AI Helps Sunday School Lesson Planning
Our adult Sunday School class (ACE) at Caldwell Presbyterian Church is reading and studying the book, “Grace Can Lead Us Home: A Christian Call to End Homelessness” by Kevin Nye. Tomorrow I’m facilitating our lesson, focusing on Chapter 2 of his book. As a middle school STEM teacher, I’ve been using a variety of AI tools in the past few months to help me create lessons, vocabulary lists, and even create web-based software applications using JavaScript. In addition to ChatGPT, Claude by Anthropic is my favorite text-based generative AI tool de jure, particularly because it allows users to upload PDF files (up to 10 MB in size) and use those for analysis and processing.
Since I purchased a Kindle version of Nye’s book and was able to convert it into a non-DRM PDF, I used the following AI prompt this evening to generate a lesson handout for tomorrow:
As has happened multiple times in the past 10 months, I was blown away by the speed, accuracy, and quality of the AI result to my query. Here’s a link to the 2 page handout Claude helped me create this evening, which includes:
- A short summary of Chapter 2 of the book
- Some main ideas
- Some vocabulary terms
- Some suggested discussion questions
AI truly can give each of us “superpowers” relative to the skills and abilities we had without it. Teaching (and learning) will never be the same, IMHO.
To learn more about AI, AI tools, and my analysis of what this means for teaching, learning, our culture and society, check out and SUBSCRIBE to the (almost) weekly podcast I co-host with Jason Neiffer, “The EdTech Situation Room.”
Addition: I also asked Claude (in the same chat thread” the following question: “Please analyze chapter 2 of the attached PDF, and list the Bible verses which are specifically mentioned by author Kevin Nye in that chapter.” Claude’s answer:
Here are the Bible verses specifically mentioned by Kevin Nye in Chapter 2 of the book “Grace Can Lead Us Home”:
- Psalm 24:1 – “The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it”
- 1 Corinthians 10:26 – “For ‘the earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it'” (Partial quote)
- Philippians 2:6-7 – “Who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.”
- Romans 5:20 – “But where sin increased, grace abounded all the more”
- 1 Thessalonians 5:21 – “Test everything; hold fast to what is good”
In this chapter, Nye references these Bible passages to support various points in his discussion of housing and theology. Psalm 24:1 and 1 Corinthians 10:26 establish that the earth belongs to God, not individuals, which relates to his arguments around property and land ownership. Philippians 2:6-7 highlights Christ’s example of giving up power and privilege for others, which Nye connects to housing justice issues. Romans 5:20 supports the idea of responding to homelessness with grace rather than judgment about who deserves help. And 1 Thessalonians 5:21 encourages taking what is good from existing programs and philosophies while leaving behind what is unhelpful.
Via Claude.AI