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Before Class

Tool setup guide

All the tools AgenticEd uses are free. Here's how to get each one ready — plus a fallback for every activity if your school blocks tools or logins.

🛡 Before you start — student data

Have students use non-identifying example data in any AI tool (a made-up persona, a public document) — never real names, grades, or records. Confirm a tool is on your district's approved list before requiring accounts. See the privacy page.

ClaudeWeeks 3 & 5 · agent building

claude.ai — conversational agent building with tools

  1. Go to claude.ai and sign in (basic use is free).
  2. Start a new chat — this is your agent's workspace.
  3. Give it a clear role in your first message (its "system prompt"), e.g. "You are a research assistant that…".
  4. Ask it to complete a multi-step task and watch it reason, act, and adjust.
No login? The teacher runs one shared chat on the projector; the class directs it together and fills in the worksheet from the demo.
NotebookLMWeek 3 · see RAG work

notebooklm.google.com — grounds answers in your documents, with citations

  1. Open NotebookLM and create a new notebook.
  2. Upload a public, non-identifying source — the school handbook, a syllabus, or a public article.
  3. Ask 3 questions the document answers, and 1 it doesn't.
  4. Follow each answer's citation back to the source — that's retrieval you can see.
No login? Use the paper-RAG activity: groups answer only from highlighted lines of a one-page source, citing each line.
PerplexityWeek 3 · retrieval alt

perplexity.ai — shows the pages it retrieved before answering

  1. Go to perplexity.ai — no account needed for basic search.
  2. Ask a factual question.
  3. Notice the numbered citations — click them to see the retrieved sources.
Blocked? Interchangeable with NotebookLM above — use either.
ChatGPTWeeks 2 & 5 · prompting & building

chatgpt.com — prompting practice and web-connected agents

  1. Go to chatgpt.com and sign in (free tier is fine).
  2. For Week 2, practice the four prompting techniques: role, step-by-step, output format, examples.
  3. For Week 5, use Custom Instructions to give your agent a persistent role.
No login? Claude works for the same activities — pick whichever your school allows.
Optional — go deeper

Each week has an optional Google Colab notebook that runs Python in the browser with no install and no API key. They're linked from the bottom of each week's page.

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