AI for ELA with Khan Academy

Uh, welcome and thank you so much for joining us. We're here to talk about AI for ELA. Um, we have Maddie with us from Hobart, Indiana; Sarah and myself are from KH Academy. Um, so let's just start with a set of introductions. Um, let's start with Maddie.

Maddie: "Awesome! Hi everybody, my name is Maddie B, and I am the English department chair at Hobart High School. Uh, we've had a really good relationship in our district with KH Academy for a long time, and we, uh, piloted the program Con Migo last year in a few of our English classes including mine. I've been teaching English here for eight years, and I teach um a lot of the early college classes we have here in Hobart, and it's been really cool to use this program to help with that."

Sarah: "Hello everyone! I'm Sarah Robertson, I'm a senior product manager at KH Academy. Um, like Aviv and Maddie, I started my career as a middle school ELA and Humanities teacher at a Title I school in Boston. Um, and then I transitioned into edtech as the founding head of product at commonlit.org, which is another wonderful nonprofit resource for ELA teachers if you don't already use it. And yeah, today I'm really excited to talk about Kigo and ELA."

Aiv: "Thank you, Sarah. And I'm Aiv Weiss. Um, I've been at Khan Academy for about five years, but before that I was an eighth grade ELA teacher, and before that I taught in a Hebrew immersion school. So, um, I've been working on trying to get reading and writing to be something that kids love doing for a long time, and I, uh, transitioned to edtech because I had this far away sort of sci-fi dream that something like what we're about to talk about today could be possible."

Aiv: "So let's get right into it. Um, I want to first tell you before we dive into specifically uh, ELA and what AI is doing for ELA and what it could or can do, I just want to tell you a little bit about how Khan Academy is approaching AI. So everything that we do has always been research-based in pedagogy and grounded in learning science. Um, the same is true for how we're approaching Kigo from how our lesson plans are designed, um, to actually planning the tool so that learning is built into every single interaction that students are having with Kigo."

Aiv: "Um, we started something called Khan Academy districts a few years ago with the goal of supporting teachers and admins so that we're driving deep learning at scale. And so when we talk about bringing Kigo to the classroom in a school district, we're talking about supporting administrators, teachers, students all together. And we're actually, we take very seriously the fact that we only allow students to have in-class access to Kigo in our partner districts, and that's because we take the safety of this new environment really seriously. Um, and also because we believe that that ecosystem is really important to protect and that we have those feedback loops going from teacher to student, teacher to student, and with the support of admins and instructional coaches."

Aiv: "Um, another way to get student access to some of the things you'll see today, so if you're a family who wants to get Kigo for your own family, you can, uh, allow your student to work on some of this stuff at home. Uh, the last thing I want to say is that, um, one of the reasons that the KH Academy team is so passionate about our work on Kigo is because we believe that AI can be offered really ethically to classrooms."

Aiv: "Um, we have a responsibility to help our students be really good digital citizens, to know how to think critically about what they're seeing out there in the world, and AI is just another opportunity for them to practice some of those really important skills. We also think it's really important to model and lead the way on how to mitigate risks when dealing with something that is so new like this, so I hope that answers some of your questions and is sort of the context in which all this is coming down from."

Aiv: "We have um, a lot of stuff out there across our YouTube channel and our blog sort of showing you how the team is thinking about it and how schools that we've piloted the program with are using the tool. Um, so this is just a quick overview, but know that there's a lot more information out there. Um, so here's what I was hoping we could talk about today. I would love if, uh, we could hear from Sarah about some big, deep problems that anyone who's taught in an ELA classroom before thinks are completely unrealistic—like you would need magic in order to solve them."

Aiv: "I would love if Sarah could talk to us about the types of problems that at KH Academy we're really trying to solve now, um, show us specifically the SA feedback tool, and then Maddie has some really amazing examples of how Kigo is being used to push your students on their close reading skills. Um, and also Maddie is the department head for ELA, and she's been able to create some really amazing plans um, using Kigo. And then we'll talk about the future state of AI for ELA, and we'll close out with a coupon code that everyone here can use to immediately try Kono for yourself if you haven't yet done so."

