🚀 Launching Soon! This feature will be publicly released in the next few weeks.
The AI Tutor feature in Further allows students to interact directly with an embedded AI within lessons, using a simple chat interface.
As a teacher, you can customize the AI tutor's behavior when creating the lesson, ensuring the AI supports students in ways that complement your teaching objectives.
This article guides you through
- Ensuring the AI Tutor is enabled in your school
- Embedding the AI Tutor in a lesson
- Customising the AI Tutor’s behavior
- Tips and best practices
Ensuring the AI Tutor is enabled in your school
To enable the AI tutor, go to Dashboard > Schools > (select your school) > Settings
Ensure that the “AI Tutor for students” switch is enabled, as in the above screenshot.
If you don’t have access to the school settings, please ask your school administrator to enable the setting.
Embedding the AI Tutor in a lesson
To add the AI Tutor to a task, choose AI Chat as the student response type.
(If you don’t see this option then the feature is disabled in your school.)
Next, all you need to do is give the task a clear heading and description for the student.
As with any lesson description, write this section as if you’re speaking directly to the student. You can mention the AI Tutor in the heading but keep the description focused on the subject matter and what you want the student to achieve. The AI Tutor will use this information to guide the student accordingly.
When you switch to Preview you can see what the student will see:
When the student clicks the start button, the AI Tutor begins the conversation with a question that matches the task.
As you can see in the above example, the AI Tutor knows how to turn your student-facing instructions into an interactive conversation. It also takes the wider context of the lesson into account to ensure the student is guided effectively.
Out of the box, the AI Tutor will provide helpful guidance in line with Further’s ethos, including:
- Focus on inquiry-based learning
- Real-world examples that are interesting to students
- Avoiding harmful or misleading information
- Scaffolding problem-solving rather than giving away shortcut answers
- Embracing students’ desire to explore while maintaining focus on learning objectives
- Guiding conversations to a meaningful conclusion in preparation for the next task
Customising the AI Tutor’s behavior
If you want more fine-grained control over how the tutor behaves, you can tweak its behavior using custom instructions.
For example, if you wish to keep the conversation broad at the beginning, to elicit the student’s prior knowledge and interests, and then narrow down on a more specific topic, you might add an instruction like this:
“After about two turns of conversation, highlight the importance of understanding ratios, based on the student's examples.”
Here is what the AI Tutor made of this input, starting the conversation with a broad question:
Following the custom instruction, the AI Tutor then introduced the topic of ratios and linked it to the student’s examples:
As you can see, custom instructions give you a wide range of options to adapt the tutor to your specific needs and preferred teaching style.
Tips and best practices
Here are some tips for using the AI Tutor most effectively.
Tip 1: Write a clear task description
To get the best results from the AI Tutor, the primary factor is how you word the task description.
- Keep it focused on the topic and the student’s learning objective
- Avoid going into detail on how students should use the chat
- Let the AI Tutor handle the details of the conversation based on context
- Write in a pure teacher-to-student style as if the AI tutor didn’t exist
- Prioritise clarity for the student
Tip 2: Test your task
Use Preview to check how the tutor behaves based on your input.
- Is it doing what you expected?
- Is it clear from the student’s point of view?
- Could you improve it further by tweaking your task description?
- Is there potential for improvement using custom instructions?
Tip 3: Add custom instructions when needed
Use the custom instructions field to guide how the AI Tutor supports your students.
- Write from a teacher-to-tutor perspective
- Write in succinct, imperative form
- Be creative, let your experience guide how you instruct the tutor
- Build a library of custom instructions that worked well for you, to reuse in other lessons
- Experiment with different custom instructions - see the examples below for inspiration
*🎯 Examples you can use
Below are some examples of custom instructions you can try and tweak to effectively guide the AI tutor. These are just suggestions - let your imagination be the limit.
💡 Video Comprehension Prompts
- "Ask the student to recall key concepts from the previous video and ensure they did not skip the video."
- "Prompt the student to identify three key causes of the environmental issue shown in the video."
- "Check if the student can summarize the video in one to two sentences using their own words."
🧮 Math & Problem-Solving
- “Support the student in finding at least 3 examples of how math is used in farming. Guide them to think about ratios, data, or equations.”
- “Ask the student to write and solve a word problem using the information from the scenario.”
- “Prompt the student to explain how they calculated their answer, step by step.”
📚 Reading Comprehension
- “Ask the student to compare the main character's actions to a real-world example.”
- “Guide the student to identify the author's main argument and provide evidence from the text.”
- “Encourage the student to ask two follow-up questions about what they just read.”
🌍 Science or STEM
- “Help the student explain how cause and effect are shown in the experiment.”
- “Challenge the student to predict what might happen if a variable changed in the model.”
- “Ask the student to connect this scientific idea to their local environment.”
- “Help the student develop questions and evaluate sources.”
- “Ask probing questions, e.g., what do you think would happen if...?”
🧠 Metacognition & Self-Reflection
- “Ask the student how confident they feel about this topic and what part was confusing.”
- “Encourage the student to reflect on how this task connects to what they learned last week.”
- “Prompt the student to explain what strategy they used and why.”
🤝 Collaboration
- “Facilitate peer discussion between students.”
- “Encourage role-play, embody assigned characters while maintaining educational focus.”
- “Prompt students to teach the concept to each other using real-life examples.”
Disclaimer
The AI Tutor provides responses to support learning, but these may sometimes be incorrect, incomplete, or outdated. Students should think critically about the AI’s messages and check important information with reliable sources.
Lessons containing AI Tutor tasks are designed for use with or without a teacher present. Teachers and students remain responsible for verifying the accuracy and suitability of the AI’s responses. pi‑top is not liable for decisions or actions based on AI-generated messages.
Wrapping up
The AI Tutor is most effective when guided by thoughtful prompts that reflect your teaching goals and style. Use these examples as a starting point, and experiment to find what works best for your students.