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:
Next, provide the actual content. For this example, let’s use a short assessment:
Now, clearly state what you want the LLM to do:
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.
Now, let’s say you have a table in HTML, but you want it in markdown format for your handout.
First, explain your context:
Finally, ask for the transformation:
By specifying both the input (HTML table) and the desired output (markdown table), you guide the LLM to convert the content into a format that is easier to use in your handouts or lesson materials.
Sometimes, you have a block of text and want to change it's structure. Imagine you have a lesson outline written as a text block. You want to make it appropriately structured.
Start with your context:
Then, ask for the transformation:
By asking the LLM to organize the information as a bulleted nested list, you make the content easier to read and understand. This is especially helpful when you want to present information in a more structured way.
Beyond the examples above, LLMs can help you with many other reformatting tasks. Here are a few more quick ideas:
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Convert a list to a paragraph:
If you have a list of points and want to turn them into a smooth paragraph, just ask the LLM to rewrite the list as a paragraph. -
Reorder content:
If you want to change the order of sections or items, you can ask the LLM to sort or group them differently. -
Summarize for different formats:
You can ask the LLM to summarize a long text for a slide, a handout, or an email. -
Change between file formats:
For example, you can ask the LLM to convertCSVdata to amarkdowntable, or vice versa.
The key is to be clear about your input and your desired output. The more specific you are, the better the results.
In this lesson, you learned how LLMs can help you quickly reorganize or reformat your educational materials. By providing clear context and instructions, you can turn markdown into plain text, HTML tables into markdown, and paragraphs into structured lists — saving you time and effort.
Now, you will get a chance to practice these skills with hands-on exercises. Try out different prompts and see how LLMs can make your workflow easier and more efficient. The more you practice, the more confident you’ll become in using LLMs to handle all kinds of reformatting tasks.