Aiv: "Um, so, uh, let's talk about how Kigo is capable right the second to help students and teachers in supporting student writing. So I'm going to kick it to Sarah."

Sarah: "All right, when I taught seventh grade reading many years ago, um, most of my students were behind grade level. I think that is unfortunately pretty common, and I knew that research showed that in order to improve my students' writing skills, my students, of course, needed direct instruction and modeling from me. Um, they also needed to be doing a lot of writing—ideally, they should be writing almost every day."

Sarah: "And I also knew that writing alone, um, is not enough to help students improve. Obviously, they need feedback, and in order for that feedback to be effective, it needed to be focused and specific. It needed to be actionable—something that they could immediately improve upon. It needed to be aligned to clear objectives that I set, and it needed to be delivered often and in a timely manner."

Sarah: "But the reality—and I'm sure this is probably true for most of you—is that I had about 100 students, and if I were to assign, say, one essay a week, I think that's being pretty aspirational. That's at least 30 assignments per school year, which equals 3,000 student essays to provide feedback on. And that's assuming that I'm only providing feedback on one of the students' drafts, like their first draft, and then not looking at the final draft or just evaluating their final draft and not giving them an opportunity to revise."

Sarah: "So if I limited myself then to 10 minutes per essay to provide personalized detailed feedback on every student's draft, can anybody guess how many hours I'd spend per school year giving feedback? Given this, this is an ELA crowd, I bet you all have to pull out your calculators. Um, it's 500 hours—500 hours in a school year. It is just not possible. Um, especially when in most cases teachers are not just responsible for teaching writing but also reading or, you know, other humanities subjects."

Sarah: "So what typically happens? Typically we assign fewer essays, sometimes just a handful a year. Um, when we do assign essays, students have to wait days or even weeks for us to finish providing feedback, or we just provide way less detailed feedback. Maybe we just circle some things on a rubric, um, or we only evaluate the final draft, or we rely a little too much on the sometimes unreliable, uh, peer feedback approach, or we work completely unsustainable hours."

Sarah: "And we're trying to do the right thing, but ultimately we get burnt out. So when KH Academy set out about a year ago to start thinking about ways that we might better support ELA teachers, it was right around the same time that ChatGPT was released. And we pretty quickly recognized the potential for AI to help teachers in this area specifically, and we also recognized the problems that writing teachers faced, um, uniquely in this age of AI."

Sarah: "Um, now that AI is making it easier than ever for students to take the easy way out, I think you all know what I'm talking about. Um, and this is something that we really made a concerted effort and decision to start pursuing and to start exploring. So I am going to demo for you, um, the first writing feature on Khan Academy. It's called the Kigo academic essay feedback activity, and the purpose of this activity specifically is to allow your students to get immediate, specific, high-quality feedback on their writing and support with revising their essay at their own pace."

Sarah: "The goal is for students to get more feedback, to get more practice writing while still allowing you to focus on the many, many important things that you do, like targeting key skills, working one-to-one, working in small groups, developing real human relationships with students, and note also that this tool doesn't yet support students with planning and drafting an essay, but that will be coming soon, so stay tuned at the end for a sneak peek um, of some upcoming features for next school year."

Sarah: "So I'm going to switch now to a different tab. All right, do you all see the Khan Academy page now? Can I get a thumbs up from Aiv or Maddie? Yes? Okay, great! That worked easier than I was expecting. Wonderful! Okay, so this is the academic essay feedback activity on Khan Academy, and to get here, students will just go to their AI activities page. This is sort of the Kigo homepage, um, and the activity is right here on the menu underneath 'Give Feedback on My Academic Essay'."

Sarah: "And to start, students just paste in their initial draft. Uh, the maximum word count right now, this is probably going to increase fairly soon, but right now it's 1750 words. You can see that this pretty basic five-paragraph essay here is 588 words, so I'm well within that limit. Um, and I'm using a sample essay on Romeo and Juliet, and currently, the activity works best for middle and high school grades."

