AI Advocates

S1 E7: One Prompt, Endless Resources: Diffit for Teachers and Students

• Lisa Dieker • Season 1 • Episode 7

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In this episode of AI Advocates, Dr. Lisa Dieker and Dr. Maggie Mosher spotlight Diffit, an AI-powered tool designed to save educators time while boosting student learning. Maggie shares how Diffit enables teachers—and even students—to instantly create customized reading materials, worksheets, summaries, and activities from articles, YouTube videos, or simple prompts. They discuss Diffit's applications across subjects like literacy and math, its translation capabilities, its role in supporting Tier 2 and Tier 3 interventions, and its privacy-friendly setup. Tune in to hear real classroom examples and discover how Diffit empowers both teachers and students to simplify learning, promote critical thinking, and reclaim valuable time.

Diffit: https://web.diffit.me/ 

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

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

Music:

Reclaim your time….., time…., time.

Lisa Dieker:

Welcome to AI Advocates. I'm Dr. Lisa Dieker at the University of Kansas.

Maggie Mosher:

And I'm Dr. Maggie Mosher.

Lisa Dieker:

And we're really excited to be with you today. And Maggie, you're going to lead this one to reclaim some time for our colleagues on Diffit, tell us what Diffit is.

Maggie Mosher:

If you haven't used Diffit, it's D-I-F-F-I-T. Diffit is free. And what I love about Diffit is, when you get to the home page, and you don't ever have to be logged in to use Diffit so you can get an account, but you don't have to. You have options, and one of the options says, literally anything that's the first option. And you can put in any topic, any question, any theme, state what aligned standards you want it to align to, in ELA, history or science, and then state what reading level you want it at, what language you want it at, and then how you want the reading to come across. Like, do you want it informational? Do you want it narrative? Do you want it to be fictional? How do you want this to come across? And I love that. The other piece to it, that I absolutely love is if you go two over, it says an article or YouTube link, you can put in any link to an article or any link to any YouTube and it will take that and give you a summary. It'll give you worksheet activities for it. It'll give you games, and it does it in seconds. And it'll put them in PDFs. It'll put them into Google Slides. You get to choose how to download it. I love it because it's just so fast. It does it so quickly, and also because when I presented this to my high schoolers with disabilities, I just showed them how I was using it, and said, hey, you know I'm using it this way, and I want you guys to help me use it, because we need to teach these second graders what we're learning right now, and we were learning something much more complicated, but they needed it at a second grade level, so we made it. We're going to be teaching these second graders. And without me saying anything after that day, my high school student went and did that with all of his assignments, he put the link in and had them all go to second grade level, because he was like that. That sounds so much better. It's the same content, but now it's at a second grade reading level, and so I was so proud of him, because now that's his resource and it's his tool, and he's using it on a daily basis with all of his classes.

Lisa Dieker:

So you have doubled down on reclaiming time, because not only does the teacher have more time if they use Diffit and it's free, so you also have money, but also if you can teach your students to make their own Frayer model worksheet. And if that's something you're using, I also really like it. It's one of my go-tos for my general ed colleagues that are trying to figure out tier two and tier three interventions. Because you remember general ed colleagues, that comes from you, even if I'm co-teaching it's I'm supposed to really be doing the interventions for those kids who have IEPs, they're supposed to be doing those tier two, tier three supports. And Diffit is my go-to to say, hey, let's put in this standard. Let's put in this question and come up with some summaries. Now I do also think it's interesting that Diffit's website says that 96% of their teachers says it saves me time. So we know that's that's really important. Now, I have not used it, Maggie, so maybe you have, because you're kind of the expert more here as much in math. Do you see it as resource rich in math? I know it's extremely rich in literacy. I haven't used it as much in math, but I know it's language. So can you talk a little about Diffit in math?

Maggie Mosher:

So what I use it for math mostly, is the YouTube link, but you can use the literally anything to ask the math question. I used it with our geometry class this week, and we put in a math question, just saying, how is geometry ever going to help me? And I have them each put in their jobs. So how is geometry ever going to help me become a psychologist, like, why do I care about 11th grade geometry? What is the point? And it was really specific about the answer. It gave back. It said you will need these geometry specific skills in order to get your first math class in college, in order to get your they gave them very specific to pass the ACT, SAT if that's still around, but gave them very specific reasons that geometry was important and mattered. And I thought that was really neat. And then we took geometry videos that I did not have time to watch, to like vet before, and I just put them all into the article YouTube link, and got summaries of each of these videos, and I found the video that I thought would be the most exciting to them, which was about the plane crash and the helicopter that happened in the news recently, and how geometry and GPS was used in that, and how it could have saved lives. And that was really neat, because the students were so engaged. It was like, oh, wow. We're talking about something in the news, and then we get to talk about how what you're learning now could have saved specific lives later, if you were that pilot. And so that was really neat. A good connection for them. So, yeah, you can use it for any subject. I will also say, especially if you're translating anything in math, it has a really good translator to Swedish, Spanish, anything you want.

Lisa Dieker:

Yeah, yeah, they've, I think they've just really done a great job of using the back engine. And I'm less worried. You know, when we all started with translating things, it was really wonky. It's still not perfect, and if you don't speak the language, be careful what you give a kid. But again, you know, depending on the age, and as far as I know, I haven't seen. Any privacy concerns with Diffit because you're asking generic and for those of you who are in states where you can't give away kids emails, that's great, because they don't need to sign into anything. You just click start here and there it is. So, so that's one of our reasons. We love Diffit. We think it's great. It's it's one of those growing resources. And again, much like we've talked about, like other sites that are free and open source. The difference in Diffit is it kind of is a one shop for just that question, like, how do I do blank, whereas you might want to use some other tools to make jokes and songs and all of that. But Diffit, I think eventually will have that robust of a nature. But you have to be a good prompter. Would you agree to use Diffit?

Maggie Mosher:

Yeah, I think you have to be a good prompter, or you have to want only vocabulary out of it. Diffit is also really good at grab grabbing vocabulary and basing it really into key terms, and making flash cards and making images and visuals and maps and concept maps, it will do all of that for free. But it's better at just basic vocabulary or really good prompts.

Lisa Dieker:

Right and and really good, like, 3-2-1 summaries, like, if you go to their website, you'll find they do a great job. I would say that it's rich and heavy in reading and writing and critical thinking and collaboration. And I think, as you said, that was a great example of how to use it in math. So we hope you'll check out Diffit we thank you for joining us, and please.

Maggie Mosher:

We hope it reclaims your time.

Lisa Dieker:

Yeah, that's what we're looking for. Thanks so much.