Reformatting Educational Materials Effortlessly with LLMs

As an educator, you often work with materials that come in many different formats — sometimes not in the format you need. For example, you might receive a lesson outline as a long paragraph, download a table in HTML, or have an assessment written in markdown. Reformatting these materials by hand can be tedious and time-consuming, taking away from your creative work and lesson planning.

LLMs can help you quickly reorganize or reformat these materials. With the right prompt, you can turn raw content into the exact format you need, saving time and effort. In this lesson, I will show you how to use LLMs to handle these tasks efficiently.

The examples in this lesson are simple, but remember that LLMs can work with much larger and more complex materials as well.

Let’s walk through how to write prompts that help LLMs reformat your materials. We’ll build each example step by step, explaining the reasoning behind each prompt.

Suppose you have an assessment written in some specific format, like markdown, but you want to remove all special symbols so it’s just plain text.

First, you need to tell the LLM what your input is and what you want as output. Be clear about both.

Start by giving the context:

Context:
I have a small assessment in a markdown format.

Next, provide the actual content. For this example, let’s use a short assessment:

# Geography Assessment

**Name:** ___________________  
**Date:** ___________________

### Multiple Choice

1. What is the largest ocean?
   - a) Atlantic
   - b) Indian
   - c) Pacific
   - d) Arctic

2. Which continent is Egypt in?
   - a) Asia
   - b) Africa
   - c) Europe
   - d) South America

### Short Answer

3. Name one country that borders the United States.

   ___________________________

### True or False

4. The Amazon River is in Africa.  
   - True / False

**End of Assessment**

Now, clearly state what you want the LLM to do:

Ask:
Rewrite it **without** markdown-specific symbols.

By providing both the context and clear instructions, you help the LLM understand exactly what you want. The model will remove all markdown formatting (like #, **, and -) and return the assessment as plain text, making it easier to print or share.