Sarah: "Um, it can work for lower level grades, but the feedback may be a little bit advanced. Um, it also works best for persuasive or argumentative essays, explanatory or expository essays, and literary analysis essays. Um, students should also paste in the essay prompt so that Kigo is aware of what the actual assignment is and can check to make sure that the essay is aligned to that and is meeting the requirements that the teacher sets."

Sarah: "So I'm going to click submit for review. Now the AI is analyzing the essay and generating feedback in five main areas, each of which are content experts in AI prompt engineers have spent more than six months perfecting against stringent quality standards. I am talking like the most intense, um, rubric-like checking so many thousands of drafts to make sure that the things that we're putting in front of students are accurate, are fair, are ethical, and that they are, you know, grade-level appropriate."

Sarah: "So we feel really good about the quality of this feedback. Um, the current five areas that Kigo gives feedback on are introduction, and this includes things like the lead or the hook of the introduction, thesis, the overall alignment of the essay in general to the prompt, um, evidence and reasoning, structure and organization, conclusion, style, tone, language, and vocabulary."

Sarah: "And research tells us that highlighting one feedback area at a time for students helps them focus on improving one set of writing skills versus being completely overwhelmed by a paper that's been heavily marked up for a whole variety of issues. So students can filter by specific feedback area. Note that while we're analyzing the essay for feedback, just like other Kigo activities, we're also moderating the essay for safety. So teachers, parents, and admins can see when students use the activity, what their first draft looked like, they can see the feedback that Kigo gave them, um, they can see any chats the student had with Kigo about the feedback, they can see the latest essay draft, and if anything is flagged for moderation by our moderation checks, then teachers, parents, admins, they all get a notification email."

Sarah: "Um, once Kigo's done generating, you can see that it's finished here. Um, you'll notice that students get a mix of both positive feedback and critical feedback, and some feedback is at the whole essay level. Um, other feedback can be about a specific section of the text or even specific sentences, and so Kigo will highlight the pieces of the text the feedback is about so that the student can hone in on that."

Sarah: "All right, so let's dig in here. Um, one thing that I think makes this activity particularly powerful is, excuse me, is that um, this is not just a feedback tool; it's really a revision tool. Um, the student can make revisions on the spot and get immediate help and feedback to act on each suggestion."

Sarah: "So I'm going to pick a piece of feedback here and I'm going to give that a try. Okay, so this is about my thesis statement here. Again, this is an essay on Romeo and Juliet and which character is most responsible for the tragedy. The student's thesis just says, 'However, Friar Lawrence is the most responsible.' The feedback is telling the student to make their thesis statement more specific. Um, it's telling me to explain briefly why or how he is the most responsible. So it's not telling me exactly how to change it; it's just telling me a general way that I might improve upon it."

Sarah: "And one of the things that students can do is they can ask Kigo to give them an example. And again, this is not like other AI tools that might actually provide a, um, suggested revision for the student to just accept and be on their merry way. It will give an example from a different essay. So in this case, Kigo is giving an example for an essay about fast food, and it says, instead of a thesis like 'Fast food is the most responsible for health problems,' it says, 'Fast food significantly contributes to health problems due to reasons X, Y, and Z.' So now as a student, I have a model that I can use to improve my thesis."

Sarah: "So if a student—and I'm being quick here for the demo purposes—but let's say I want to revise my thesis based on this model. Um, I'm going to paste some examples here. 'Friar Lawrence is most responsible due to his role as a trusted adviser, his involvement in their secret marriage, and his unfortunate planning.' So I can now ask Kigo, 'Is that better?' And if I left something out or if my language is unclear, Kigo will tell me—in this case it looks acceptable. I'm going to mark this as resolved and go back to the rest of my feedback."

Sarah: "Um, and now that I can resolve this, I can move on to another piece of feedback. Um, if I'm going to show another example of a case where a student might get help revising. So, um, similar to just general feedback on making sure that the student is sort of checking the general boxes of basic essay structure, um, it can also support students on things like style and tone."

