Sometimes the smallest sessions deliver the biggest tips.
Four sessions in, and Prompt Party has settled into its own rhythm. Some weeks the room is packed and the demos run long. Some weeks, like this one, the crowd is cozier and the conversation goes deeper. Both are good. Both produce the kind of prompts you actually steal.
This week brought two prompts, one delightfully simple language tweak that’s already changing how we all write to the agent, and the first official winner from the community Prompt Library. Here’s what went down.
Paula’s two-word trick
@PaulaEure, Canvas admin at Belhaven University, opened with a Google Sheet. Categorized prompts for the things her team checks behind instructional designers: rubrics, the homepage, course settings, modules. She copies, pastes, and goes.
But the real gold was buried in her process notes. Paula had been writing prompts that started with “can you,” and the agent kept handing the work back to her. So she experimented. She started writing “help me” instead. And the agent started actually doing the thing.
She’s right. The placeholder text in the Ignite AI agent by Instructure prompt box reads exactly that. Paula noticed. The rest of us had been ignoring it.
“Things have been working a lot better since I’m now saying ‘help me’ instead of asking it if it can do something.”
— Paula Eure, Belhaven University
Kristin Lundstrum named why it works:
“I really like the tip of ‘help me check’ or ‘help me’ instead of ‘can you.’ With ‘can you’ Agent is like, well, yes I can do that, but then what do you want me to do?”
— Kristin Lundstrum, Instructure
Two words. Try it today. Tell us if your hit rate changes.
The bonus tip inside the bonus tip
Paula’s prompt sheet wasn’t just for her. She shared it across her department. And her wider team uses an internal e-learning notebook as the hub for everything they figure out: accessibility wins, prompt experiments, the workflow tweaks that used to get lost in Teams threads.
If your team doesn’t have a hub like that yet, Paula’s setup is worth copying. Personal prompt library, plus a shared place where the good ones live.
Emily’s course pacing chain, the deeper cut
If you caught Prompt Party number three, you saw @Emily Koutsoyannis tease a three-prompt course pacing workflow. This week she ran the full version, live.
Prompt one: help me review the course pacing plan and identify students who are off track based on assignment override dates. The agent worked through assignment data, student submissions, and the differentiated due dates that customize course pacing. What came back wasn’t a list. It was a picture: who was significantly behind, who had minimal engagement, when each student was last active, and what to do next.
Prompt two: adjust the course pacing plan so the earliest assignment is due tomorrow. Reset every student’s timeline forward in one move. The agent paused to ask the smart follow-up: shift everything and recalculate, maintaining original spacing intervals? Yes.
“All discussion posts, all quizzes, all major written assignments. That would be a lot of clicks.”
— Kristin Lundstrum, Instructure
Prompt three: notify students by announcement. And here’s where Emily dropped a workflow tip worth its own paragraph.
The announcement workaround you didn’t know you needed
Announcements in Canvas don’t have a true draft state. They’re sent or they’re scheduled. So Emily uses delay posting deliberately, even when she doesn’t actually need to delay anything.
“That gives me time to go in and just review it in the announcements area. So I’ll say this now so that way I can have time to go in and look and see if there’s any settings I need to change.”
— Emily Koutsoyannis, Instructure
Scheduled posting becomes your editing window. Smart. And while we’re here, Emily’s other tweak: ask the agent to provide the link to the announcement once it’s created. It does it sometimes. Ask, and it does it every time.
The whatifs the room wanted to chase
Emily floated the next experiment before anyone could ask: what if you ran the same flow against module progress instead of course pacing? Big course, prerequisites, requirements, that one giant list every instructor squints at when they’re trying to figure out who’s where. Ask the agent for a snapshot. Break it down. Show me where most of my students are.
“...especially when you review module progress and progress is one big list. So with large courses, that becomes very challenging. To get a snapshot — yeah, that would be a very, very helpful thing to do.”
— Kristin Lundstrum, Instructure
Emily doesn’t have a course big enough to test it. If you do, post what you find.
Our first monthly Prompt Library winner
This is the announcement we’ve been quietly building toward. The Prompt Library has been growing all month, the votes have been coming in, and May has a winner.
@cgaudreau from Bay Path University took the top spot for the reformatted tab prompt. Some of you saw Christopher work his magician routine back in Prompt Party number one, fixing ADA table issues in seconds. Now his prompt is the one everyone else is borrowing.
Honorable mention goes to @TheresaDolansky for Homepage Unit Buttons, who landed in second. The library is doing exactly what we hoped it would.
Christopher gets a little something in the mail from us, and hopefully we’ll see him in a future session to show off how he’s using it.
Prompt Party is opening up to more time zones
Quick logistics. Next week’s session is earlier in the day to catch our EMEA friends who haven’t been able to make our usual time. And starting July, we’re running sessions in APAC-friendly windows too.
Mark Tuesday, June 30th on your calendar. Late evening in North America, lunchtime in Sydney. Two sessions are on the books for July, and we’re hoping for more in August.
Get in the library
If you haven’t posted yet, this is your sign. Vote on the ones that helped you, comment on the ones you tried, and share the ones that are working in your courses. May had a winner. June is wide open. Catch up on the original Prompt Party announcement.
See you next week!
