Lesson Planning with Khanmigo Webinar

Welcome, welcome everybody! We are here today to talk about lesson planning and how at KH Academy and with Con Migo we can support you with lesson planning.

We know we are all teachers; we have been in the classroom. We have gone through lesson planning. We know how much time and energy it takes on a daily and a weekly basis to put together lesson plans that aren't just done but that are engaging and relevant to your content and to your students.

So, we're going to show you today how Kigo can meet you right where you are and support you with that lesson planning and making today more impactful to save you time, so you spend less time lesson planning and more time teaching kids.

Now, in order to access the features that we're going to show you today, you do have to have a paid subscription to Con Migo. There are two ways that you can do that: the first is through a district partnership, the second is just to sign up for a subscription on your own.

Now, we are going to drop a link into the Q&A here in just a little bit. Normally, it is $4 a month—just $4 a month to have access to Con Migo and to use this lesson planning tool amongst many others. But since y’all are here with us today or watching this recording, we’re going to give you a coupon code. Get your pencil out; we’re going to drop it down. That coupon code is just “lesson plan” and the number one: lesson plan number one, all one word, if you will.

And that’s going to give you the ability to try Con Migo for just a dollar for the first month. So again, to access these features, it is paid but a bargain for the time you're going to save.

So with that, I'm going to hand it over to my co-presenter today, Gentes. It's all yours!

Thanks, Sty! Hi everyone, really excited to have all of you here to learn a little bit more about KH Academy, Kigo, and of course, lesson plans.

I’m G Buunis, I’m a senior product manager on our teacher experience team, and over the last couple of months, we’ve been hard at work to turn Kigo into a useful teaching assistant and of course, a good lesson plan writer.

What we've learned is that out of the box, AI is pretty okay at creating a lesson plan, but it's only okay. Creating a lesson plan that is truly useful—that we ourselves, as a lot of us are former educators; myself, I used to be a middle school English teacher—would actually use in our classrooms.

So our first attempts using Kigo were okay. We actually started evaluating Kigo using the rubrics we ourselves would have evaluated first-year teachers. We ourselves were evaluated using these rubrics and we evaluated Kigo.

And sorry to Kigo, it initially scored as “unacceptable” to “developing.” It didn't always have lesson plans that matched or used to parent the standard waros that didn't always cover the prerequisite skills parts of our prompt that we so carefully informed Cono to be pedagogically appropriate, standards-aligned.

So we, of course, set to work. We found that by giving Cono access to our KH Academy content by breaking the prompt into careful sections the way we would as educators—going step by step with direct instruction, guided instruction, warm-ups, exit tickets—we were able to get Kigo to be much, much better.

We're happy to say that at the current moment, Kigo is somewhere between “developing” and “proficient,” and of course, we are somewhat perfectionists here, so we're going to continue working and trying to get Kigo to be beyond that and truly exceptional.

But ultimately what this comes down to is we believe Kigo is best with educator input. We need the educator in the loop to make Kigo the best it can possibly be.

So you'll see the things that Stacy shows today; we've designed Kigo to not just create a lesson plan, but to really co-create a lesson plan with you—to take your input and bring its expertise to create that initial lesson plan but then to work with you together to make that lesson plan really fit the needs of your students, your classrooms, and your schools.

So really excited to have you all put this tool through its paces. I will be on board here to answer any questions in the Q&A, but without further ado, I will happily pass it over to Stacy to show you all lesson planning with Kigo.

All right, y’all, let's dive in! So I'm going to go ahead and share my screen, and we are going to go into the lesson planning experience.

So I have opened up here to our AI activities page. What you see on the left-hand screen, if you're not familiar with Con Migo, are a whole bunch of activities that are super useful for creating lesson plans for engaging your students.

We are going to zoom in on this “create a lesson plan” feature. So I'm going to go ahead and open that up, and it's asking me what content I’m going to be teaching.

So the first thing to know is that this experience is going to be tailored to the region that you have selected. So for today, I'm working on California. But up here in my settings, if I am in a different area, I can just select Florida or Indiana or any other state that I'm working from.