Sarah: "So in this particular essay, uh, the student is using some vocabulary, um, in some language that's like a little informal for a 10th grade academic essay. So an example that Kigo points out here is that the sentence says, 'This decision made the secrecy around their relationship even worse,' and Kigo is pointing out that there's another way that you could write this to make it more specific or can make it kind of more academic sounding."

Sarah: "So I can ask Kigo to give me an example, or I can ask it to explain the suggestion too. Let's say it gives feedback that is a little too vague for the student; they need some more specific. Um, so in this case, it's telling the student that they could explain how specifically, uh, Friar Lawrence's decisions, uh, made the secrecy worse, uh, did make it harder for Romeo and Juliet to communicate, etc. It's giving the student ways that they can improve without giving them the exact directions for how to do it, and the student can have a whole back and forth conversation with Kigo about this feedback."

Sarah: "It can ask, uh, Kigo for um, word examples so it can act as a thesaurus or a dictionary, but it won't give exact sentences for the student to write. So let's say I wanted to think of another word to describe like to make something worse. I could say, 'Um, what's a more academic way of saying "make something worse"?' And it's giving me the word 'exacerbate the situation' or 'intensify the problem.' This is a really wonderful tool to teach students new vocabulary words and give them, um, examples of ways to phrase things that might be, you know, more grade-level appropriate."

Sarah: "So I could make those revisions and again, ask Kigo to evaluate my new revisions and that is the gist of it. I know we're short on time, so um, to recap some things that make this activity different from some other AI writing tools out there is that the focus is on high-quality feedback. Um, the feedback is specific, it's immediately actionable, the student can get revised, uh, follow-up feedback right away, it—the feedback's across a range of dimensions, the user experience actually supports the student through the revision process without ever doing the writing for them."

Sarah: "Um, and that's it for the demo, and I think I'm passing it off to Maddie."

Maddie: "Great! Thank you. I've seen this tool in action that Sarah just showed with my own students. Um, I had a few of them try it as soon as the feature went live. I got so excited personally as a teacher, and I'm seeing a bunch of teachers in the Q&A right now saying the same kinds of things—like, oh my gosh, it's unbelievable that it can do this much! Um, the amount of feedback they were able to get in a timely fashion really did impact the quality of their drafts in a way that I, as an educator in the classroom, really appreciate."

Maddie: "Um, it's been amazing to see Kigo develop even over the past six months from the user side, uh, because we piloted back in the spring, and, uh, having it now in January, it's absolutely remarkable how it's changed. Um, I know some people also arrived a little late and might not have heard me say that there will be answers that will be released in a blog post, you said, right, for some of the questions they're putting in the chat. Um, but one of the ones that had been asked, um, for me was what grade levels I use Kigo with, so I will tell you right now in my district I use it with 10th graders, 11th graders, and 12th graders."

Maddie: "And I also use it as a department chair for contextual planning to kind of streamline that process, and that's more of what I'm going to speak to today. So here in Hobart, uh, we live right uh, underneath Lake Michigan. Uh, and I say that because it's actually super timely that this webinar is happening today because it's one of the first days I've been back in school this entire month due to just weather—absolutely wild weather patterns, I've heard all over the country it's been kind of that way."

Maddie: "And um, I have to tell you that Kigo has made my e-learning experience with my students so much more effective. And I do have some examples that in my slides for today that are from actual students who used Kigo to help them in e-learning. So if you can go ahead and hit the next slide."

Maddie: "So, um, and I know the text is kind of small; I apologize, but so for these screenshots that we have here, these are from my actual students. One handy feature about Kigo is, uh, you always have access to your students' chat log. So I asked my students on the e-learning day, my specifically my dual credit seniors who are in an American Lit class to chat with Kigo about a little bit more of a niche story. Uh, we were looking at Ambrose Bierce at the time, and we were looking at 'An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge', and those are some pieces that, you know, they're not exactly Romeo and Juliet or Edgar Allan Poe, right? Not everybody has exposure to Ambrose Bierce in their high school experience. I know I had not in my own."

