Maybe you found an article, paper, textbook, pdf, report, or any text-based resource online and want your lesson plan to be based on it. You have multiple ways to do so.
In this article, we will discuss three methods, ranked in order of effectiveness.
1. Create lesson plan from URLs - using Monsha.AI
This is the easiest, quickest, and smartest way—and it’s free! Monsha for lesson planning is great because it reads external links for you and handles the structuring of the lesson plans, so you don’t need to worry about writing prompts or anything else.
Follow these steps:
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Head to Monsha and sign up or log in—it takes just two clicks!
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Once you’re in, you’ll see a list of resources to create. Choose Lesson Plan.
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On the lesson plan page, you can assign your plan to a course, unit, and lesson. This is optional, but we recommend it to keep things organized and make it easier to plan and maintain your entire course later. Again, this is optional at this point—you can always attach your resources to a course later if needed.
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Now, choose what you want your lesson plan to be based on. You can add a topic, paste a URL, use an article or YouTube video, or even base it on a resource you’ve created before on Monsha. In the context of this tutorial, select A Link From the Internet.
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Paste the link directly into the field. Make sure the link can be crawled or indexed by bots. Meaning — if the URL can show up in Google search results, Monsha can access it too. Monsha (and ChatGPT, Claude, or Copilot) currently can’t read Google Docs or Slides.
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If you haven’t assigned a course, select the grade level and language.
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Finally, choose the components you want to include in your lesson plan. Select only the ones you need and in your desired order.
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Click Generate, and your lesson plan will be ready in seconds! It will look something like this:
You can either export it immediately or access it anytime later from your Monsha account. You can even create further resources (like an assessment or reading passage) based on the lesson plan you just created.
Easy, right? Now, let’s move on to alternative methods.
2. Create lesson plan from URLs - using ChatGPT-4o
For this to work, you’ll need access to the ChatGPT-4o model because GPT-3.5 can’t read external links, and GPT-4 can be hit or miss.
Here’s a step-by-step guide:
- Sign in to your ChatGPT console and make sure you’ve selected the GPT-4o model.
- Start prompting with something like this:
Imagine you are a teacher expert in creating lesson plans. Now write down all the key points discussed in this URL:
\\\\[insert your URL]
- You might want to follow up with ChatGPT to brainstorm different ways to present the topic to your students:
Can you suggest some engaging ways to teach these lessons in my class?
- Organize these ideas into a structured lesson plan:
Based on the ideas and lessons we've brainstormed, can you create a structured lesson plan for teaching this lesson in my class? It should include Objectives, Key Points, Standards Addressed, Evaluation, Differentiation Strategy, and Classroom Activities. Class duration is 60 minutes.
- Additionally you can ask ChatGPT to find educational videos or resources to supplement the lesson plan:
Can you search the internet for some additional educational videos and articles on this lesson?
- Finally, review the lesson plan and make any necessary refinements. ChatGPT can provide feedback on your lesson plan.
Review the lesson plan based on what we have discussed so far and suggest improvement. Format it properly.
You can reduce the number of follow-ups though by using a more comprehensive, structured prompt for lesson planning.
3. Create lesson plan from URLs - using ChatGPT 3.5 or ChatGPT 4
If you don’t have access to ChatGPT 4o but still want to use ChatGPT, or somehow even ChatGPT 4o can’t read your URL, here’s a workaround:
- Copy the website content into a document of your choice (e.g., Microsoft Word or Google Docs).
- Split the long document into manageable sections.
- Use ChatGPT to summarize each section separately.
- Combine the summaries of each section.
- Summarize the combined summaries to create a more concise overview.
- Repeat this process recursively until you have a summary that covers the entire document. This article demonstrates the steps of summarizing long documents using ChatGPT.
- Now ask ChatGPT to create a lesson plan based on the final summary. For this you can follow the prompting steps in Method 2.
Feel free to try all of these methods and see what works best for your workflow. Most likely, you’ll find Monsha to be the ideal choice—not because we’re biased, but because we designed Monsha like that—to offer teachers a better way of creating content. Give it a try!