So that's right there and super easy to change, and what that's going to do is allow you to have a lesson plan that’s tailored to your state standards and reflective of the content that you're required to teach.

So I am going to let Kigo know that I am going to be teaching Algebra 1, and we're working on rate conversion. I was a middle and high school math teacher for a while, so I'm going to lean into my old content. But don’t worry, I’m going to show you some other content areas in just a bit.

So it’s working on some ideas for me, giving me a couple of things that might reflect what I'm teaching with my students. So right now, again, because I am working on California standards, it's giving me those lessons and those standards right there. And as it turns out, there's rate conversion.

So I'm going to click into that, and we're going to open up a lesson plan here. Notice that it starts writing the lesson plan right away. It's going to draft a complete lesson plan that has all the necessary components.

So you're seeing standards, objectives, all sorts of things that are ready to go. Now, let's imagine we're on a cooking show, and we're watching the baker bake right here. I'm going to flip over to the part where we pull the finished product out of the oven, and we see a complete lesson plan here.

So notice we have the objectives, lesson activities, including a warm-up. We have what we might use for direct instruction, guided practice—also important—independent practice, and an exit ticket, teacher resources, and how we might differentiate instruction.

That was always the thing that took me the longest to plan for in the classroom: how am I going to reach advanced learners? How am I going to reach learners that need a little extra boost, that need to strive for a few more steps and supports?

Notice that our vocabulary is in here, even some possible extensions and ways that we might extend the learning and take it just a little bit further. We have required materials, a summary, and even an account of how we might spend our time and our minutes.

So with that, it's given me a lesson plan. This looks great, but I need to make a few adjustments to reflect our content. So I'm going to go back up here to the top. Forgive me while I scroll.

And on my campus, we are actually required to write objectives as “I can” statements. So what I'm going to do is highlight this objective. I'm going to tell Kigo I want to chat about this. Now notice I can chat about this, or I can just ask Kigo to replace this with something new; I'll show you that in just a minute.

But for now, I'm going to chat about this objective. So it's going to tell me something about this objective, let me know what I'm working on, and then I'm just going to tell Kigo, can you rewrite this as an “I can” statement?

And notice that it did exactly that. It came back in, and now I can transform rates between different units and apply these conversions to solve real-world problems. So it did exactly what I asked it to do!

I'm also going to go down to, let’s see, my direct instruction section here. I know that I need to work out of a specific page in my textbook, so I'm actually just going to add another step. We are going to open our textbook to page 19, which is from chapter 4, lesson 6.

So notice that I can type directly into the lesson plan and make adjustments, and I can even remove things. So if this section right here, this question, is not something that I want, I'm just going to delete that and remove it from my plan.

I'm going to go down here; I've read this, you know, taking the time to really read each of these questions. I'm going to scroll down to the exit ticket, and again I think my students might be a little disengaged by this time.

A lot of times at the end of a math lesson, students aren't with me anymore. So I'm going to tell Kigo that I want to chat about this, and I would like... oops, got a lot to say about this!

And certainly, I can sit and read this. This is going to give me a really clear explanation as to why this exit ticket is written this way and different things that I might do to gauge interest. But I'm going to ask Kigo to rewrite this exit ticket so that it relates to something that my students are interested in.

And right now, that is—I’m going to go with Taylor Swift. We want to rewrite the exit ticket so it has something to do with Taylor Swift. And notice that it is doing that!

So no matter what your students are interested in, I've seen teachers do this with Fortnite, video games, different animals, different activities that students are interested in. I can ask Kigo to make those adjustments, and this is certainly something that you could do on your own. This is something that you can come up with these ideas, but that takes time, right?

It takes maybe some Google searching, sitting around pulling things out of the back cobweb part of our brain, and now we can get Kigo to do that in a fraction of the time—in just a few seconds—to establish relevance for our students and to just bring them in.

Right? My kids see Taylor Swift on the page or Fortnite or horses, whatever it is they’re interested in, it piques their interest, and they're with me just a little bit longer.

Another thing that I can do, if I don’t like this activity, I can highlight that, and maybe I don’t want to chat about it, but I just want Kigo to replace it with something new, and it's going to do that. Just give me another idea!