Maddie: "Um, what I was so astounded by was how in-depth Kigo was able to go in engaging with my students. I had asked them to chat with Kigo kind of seminar-style about any kinds of questions they might have had about the reading—things they didn't understand about the story, right? Or anything that they, um, they wanted to talk about deeper that we couldn't do because we weren't together in class, you know, it's a seminar style college literature class so we move on pretty quick. Um, and I really wanted to make sure they didn't lose out on that depth, so they were still able to have that conversation with Kigo."

Maddie: "So this first that we have here is actually the purple is my student, um, and he is one of the brightest ones in the class and the top 15 of his graduating class, and he chose to use his time with Kigo just kind of chatting about this deeper level of the text. So, uh, you know, he talks about how, um, you know, he was picturing how the symbolism really, you know, related to the overall message of the story—um, relating to the idea that Bierce might want the reader to know war isn't what you think until you've experienced it, right?—and talking about how the symbol connected to that message."

Maddie: "Kigo was able to respond to him, um, as effectively as another student in the class might have, and I actually have a quote from that student where he had said later on that it really enhanced his ability to understand that reading. He said it allowed me to give to get feedback on some of the analogies I had picked up on, and it made me feel really prepared to talk about the work in front of someone else and fleshed out my ideas in a helpful manner. And it even asked him in various sections, 'Oh, do you have a quote that'll support your understanding of this?' Um, and so it was really remarkable to read over his chat log with Kigo and how, you know, effectively it was able to meet his needs even as a college level reader in a more niche text. It was able to engage kind of in depth here."

Maddie: "Um, and you can see in the chat here that it was kind of reinforcing first what he said, affirming what he had said and then asking him to dig a little deeper. Um, on the next slide after this one, if you could switch it. This is one of my students who I would say, uh, she's more of an average level performer in the course, right? Uh, reading is not always her strong suit, so she was having a hard time with the background information related to the story. What was the purpose of the railroads? That were going over."

Maddie: "Kigo actually is able to give her that historical context that even the Norton Anthology of American Literature had not given to my student. So, you know, on the one hand, we can see a student here who was looking to really elevate his understanding; on the other, we’re looking at someone who needed the gaps kind of bridged there, and it was able to meet both of their needs, even though I wasn't with them in person. Um, overall their experience using that program outside of the classroom, they were very happy with it."

Maddie: "Um, these are the same students who had piloted the program the year before, but they did so in a writing class, so this was really one of their first times engaging with it in reading, and they were thrilled. They went, 'Oh my gosh, I would absolutely do this again—it did exactly what you would have done, Miss Bich! They it really encouraged me.' So this is just a real-world example of how it worked for them. Um, and then now I wanted to kind of pivot a little bit and speak to how I'm using it as an educator kind of outside of my classroom."

Maddie: "I do many lessons with Kigo like that one pretty regularly. Again, especially during e-learning. But I will tell you that the thing that really pushed me over the edge from being a teacher that was more nervous about AI than excited about embracing it was through seeing all of the ways that it could help streamline that behind the scenes work as a teacher."

Maddie: "Um, I don't have any slides on it today, but one thing that I wanted to note is there is a tool in Kigo where you can have rubrics created for you, um, based on your own assessments. Um, my school district, we were working on really building some cohesive language in our rubrics and cohesive formatting. Um, we do about 10 units per year in our ninth and tenth grade classes. I think since there's so many English teachers in the webinar today, there's like almost 600 people here; I know you would know exactly what I'm talking about when I say English teachers take a long time to write a good rubric, right? We care so much about finding the perfect way to phrase those differences between something that is excellent versus, uh, you know, meeting a standard, above standard, meeting standard, approaching a standard, and having those little descriptors for each performance level."

Maddie: "Um, rubrics used to take me up to an hour to make on my own, and we were able to get 10 rubrics made in a half day. In my district, we took a curriculum mapping day, we had our performance task ready, we had Kigo open, and we made all of those rubrics, and they're exceptional! We made them in a half day."

