How to AI-Generate Lesson Plans from an Online Article, Website or URL

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

This is the easiest, quickest, and smartest way—and it's free! Monsha for lesson planning is a game changer because it reads external links for you and handles the structuring of the lesson plans, so you don't have to worry about writing prompts or all the details.

You can also use a file to base your lesson plan on, or pull in a YouTube video as sources for your plan.

You'll have full control over the template and components of your lesson plan, with the option to align it with specific standards. Plus, you can export it in the platform or format that works best for you.

Here's how to do it:

1. Head over to Monsha and sign up or log in—it takes just two clicks!

2. Once you're in, you'll see a list of resources to create. Choose Lesson Plan.

3. You'll be taken to the lesson plan creation page. Here, you can assign your lesson plan to a course, unit, and lesson. This step is optional, but we recommend doing it to keep your resources organized and make the most of Monsha's ability to plan your entire course or subject into units and lessons. But feel free to skip it now—you can always attach or detach your resources from a course later.

4. Next, 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, upload a file or image, or even base it on a resource you've created before in Monsha. You can also combine multiple options if needed.

For this tutorial, we'll select A link from internet.

‍5. 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.

6. If you didn't assign a course in the earlier step, you'll need to select the grade level and language in this step.

7. Finally, choose the components you want to include in your lesson plan. Select only the ones you need and in your desired order. Currently, the available options are:

✅ At a glance
✅ Objectives & Learning Outcomes
✅ Standards Addressed
✅ Material & Resources Needed
✅ Key Concepts
✅ Assessment and Evaluation
✅ Differentiation Strategy
✅ 21st Century Skills / College & Career Readiness Skills
✅ Instructional sequence

Feel free to also include any additional instructions you might have.

8. Optionally, you can assign a DOK level, Bloom's Taxonomy level, or Lexile reading level to adapt your lesson plan.

9. Click Generate, and your lesson plan will be ready in seconds!

But there's even more power in your hands! Once you generate the lesson plan, you can:

1. Edit it as much as you like with Monsha's powerful editor, which supports rich content like tables, code, images, equations, and almost anything!
2. Re-generate the content with just one click if it's not quite what you were looking for.
3. Differentiate the lesson plan based on grade level, language, DOK level, Lexile reading level, or Bloom's taxonomy.
4. Export it as a DOC, PDF, Google Doc, or other formats.
5. Create additional resources (like a presentation, assessment, worksheet) based on the lesson plan you just made.

You can always access your lesson plan later from your Monsha account.

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:

1. Sign in to your ChatGPT console and make sure you've selected the GPT-4o model.
2. 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]

3. 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?

4. 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.

5. 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?

6. 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:

1. Copy the website content into a document of your choice (e.g., Microsoft Word or Google Docs).
2. Split the long document into manageable sections.
3. Use ChatGPT to summarize each section separately.
4. Combine the summaries of each section.
5. Summarize the combined summaries to create a more concise overview.
6. 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.
7. 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 both of these methods and see what works best for your workflow. Pretty sure you'll find Monsha to be the ideal choice—not because we're biased, but because we designed Monsha to give teachers an easy, iterative, and super-quick way to create just-right resources. Give it a go!