If you missed it, you missed it. But here’s your chance to catch up (and crash the next one).
We threw our very first Prompt Party, and the energy was exactly what we hoped for. No slideware. No polished demos rehearsed five times. Just Canvas users in their actual courses, opening up the IgniteAI agent, and showing the rest of us what they’ve been up to.
The premise is simple: gather the Community, hand the mic to the people doing the work, and watch what happens. The result was 30 minutes packed with “wait, it can do that?” moments, and a few happy accidents.
I kicked us off with the spirit of the whole thing: “I’ve seen some of our product team use it, but I haven’t actually seen it used in the wild.” That’s what Prompt Party is. The wild.
Four demos, four different problems, one very busy agent1. Cherie put her announcements on trial
Cherie Crosby-Weeks from Manor College opened her announcements tab, dropped in a prompt, and asked Ignite to assess an entire semester’s worth of communication. Categories. Counts. Logistics breakdowns. Feedback. Insights. The kind of audit you’d normally do with a spreadsheet, three cups of coffee, and a quiet Saturday.
“I would have never been able to figure that out on my own on a good day.” — Cherie Crosby-Weeks, Manor College
She also shared a workflow we loved: pull the report out of Ignite, strip the student-identifying info, drop it into another AI tool for a second pass. Ignite is a great start. It also plays well with others.
Christopher Gaudreau from Bay Path University tackled something every instructional designer knows in their bones: tables used as layout instead of as actual tables. He wrote a one-sentence prompt asking Ignite to add proper headers. Reload. Done.
“That was like watching a magician.” — Renee Carney
Christopher’s point landed hard: small teams need every win they can get, and ADA cleanup is the kind of work that quietly eats whole afternoons. A one-sentence prompt is a real shift.
“There’s so many pages that people need to correct, and that took like three seconds.” — Cherie Crosby-Weeks, Manor College
Thomas Turano took the room into an elementary classroom: a teacher, a reading passage, and a student who needs a lower Lexile level. He asked Ignite to copy the page within the same module and rewrite the passage for beginning readers, keeping the core concepts and learning objectives intact.
When Renee asked how long that would take a teacher to do manually, Thomas didn’t hesitate.
“A lot of time.” — Thomas Turano
Anyone who’s ever differentiated for a class of mixed readers knows the truth of that answer. Cherie put it more bluntly:
“That’s a game changer. I mean, like, oh my god.” — Cherie Crosby-Weeks, Manor College
4. Christopher came back with flashcards
Just when we thought we were wrapping up demos, Christopher jumped back in with a bonus: a fully interactive flashcard activity for second-grade math, generated from a simple prompt. All the questions, all the answers, all the backend work. Editable like any other Canvas content.
If you’ve been telling faculty to add interactive elements to their pages instead of wall-to-wall text, this is the on-ramp you’ve been waiting for.
Then someone said “gaps,” and the room sparked!Christine Hall asked the question that turned the session up a notch: could Ignite identify academic gaps? Weakest standards across exams? The kind of analysis a district team usually runs for fourth-grade testing, but for any classroom, on demand?
Cherie tried it live. She prompted the agent to compare three course outcomes and report back on the gaps between them. While it processed, Christopher dropped in a use case we want to come back to:
“It’s very impactful to see what they’re missing or what they could be… just ask it to audit a course.” — Christopher Gaudreau, Bay Path University
Then Cherie’s output came back. The agent had pulled point values, identified a 20-point difference in rigor between a group project and the other outcomes, named which students had mastered each, and offered recommendations. Live. In front of everyone.
“See, Renee, now we’re not going to go to sleep.” — Cherie Crosby-Weeks, Manor College
Same, Cherie. Same.
The strategy underneath the spaghettiOne of the best parts of the session was hearing how these early adopters actually got started. Justin Stone asked whether they came in with a plan or just kicked the tires. The answer was honest:
“I was like, I’m playing Legos.” — Cherie Crosby-Weeks, Manor College
“We threw all that spaghetti against the wall. We played with all the Legos.” — Christopher Gaudreau, Bay Path University
Both presenters talked about the careful balance of championing a tool internally without overpromising before a tier upgrade. Cherie shares prompts directly with faculty. Christopher’s team uses an internal AI chat group. They pay attention to which prompts spread and which fall flat. That’s how adoption actually happens, not from the top down, but from one teacher saying “wait, watch this” to another.
The Prompt Library is open. Go feed it.Every prompt mentioned in the session is going somewhere useful: the Community Prompt Library. Post what’s working for you. Test what someone else posted. Vote on the ones that earn it. Renee hinted at prizes for the prompts that get the most love, and we’re not going to spoil the surprise. Read the original Prompt Party announcement.
Don’t miss the next oneWe’re already lining up demos for next week, and the week after. If this recap gave you the smallest twinge of FOMO, good. That’s the point. Forward the invite to the colleague who’d love this. Bring a prompt you’re proud of, or one that flopped and you can’t figure out why. Both are welcome.
See you in the Instructure Community!
