Weekly AI Starter Tool Kit For School Leaders #2
Running a school today is not for the faint-hearted.
On any given day, a principal is juggling parent meetings, exam schedules, vendor calls, transport issues, staff queries, student performance, policy updates, and somehow still expected to look calm while doing it all.
AI can help. But only if it understands what you actually mean.
Here’s a simple but powerful idea I shared in a recent workshop with school leaders:
AI works best when you tell it what you want to see, how it should feel, and what to avoid.
A simple prompting rule (no technical background required)
Whenever you ask an AI image tool to create something, describe five things:
- Subject — Who or what is the focus
- Scene — What’s happening around them
- Emotion — Calm, stressed, busy, thoughtful
- Style — Comic, realistic, illustrated, Indian, Western
- Constraints — For example: no text, no speech bubbles, no logos
To show how much style alone can change the result, here’s a small experiment.
MASTER IMAGE GENERATION PROMPT
(MAD Magazine / US comic style, no text)
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Prompt:
A detailed MAD Magazine–style cartoon illustration of a school principal having an extremely busy day.
The principal is sitting at a cluttered desk in the center, looking tired but determined, holding a phone in one hand and a coffee mug in the other. Around him, multiple scenes are happening simultaneously like a chaotic collage:
– Angry parents arguing
– Teachers asking questions
– Students with report cards and exam papers
– School buses and transportation issues
– Timetables, schedules, and policy documents flying in the air
– Health and safety concerns
– Vendors and administrators waiting for approval
Everything appears overwhelming but humorous.
Style should be colorful, exaggerated, expressive, and slightly satirical, inspired by classic MAD Magazine / US editorial cartoon art.
No words, no speech bubbles, no text anywhere in the image.
High detail, dynamic composition, playful chaos, professional illustration quality.
Output
The prompt would generate an image that is given above. Use a prompt like that to generate whatever you need. By changing a single word on style description, I was able to quickly generate another image that would be more appropriate and culture-sensitive to a specific market. A Western school scenario is compared to an Asian school scneario and images are placed next to each other for you to compare and understand the difference.
On Bing Creator
The same prompt generated this set of images on Bing Creator, which, as you can see, shows in vivid detail the level of chaos and hyperactivity around the principal character, who is the school principal or head of the institute. Notice the level of stress and emotional charge in the faces of all supporting elements in the background. This was generated using the DALL-E model with a ratio of 1:1.
The model can be changed to some other (LLM drop-down in the menu on the right side), and some level of aspect ratio changes are allowed.
The question that used to be — how will I create this post or image (for a parent-teacher meeting, or a Board of Studies meeting invitation card design), for example, has now disappeared.
The question now is, ‘What is the question I need to ask the machine to get the output I need?’ This is the essence of ‘prompt engineering’.
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About me:
I work with Solopreneurs and Startup Founders to help build, sell, and scale with digital assets, content, and full-stack GTM. 3x founder, Faculty in Product Management at TAPMI Business School. Writer, Tech Marketer. https://tonsepai.online/ ;https://www.linkedin.com/in/tonsepai. You may also subscribe to my posts here on Medium or on Substack.