Right? I didn't like what's there; I want to see something new. So no, this lesson plan is completely customizable, and Genta shared about this earlier; this is what I love about it!

It's not giving me a packaged thing that I have to take as is. I can make this my own; I can add, I can delete; I can make it so that it’s relevant and engaging for my students.

And when I'm all done, I can either print it exactly as it is, or I can export this lesson plan into Word to make those adjustments and then print it out. So super exciting to have all of those options.

The objective is to give you time back. We all have to lesson plan, but if you don’t have to spend so much time doing it, you have more time to focus on learners, on teaching, and maybe even more time with your family—less time that you’re sitting at school working on these things at the end of the day.

So for new teachers, maybe this gives you some fresh ideas; maybe it helps you support through those—what are all the pieces? What am I supposed to have?

For long-time teachers, if you've been at this for a while, I know that after I've been in the classroom for several years, I got really stuck in doing the same things year after year. So what I love about this as a veteran teacher is that it gives me new and fresh ideas, things that I can pull in.

And what I just showed you—my kids love Taylor Swift! Make this math lesson about Taylor Swift; that changes instruction and engages, brings life to my classroom in a way that I just really haven't seen before.

I'm going to double back to making sure that you noticed these lesson plans are based on the standards for your state, and at the very beginning of this, I showed you that you can even go in and change your state.

You can make sure that you're set to the state standards that are relevant to you so that it's fully customized and relates to the content because Kigo is here to support you with tailoring the plan to the interests of your kids.

So with that, I showed you how to get here from the AI activities page. Remember, we were in here, we went into that create a lesson plan—there's a lot more that we can do.

I click up here into our courses menu, notice that we have courses in math, in science, humanities, financial literacy, even some courses in reading and language arts. But if I scroll down here, I want to draw your attention to our digital SAT course.

I'm going to go in here; we know we have a lot of students that are preparing for this change in the SAT. We have a course in MA in digital SAT math and reading and writing.

When I open up this reading and writing course, maybe I'm a home room teacher or an advisory teacher, I’m working with students to prepare for the digital SAT, and it may be content that I teach on a regular basis or it may be content that I'm not accustomed to teaching.

A lot of times that happens for advisory teachers and home room teachers. What I want you to notice is that when I go in here and I open up this course, if I go into any piece of content and I open up that co-editor experience—I clicked on Con Migo down there in the corner if you didn’t see that; I’m just opening up Kigo, my little co-teacher there on the side—and I'm going to click on “help me write a lesson plan,” and notice we have that exact same experience populate.

Exact same behavior! So I did it in math; now I can do it in digital SAT. I might even choose to go into a science course.

So I'm going to go into high school physics; into any one of these, let’s check out work and energy—that’s what my class is doing right now. We're looking at some work example problems.

I can open up Con Migo, help me write a lesson plan, and that same customizable, standards-based lesson plan is going to pop up and be right there, ready for you.

I'm super excited about this feature across content, no matter what I'm teaching. It's customizable; it's there, and it's relevant to kids. We know that what you are doing makes a difference in the learning process and in making that connection with students—that that's what drives learning outcomes.

It's not just about standing up there and teaching, right? So when we can connect with what matters to kids, with what's important to kids, we're going to make learning happen.

So our goal is to give you time back—more time to focus on teaching, more time in your day. So with that, I hope you're feeling as excited as I am.

Again, take a look at these courses; it doesn't matter what you're teaching. Science? You got a co-editor! Mathematics, economics, doesn't matter what it is—you can have support planning your lessons, you can have that time back in the day.

So we are so excited that this valuable feature is available to you. Again, with that subscription, remember that coupon code that I shared with you earlier—it's just “lesson plan” and the number one—one word, all squished together: lesson plan one.

And when you enter that code, you can get Con Migo for just a dollar for the first month; otherwise, it’s just $4 a month. That's worth it in my mind to save this time and not have to worry about sitting there for hours writing lesson plans every week.

So I hope that you are as excited as we are, and we hope you have a wonderful afternoon. Thank you so much for joining us today!