Reformatting Educational Materials Effortlessly with LLMs
Introduction: The Value of Reformatting 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.
Example 1: Specific Format
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.
Example 2: Cleaning Data
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.
