One Good Thing Ep4: Claude AI – PDF Analysis for Teachers.

A quick AI powered PDF solution for teaching.

Claude AI is an artificial general intelligence (AGI) system created by Anthropic, a company that aims to make AI systems more beneficial, harmless, and honest ¹.

One of the things that sets Claude AI apart from other LLM powered applications is its ability to quickly analyze PDF documents in its free to access version. This allows teachers to easily generate summaries, identify key points, and adapt materials for lessons.

For English teachers, having Claude review novels, articles, or speeches as PDFs opens up many possibilities. Teachers can upload longer texts and Claude will provide a concise summary highlighting the main themes and events, but more than this, with some quick prompts you can focus the summary on key themes or characters to match the learning goals of your work. This can save huge amounts of time compared to doing this from scratch – perfect for differentiation and personalisation.

For example, uploading a novel and asking Claude to pull out important quotes related to a character or theme provides useful excerpts to analyse.

(I always picture Claude as a little Gallic…)

Furthermore, Claude can revise existing PDF materials to adapt them for different learning needs. Teachers can upload handouts or worksheets and Claude can edit them to adjust the reading level, simplify language, or add comprehension questions.

The Real Benefits

Having an AI that can ingest PDFs allows teachers to effortlessly customize and enhance texts. This helps make lessons more accessible and engaging for students. Claude can identify what’s essential or modify documents to align with learning goals that are specifically relevant for your class.

While Claude has many uses, the PDF analysis capability solves a key pain point – finding and tailoring reading content. With Claude, English teachers can pull from myriad texts to craft lessons suited to any learner. It enables educators to elevate the texts they provide to students.

So next time you need to review, revise, or extract key material from a PDF, let Claude lend a hand! And don’t forget – you can still cut and paste into the chat window like all other LLMs and if that’s not enough – you can convert most of your documents to PDFs if you want to upload them!