Maddie: "Another thing that we used Kigo for this summer was rebuilding our grammar program in our district. Um, we were unhappy with a lot of the grammar resources that are out there outside of, you know, programs such as Khan Academy, uh, we were looking into something that really we could make our own, right? Tailor to our students. We're a K-12 district—how could we build something that would meet our kids' needs?"

Maddie: "So we spent the summer working. Uh, in a team, there were three of us, and we met three times in person where we went through grades 6 through 12 and identified where according to the Indiana State Standards kids should be meeting certain benchmarks in terms of grammar. Um, which, fun fact, in most states our kids are supposed to have mastered all of grammar by the start of 11th grade, and I'm sure many of us would be thinking to ourselves, 'My students aren't there!' I know mine aren't there, right?"

Maddie: "So we wanted to build something that was vertically articulated, 6 through 10, and that's pretty ambitious to do in one summer. So we first brainstormed—here you can see on this slide—when certain skills would get covered. So we focused on three per mini-unit in a particular quarter. You can hit the next slide from there."

Maddie: "We went to Kigo and said, 'Okay, so if we want to draft content for these mini-units for grammar, we're going to need some topics.' So here's some overall categories; can you help us brainstorm some fun little subcategories we can touch on here? So like interesting careers that students wouldn't know a lot about, historical figures that have amazing back stories, um, food with weird back stories. Um, Kigo taught us about all kinds of historical events we knew nothing about, uh, just so we would be able to have non-fiction based quizzes for grammar that were engaging—things that they would actually, you know, read and have a good time with."

Maddie: "And then you can hit next slide. This is really where Kigo then came into play, aside from generating the ideas with us. We then asked for the program to draft the base sentences for the daily sentence practice our students would do during the week as well as the paragraph-based quiz that they would complete at the end. So we added the errors ourselves afterward, but, you know, really thinking this through for a second, the hardest part in my opinion of making any grammar resource is coming up with enough non-fiction content off the top of our heads where we're not plagiarizing somebody else, uh, that we could then build our own needs into, right? Kigo was able to do that drafting phase for us."

Maddie: "So we could really authentically focus on embedding what we needed. So I was able to prompt the program in the Create a Lesson feature and just say, 'Hey, I'm looking to make a grammar quiz covering, you know, a few concepts here; could you give me a paragraph suited for a 10th grader that is about the great emu war?' And it did it magically! I had this paragraph ready to go and all I had to do was add the errors in that I would have my students correct."

Maddie: "So on the next slide, you can see what those sentences then end up looking like in that particular unit. They have 10 sentences per, uh, little section of the quarter, and so the errors are already embedded. Kigo did the initial draft; I cleaned it up from there. And then on the next slide, you have what that final quiz would look like. So again, I didn't have to do the initial draft, I was able to just focus on adding in what my kids needed."

Maddie: "It really expedited my own planning process; uh, I did one quarter of these grammar resources in four hours over winter break—that's an entire quarter of resources! That's 10 sentences per little mini unit plus an entire paragraph quiz in four hours, and that's unheard of for me! The amount of time I am able to save and then guarantee vertical articulation in my district from 6 through 10—that's phenomenal, right? Our kids will be able to build with these resources."

Maddie: "And I've had my own students when they are having trouble, let's say with parallelism, I have them ask Kigo for extra practice. It will generate practice problems for them. So if these exercises that I'm giving in class are not enough for them to be able to bridge their own learning gaps, they can use the program outside of school to be able to get that toned tutor that they need without having to pay for it."

Maddie: "So those are just a few of the ways that I've used Kigo in my own classroom. Like I said, what sold me more than anything was how it's not only able to be there to be a tutor for my kids, which is huge, and you know that that is phenomenal for them, it's— but it's also, you know, frankly, just based on what Sarah was talking about earlier. It's been huge on cutting down the number of hours that I needed to devote to the planning part of my job because then I can take that energy and that time and devote it more, more so to helping my students as humans and as people."

