New free working session: Twenty Minutes Before You Prompt
Twenty minutes, entirely by hand, on one real piece of your own writing. A specific aims page, an abstract, a course description, a program review section. Pick one.
Seven boxes across Seed, Sprout, Grow and Harvest. The unpublished observation. The number nobody else has. The constraint you work under. Who is actually in the room. The version that did not work. The consensus you disagree with. The one sentence.
You finish holding a Distinctiveness Brief you paste above your next prompt, so the model compresses your material instead of the average of your field.
Nothing is generated, nothing is saved, nothing is sent, and there is no account. It all stays in your browser tab.
https://www.harvestkernel.com/twenty-minutes-before-you-prompt/
It routes to one tool when you are ready for the version you write once instead of every time: the Course Record. https://www.harvestkernel.com/go/faculty-com
New free working session: Build Your Course Record By Hand
This is not a checklist. You open one syllabus from a course you have already taught, answer four sets of questions, and finish holding a one page Course Record you can paste into any tool for the rest of the term.
Four phases, mapped to SeedStacking:
Seed. What you actually teach, and what really gets cut when the semester runs short.
Sprout. Who is actually in the room, and where they predictably stall.
Grow. How you actually sound, copied verbatim out of your own late policy.
Harvest. What you never let slide, then the page assembles itself.
Nothing is saved, nothing is sent, there is no account, and it works on a phone.
Direct link: https://www.harvestkernel.com/course-record-by-hand/
Do the first one by hand. You need to feel what a Course Record does to output quality before any tool is worth paying for.
New free working session: The Bottleneck Brief.
Twenty minutes, one course, by hand. You bring a course you are actually teaching this term. You leave holding a finished one page brief that names where the course breaks, what the evidence is, and whether that is a design problem, a capacity problem or an information problem.
Only two of those three have anything to do with AI. The first one is fixed with a pen.
Nothing is saved and nothing is sent. Close the tab and it is gone.
https://www.harvestkernel.com/bottleneck-brief/
New free working session: The Distinctiveness Criterion
Twenty minutes, one assignment, done entirely by hand. Nothing saved, nothing sent.
You bring one real assignment prompt and its current top rubric row. Four phases, Seed, Sprout, Grow and Harvest, walk you through naming what a model can already produce from your assigned readings, finding the evidence that only exists because your class happened, and writing one rubric criterion that measures it.
You finish holding a rewritten prompt and a criterion you can paste straight into your course shell.
New free working session: Your Wreck Hour, A First Week Map.
It is orientation week. Students have four class times in an email and no picture of what Monday morning looks like. Registration gave them times. It did not give them a week.
This is twenty minutes, done by hand, in four phases:
Seed. Write down what is fixed. The real class times, looked up rather than remembered.
Sprout. Add what is true and never gets scheduled. Travel, work shifts, when you eat, when you actually sleep.
Grow. Find the gap between two classes that are not back to back, do the arithmetic on it, and name which class is hardest because of when it meets rather than what it covers.
Harvest. Name your wreck hour. One hour, placed on purpose, that carries the reading for that class. Then write down what will try to steal it and what you will say when it does.
You finish holding a written week you can follow on Monday morning. Nothing is saved or sent anywhere, and the copy button hands you the whole thing as text.
Open it here: https://www.harvestkernel.com/wreck-hour/
Faculty, this is a good forward for a first year seminar or an advising email. It is not a lecture about time management. It is your students actually doing it, in August, while the week is still empty enough to be honest.
New free working session: The Authorship Trail.
Forty minutes, by hand, on one assignment. You finish holding a rebuilt assignment prompt, three process checkpoints, and the authorship line your students submit alongside the work. Nothing is saved to a server and there is no signup wall on the work itself.
Phase 3 is the one people tell me they did not expect. You paste your own checkpoint into an AI tool and watch it answer convincingly, then rewrite the checkpoint so it asks for something only your student has.
Open it here: https://www.harvestkernel.com/authorship-trail/
Background on why detection is the wrong instrument for this question: https://www.harvestkernel.com/claude-watermark-authorship-not-detection/
New working session: The First Screen Rewrite
Thirty minutes, by hand, on one real syllabus. You rewrite only what a student sees before the first scroll: what this course makes them able to do, what to do first, and how to reach you.
Four phases, Seed to Sprout to Grow to Harvest. Thirteen questions. Nothing leaves your browser, so use Copy Everything before you close the tab.
You finish holding a finished first screen you can paste into your live syllabus today.
When one section becomes four, the Syllabus Generator runs the same pass across every course you teach and keeps your answers as a Course Record.
New free working session: The Governance Clock Audit.
Forty five minutes, by hand, thirteen questions. You finish holding a dated AI clause for one course and a live decision log for the assignments inside it. Not a summary of governance. The actual document.
Four phases. Seed names the clock you are on. Sprout writes the clause and dates it. Grow puts the rule inside the assignment where the student meets it. Harvest starts the log that outlives the term.
Nothing is saved to a server, so use Copy Everything before you close the tab.
https://www.harvestkernel.com/governance-clock-audit/
New kit is live: The Week One Assignment Audit.
It came out of today's post on the first AI native class. Dr. Norrie's frame is three letters, Abundance, Belief, Choice. Good frame. A frame is not a lesson plan though, so this kit turns it into a defensible position on one real assignment, in under two hours.
Seed, 15 minutes. Pick the assignment you already grade most weeks, and name in one sentence what it is supposed to prove.
Sprout, 20 minutes. Run it through an AI the way a student would, and find the one place it was fluent and wrong.
Grow, 30 minutes. Set the AI value out loud, write the reason, and write the verification question you hand students on day one.
Harvest, 40 minutes. Write the two sentences for the assignment sheet, and hand it to one colleague with the line you want challenged.
Thirteen working fields, a progress bar, a copy button. Free, no gate beyond the community. It runs on any chatbot you already have.
Open it: https://www.harvestkernel.com/week-one-assignment-audit-kit/
Bring field 13 back here and the room will argue it with you.
New kit is live: The Horizon Drill.
It came out of today's teaching session on the singularity. The premise is simple. If an intelligence explosion ever comes, it compounds on the machine's side of the ledger. You have a ledger too, and one entry compounds the same way: your judgment. This drill runs one real task through a loop that improves your judgment, not just your output.
Seed, 15 minutes. Name the recurring task you own and what doing it well actually proves about you.
Sprout, 20 minutes. Run it once with AI, then find the place it was fluent and wrong. If you cannot find one, look harder.
Grow, 30 minutes. Turn that catch into a fixed verification sentence you run every time, and write down your honest miss rate.
Harvest, 40 minutes. Name what improved in your judgment, not your output, and hand it to one colleague with the line you want challenged.
Thirteen working fields, a progress bar, a copy button. Free, no gate beyond the community. It runs on any chatbot you already have.
Open it: https://www.harvestkernel.com/horizon-drill-kit/
Bring field 13 back here and the room will argue it with you.