their critical thinking and communication skills. The social pressure of speaking aloud in front of the class, though, can fill students with dread. Plus, conversations are limited to students’ perspectives and evidence they deem helpful. AI can assist them when preparing so they feel ready for the big day, and it can push them to think more deeply and critically than a peer.

• After choosing a debate topic, assign or allow students to pick a character (real or fictional) to portray. Say, Thomas Jefferson versus Alexander Hamilton. Have students research their character’s perspective and prepare arguments.
• Use an AI chatbot (like ChatGPT or Gemini) to simulate the opponent. Here’s a sample prompt base you can add on to: “You are Alexander Hamilton and I am Thomas Jefferson. Let’s debate the role of the federal government. You open the conversation.”
• Encourage students to pause and ask the AI clarifying questions mid-debate to deepen their understanding. After the debate, ask the AI to analyze student responses for clarity, adaptability, evidence quality, and persuasiveness. Check out this sample debate where Jefferson (student role) and Hamilton (AI role) debate about the role of the federal government in our new nation (scroll up to the top to read the exchange). 
• Wrap up with class reflection or a quick write: What did you learn? How did your perspective shift?

Story Collaborator

If the goal is to get students to write more—which ultimately leads to their becoming better writers—sometimes they may need a little jolt to spark the process. Writer’s block can stop students in their tracks, but AI can help generate targeted writing prompts or ideas that keep their creative juices flowing.

• Have students ask AI to provide an interesting opening line or first few sentences of a short story. For example: “No one believed that Leo’s cat could talk—until it demanded pancakes at breakfast.” Students then use this as a jumping-off point, continuing the narrative in their own tone and style, developing their own characters and determining how the story progresses from there. This activity is about overcoming the initial hurdle of starting a story, not about having the AI do the writing. Students build confidence and improve their writing skills by taking AI-generated ideas and making them their own. The more they practice, the more they’ll develop their writing style and voice.
• Alternatively, consider a more call-and-response activity (scroll up to the top to read the exchange). As they’re writing, students can ask AI to periodically introduce an unexpected twist that prompts the story to go in another direction, then adjust their story in response to the AI’s suggestion. 

Mock Career Interview

Access to real-world experts is powerful—but often limited. Finding the right people, coordinating schedules, and ensuring that every student gets personalized time? Tough, even on the best day. While nothing replaces real human connection, students can flex their career-readiness muscles by using AI-generated simulation interviews tailored to their desired careers. Want to be a nurse? Interview with a digital hospital administrator. Want to be a journalist? Chat with a news editor bot who wants to test your research skills and reporting instincts.

• Students choose a career and role they want to be interviewed for. Creating a sample prompt that students can edit and input into their chatbot is helpful here. For example: “I’m a high school student interested in becoming a nurse. Can you act like a hospital administrator and give me a practice interview to see if I’m ready for a future health care career?”
• Students respond to and ask their own questions by typing or using the voice feature in a tool like ChatGPT. Have students reflect on the feedback they receive and write a reflection on what they learned, as well as a plan for how they would improve in a real interview setting.

Study Buddy

Students aren’t always the best study partners for each other. Some overestimate what they know, others would rather chat about nonacademic topics, and few are trained in using evidence-based study strategies like retrieval or spaced practice. An AI study buddy, though, never gets tired, distracted, or off-topic. Whether students need help quizzing themselves, breaking down complex topics, or identifying where their understanding falls short, AI can provide real-time support. Ideally, for this task, they’re using a teacher-created chatbot that you specifically instruct to only provide hints without directly giving the answer.

• Students choose a concept to start with. Using a chatbot, they can ask the AI to generate open-ended or multiple-choice questions to help them better understand the topic.
• Alternatively, students can ask the AI to simplify and explain tricky concepts using terms they’ll understand. For example: “I’m a fifth grader who loves baseball. Can you explain photosynthesis to me in terms I’ll understand?”
• Consider asking students to explain a concept to the AI. If the AI gets confused, the student revisits and clarifies: “I’m a fifth grader and I’m going to explain [INSERT CONCEPT HERE] to you. Listen carefully, and if I get something wrong or seem confused, ask me follow-up questions to help me understand better.”
• After the session, encourage students to reflect on what they’ve mastered, as well as what they misunderstood and still need to review.

Call-In Radio Show

Deep understanding comes from asking great questions, challenging assumptions, and digging beneath the surface. This activity turns your classroom into a radio talk show, where students don’t just listen, they investigate and participate. After feeding curated sources (like articles, YouTube videos, and websites) into Google’s NotebookLM, the AI turns them into a podcast-style summary with an interactive host. Students can practice crafting and asking effective questions while dissecting the host’s answers, and they can surface misunderstandings of their own in the process—all using content you’ve vetted and selected.

• Choose your sources. You or your students collect primary and secondary sources—think: articles from History.com, PDFs of scientific research, YouTube explainers, encyclopedia entries or textbooks, and even class notes or slides.
• Upload to NotebookLM. Add a prompt like this: “Summarize the major causes of World War I using these sources. Include insights about alliances, militarism, imperialism, and the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.” Hit Generate, and NotebookLM creates a custom podcast-style summary based on your sources and prompt. Engage in Interactive Mode.
• While students listen, have them jot down questions they’d ask the host, fact-check and critique the explanations, and identify gaps or biases in what’s shared.

If you’re ready to dive deeper, check out my growing collection of AI Activity Cards—21 classroom-ready ideas (and counting) built to help you make the most of AI, without the overwhelm.