Maddie: "And that's why we sign on for this profession, right? Is not because we're so passionate about spending hours writing grammar practice, we're more passionate about helping kids, and I can go back to that part of my job that I love. So I hope this is helpful. Um, I think those are the ends of my slides, Aiv, so I'll pass it back over to you."

Aiv: "Thank you so much, Maddie, and I'm sure what everyone is appreciating in hearing you speak is that, you know, there's this, uh, there's this tendency to think about AI as a thing that just gets us out of something or saves us time because we don't have to do the thing, but I think both in your student examples and in your own planning work, it's so clear that it's a really strategic application of the AI to help you do something even better than you could have done without it."

Aiv: "Um, I really appreciate the examples you shared. Um, I want to turn it back to Sarah in our last few minutes to talk to us all about what the future of AI for ELA looks like. Um, Sarah, we would love to hear your predictions—things you're excited about—and then anything you could tell us about, um, what your team is working on building for teachers and students."

Sarah: "Thank you, Aiv, and thank you, Maddie! I had the privilege of actually visiting Maddie's classroom a couple of weeks ago, and it was just as magical as you might expect based on all of those wonderful examples that she shared. So thank you, Maddie, for for joining this."

Sarah: "Um, so earlier I talked a lot about feedback and revision, um, but I speak to a lot of ELA teachers as part of my job, and there are two things that I know are top of mind when it comes to writing for many ELA teachers right now. One of those is empowering students to just get started on an essay to begin with. You know, I shared the writing feedback tool with some teachers recently, and they were like, 'This is really awesome, but like I have a hard enough time just getting a first draft out of my students.'"

Sarah: "Um, and the second is the very real problem that I think has been mentioned in the Q&A section multiple times already of AI plagiarism and cheating. And I can't give too much of a preview because we are still a few months away from launching this, but I'm excited to share that in the next school year, Kigo will be able to support students through the entire essay drafting process—from breaking down and understanding an essay prompt to brainstorming the student’s response to that essay to outlining the essay to drafting the essay and then of course feedback and revision."

Sarah: "Um, we're calling this Kigo Writing Coach currently, and not only will this tool support students from the very beginning of their writing process, but it will also be able to provide you as their teachers with both high-level insights on students' writing skills and detailed documentation about each student's writing process from start to finish including potential originality flags is what I think we're calling them at the moment."

Sarah: "So imagine for a moment a report that tells you that your students struggled most with outlining, or your students struggled most with integrating evidence, and that you might want to look closely at the documentation for this specific student's assignment because they pasted a large block of text from a mysterious source, or because the draft that appeared didn't align to the outline that the student worked on with Kigo. When we're able to kind of document that entire writing process, it will be a lot easier to point to moments where it seemed like the student didn't do this by themselves since, you know, we are having the student walk with Kigo through this whole process."

Sarah: "And the goal here is to focus as much on the process of writing as the product of writing because we know that so many of the academic benefits of writing in general come from the experience of thinking critically and drafting and making mistakes and rewriting and reorganizing and brainstorming. All these pieces of the writing process are really what develop such critical skills in our students, so stay tuned for Writing Coach."

Sarah: "Um, and I don't want to also leave out reading because reading is very near and dear to my heart. I think some of the examples Maddie shared are wonderful applications of Kigo for reading teachers right now, but we also have some exciting other reading features that we're currently exploring and experimenting with, and um, hope to have something for reading soon. Um, for the next school year, so stay tuned for that as well."

Sarah: "And as always, the product team at KH Academy is very eager to hear your thoughts, your feedback. So, um, definitely reach out, feel free, like Aiv said, to add questions in the Q&A currently, and we'll get back to you. Um, and I'm just really excited for you all to be here! Thank you all for joining this learning session to try out Kigo's essay feedback feature for yourself or with your students, and to see more of how Kigo is already working in classrooms, click the links you see here and don't forget to subscribe to KH Academy for the latest updates and for more free world-class educational content. Happy learning!"