AI Content Generation
As useful as general-purpose AI tools are, even their output can be less than ideal when it involves directly summarizing the content of a specific URL. Here’s how you can solve the challenge and create ready-to-use URL-based lesson summaries.
Date Published:
May 19, 2025
Written By:
Monsha
If you regularly summarize classroom materials for your students, you may have wondered how you can improve the process and save time. You may even have thought of adopting AI tools for the task.
The good news is, you can use AI to generate lesson summaries based on complex text.
The challenge is, not every AI tool can help you summarize your source materials, especially if that source includes nothing but a link.
Well, where there’s a will, there’s a way. And today you’ll discover how you can generate a lesson summary even from something as simple as a link. There are two approaches to this exercise, both of which will be covered here.
Before you choose a tool to summarize any materials, you have to factor in a few things:
Objective: How will the lesson summary help your students? (e.g., with their critical thinking)
Your students’ readiness: How prepared are your students for an activity that involves lesson summaries? Are they beginners, intermediate, or advanced readers?
Topic or theme: How familiar are your students with the general topic of the lesson summary?
Length: How long should the lesson summary be?
These considerations cover the basics of your approach to creating lesson summaries. You may have further requirements, based on your classroom or workflow. Such as:
Curriculum: How will the lesson summary fit in your overall course or lesson plan?
Adaptability: How can you customize the lesson summary once your students’ readiness improves?
Reusability: How else can you use the lesson summary for other activities or materials? (e.g., to assess your students' vocabulary skills)
Repeatability of the process: How consistently and quickly can you use the process to create more lesson summaries in future? (e.g., for other classes)
These additional aspects may seem trivial at first. After all, it’s just a lesson summary. However, thinking about them in advance can help you develop a method that works every time you need to prepare similar materials.
Now, you can go the general-purpose AI prompting route to do this task, which we’ll explore in this post, but there’s a far easier and more effective solution: an AI lesson summary generator for teachers like you.
We’re going to summarize the English Wikipedia article on Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.
The objective is to help 8th grade students understand the key points of the article. Since building familiarity is the goal here, 5 paragraphs is sufficient for this exercise. In your case, your requirements may be broader, but the strategy will be the same.
Now that we have the scope defined, let’s dive in.
1. Head over to Monsha and sign up or log in. (You can sign up in a minute.)
2. Once logged in, you'll see a list of different types of resources you can make, from lesson plans to worksheets. Select Lesson Summary.
3. The next screen will give you the option to assign your lesson summary to a course, unit, or lesson. We don’t need this option for now, but it basically allows you to keep all your resources organized if you create them with Monsha.
4. This is where you can pick your source. From a topic of your choice to YouTube videos, your options are pretty diverse. It’s even possible to combine multiple sources!
We’ll use the “Link from internet” option. Let’s type in the URL.
5. The next configuration screen is where you can specify your requirements with a few clicks. Pretty useful, isn’t it?
Grade 8 is the first thing we’ve selected, but that’s just the start. With Monsha, you can make your lesson summary compatible with common learning frameworks:
Since we want to help our students to understand better, we’ve chosen Bloom’s Taxonomy (Understand).
The next step is optional, but you can give Monsha additional instructions based on your needs, be it about the tone or the format.
6. Click Generate. In just a few seconds, you’ll have your lesson summary ready to use! Here’s the output we received:
There are plenty of tools that let you summarize a source material, but they may not always offer an intuitive way for you to get an ideal output. On the other hand, you can significantly reduce your workload with the teaching-focused tools Monsha offers. Here are the reasons, based on the lesson summary generator alone.
Quickly customize your lesson summary: With clicks. Exactly. Once you get your output, you can expand it or focus on something specific or make it engaging just by selecting your preference. All you’ll need is the Quick Actions feature. No manual editing required.
Edit your lesson summary: If you feel like taking a hands-on approach, you can edit your lesson summary to perfection. Add an image, for example. The best thing? You don’t have to start over, even if you make the editing decision a week after generating the first version.
Adapt your lesson summary to your students’ needs: During the configuration stage, you can differentiate your lesson summary based on grade level or frameworks like DOK levels. This feature is available afterwards, too. So you can use the same resource to create multiple versions for other groups of students. This is how Monsha gets differentiated instruction with AI right.
Export your lesson summary: Save your lesson summary in your preferred format, be it a PDF or a DOC file.
Create other teaching materials from your lesson summary: If needed, you can generate another version right away. Even better, the lesson summary you generate with Monsha can be used as the source material of other resources! For example, you can generate a quiz based on it.
Just one quick note. Your lesson summary and all other resources remain organized in your Monsha account. So you don’t have to worry about losing track of them.
When it comes to summarizing text, general-purpose AI chatbots can do a pretty good job. To get good outputs from them, however, your instructions need to be as clear as possible. So strategic prompting for classroom use is the only way you can provide context.
For this exercise, we’ll use only one prompt example, but with two AI chatbots: ChatGPT and Google Gemini. You can modify this example to suit your requirements.
"Provide a summary of the main arguments and key points from this article link: [Link]
Include up to [Number] paragraphs. Use language that is easy for [grade level] graders to [objective] and helps test [assessment focus]"
If you were to use this template for the exercise covered in this post, your prompt would be like this:
"Provide a summary of the main arguments and key points from this article link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettysburg_Address
Include up to 5 paragraphs. Use language that is easy for 8th graders to understand and helps test what they know."
So, how may ChatGPT and Google Gemini respond to this? Let’s see.
More than we asked for. That’s the simplest way to put it. In fact, ChatGPT went beyond the Wikipedia article link we provided and cited other sources like the New Yorker magazine. That would have been helpful if we had wanted to generate a reading passage, but this output didn’t follow our instruction properly. To minimize the possibility of this happening, customize your prompt this way:
"Provide a summary of the main arguments and key points from this article link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettysburg_Address
Do not cite any other sources to summarize this article. Include up to 5 paragraphs. Use language that is easy for 8th graders to understand and helps test what they know."
Unfortunately, ChatGPT may still end up including other sources. While you can manually review the output and make corrections, this may increase your workload if you need to deal with multiple lesson summaries, defeating the purpose of using AI for teaching efficiency.
By the way, if this issue persists, copy-pasting the content of the article may give you better results.
Much better than ChatGPT’s response. The output followed the instruction and cited the only source provided. Well, the result may be different for other links or prompt examples, depending on your requirements, but this is a promising start.
If you use any AI tools to generate lesson summaries, the goal isn’t to outsource every aspect of the manual tweaking typically required for the task. Instead, what you want is a reliable process that can incorporate your teaching insight and build on it. A process that you don’t have to reinvent every time you need some classroom materials. A process that complements your current workflow, instead of complicating it. That’s where Monsha can play a role. So try it out and let us know what you think!
AI for Teachers
We’re the Monsha Team—a group of educators, engineers, and designers building tools to help teachers combat burnout and get back to life.. Our blogs reflect real classroom needs, drawn from conversations with educators around the world and our own journey building Monsha.
Join thousands of educators who use Monsha to plan curriculum and create, adapt, and differentiate resources like lesson plans, assessments, presentations, worksheets, and more.
Get started for free
