AI Advocates

S1 E6: Center Boards & Task Flows in Seconds? Thank Napkin AI.

• Lisa Dieker • Season 1 • Episode 6

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In this episode of AI Advocates, Dr. Lisa Dieker and Dr. Maggie Mosher dive into a creative and time-saving tool for educators—Napkin AI. Inspired by the classic “sketch it on a napkin” brainstorming approach, Napkin AI turns your rough ideas, lesson plans, and even classroom chaos into polished visuals in just minutes.

Lisa and Maggie share their firsthand experiences using the tool to create flowcharts, task analyses, and center visuals—saving hours of work and boosting accessibility for all learners. They explore the tool’s intuitive design, its integration of AI-generated images, and how it empowers teachers to reclaim their time while staying creative and student-centered.

Whether you're building a lesson, planning a grant proposal, or helping students visualize content, this episode is packed with insights on how Napkin AI can bring your classroom ideas to life—no design degree required. 

🎧 Tune in and start sketching smarter—not harder. 

Napkin AI: https://www.napkin.ai/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61563791019174

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@KUAIAdvocates

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/aai-flite-center/

Music:

Reclaim your time….., time…., time.

Lisa Dieker:

Welcome to AI Advocates. I'm Dr. Lisa Dieker,

Maggie Mosher:

and I'm Dr. Maggie Moser.

Lisa Dieker:

And we're excited to help you reclaim your napkins. I mean, your time today. So, so Maggie, what's the site we're talking about? And then I'll share a little of what I love about it.

Maggie Mosher:

Yeah, we're doing Napkin AI today.

Lisa Dieker:

Yeah. So I learned about this from one of our colleagues, who's a doc student here at KU and he's like, have you seen this? I'm like, No. And Napkin AI is literally what it sounds like. It's like, have you ever been at dinner and you and your friends are like, oh, let's start a business, or let's redesign the bathroom, or let's rearrange my classroom, or let's come up with our lesson plan. And if there's nothing else available, what do you use? You use your napkin. And so it's really meant to be that concept. But what I really found it helpful is Maggie and I just recently submitted a grant, and it said it needed a figure and a flow chart. And I was like, well, I'm going to try it. So I took the text, and I think what I was most impressed by is it gave me both a color and a black and white option, which I liked that choice, but it was a text on AI Advocates and putting together people in education, and it made the image and the flow chart a pencil, and it was a cut apart pencil, and I was like, oh, and it's like, do you want color, black and white? I was like, okay, I love that part. And then I said, can you make a flow chart? And I gave it what we were trying to do. And not only did it do it, but it made it beautiful. It made it color, and it matched the pencil. So, you know, in what two minutes, I did something that I probably would have spent 10 hours on PowerPoint trying to get right, and it actually was much better, and it gave thoughts on the napkin that I wouldn't have even known to put down there. So

Maggie Mosher:

100% I love that about it. I also love that I can put in any of my presentations or any of my lessons that I do that day and just stick it in, just copy paste it. And when it comes up with the pictures, it'll give me, like, 20 options. So I can choose this kind of picture, and then once I choose that, I could choose, okay, so I really like the four visuals with the words on the side. Once I choose that, it then gives me 10 more options of how that could be visually look, depending on how I set it up, which I also love, because then I've got all of these different visuals, and I can choose the visual, and then it gives me things like, okay, you got all of this in here. Here's the words, here's your image. Now you can click on these, and you can specifically label things that aren't labeled. You can add your own sketch in there. You can sketch on top of it. I can even add images of my students in there, which I thought was really cool. So like for centers for teachers, I think this would be amazing. If you have the directions for each center, throw the directions in and it'll automatically make visuals, and you can put images on top of it of your students doing those centers as well, and you'd have a whole choice board of centers already ready for you in minutes.

Lisa Dieker:

Yeah, and I was thinking task analysis for those kids who need steps and procedures. And you could say, for each step, could you please add an image? And it will do that for you. So, you know, the only we love free and Napkin AI has a free version. It isn't like most that we've talked about, where teachers can do it completely free. If you want to have the fancy part, it is $10 a month. And right now it looks like they're because there's still a little beta in development because it's a newer tool if you wanted to pay $300 for lifetime of the believer plan. But again, we haven't found a need at this point to do the monthly fee. It's certainly something if you were a teacher that really you know, you were in art or digital design and you needed images all the time, it certainly might be worth that pricing. We're not telling you not to ever pay for anything. We're just giving you the landscape of what we know. And then the last thing I will just share about Napkin AI. And then anything else Maggie you want to share is it also does have the pin feature and the, you know, enlarge feature and the text box feature, and it will let you have AI help you. So, like, if you're like, I need to do some stuff with some kids who are struggling in centers. You could use an AI prompt for that, and then AI and Napkin AI prompt together will come and give you some images to help you, like, get out and know if you've ever had that brain fog where you're like, I gotta do something with these three groups of kids that dislike everything to do with Plato, but I don't even know what to do. And I could put that prompt in and Napkin AI would both give me images and some text through the AI generation to help with that.

Maggie Mosher:

Definitely I the only thing I'd add to that is, I think too with especially with students with dysgraphia, dyslexia, dyscalculia, having the ability to just take that little text that I'm not understanding because everything keeps moving, or those numbers that just aren't lining up correctly for me, and throwing it in there and it making all kinds of different visuals for me gives me lots of ideas and options. So I can see what I can't necessarily see in one way. I can see in a totally new way. And I loved that about it. So

Lisa Dieker:

I just have to add really quickly, you did it again, as that is, Maggie reminded us that let kids use Napkin AI. We don't know about the privacy piece of this. So again, but right now, the free version, you don't have to do anything but log in with a Google account. So if you're logged in, then the kids could go play on the napkin. But do know that you would want to be careful with that at this point in time. So yeah.

Maggie Mosher:

Yeah, never put any private information in any of these that's for sure. Tell your kids not to, but books or things that you're reading in class that would be an easy one. And if you want to check out more or hear more about how you can reclaim your time, check us out at KU ScholarWorks.