Staff: Your First win in AI

Curious about AI but not sure where to start, or what you're allowed to use it for? This 50-minute, hands-on workshop is built for Clark School staff at every comfort level, including people who have never opened an AI tool. You'll get a quick tour of the AI tools UMD already provides for free, and learn a simple rule of thumb for which kinds of work data are safe to use with each one.

Most of the session is spent at your table, not in a lecture. Working in small groups, you'll use TerpAI, UMD's own AI assistant, on a realistic task from your kind of job: answering a pile of student emails, turning messy meeting notes into action items, cleaning up a spreadsheet, or rewriting a dense procedure in plain language. Along the way you'll learn a four-part prompt formula and the habit that makes the biggest difference: treating the first answer as a draft and asking for what you actually need.

You'll leave with a one-page cheat sheet, a task from your own job to try the following week, and a clear sense of where AI can save you time. All you need is your UMD login. Shared computers are provided for each table of 6, and you're welcome to bring a laptop.