AI for Digital SAT prep

All right, everybody! Well, we are going to take time to now introduce, uh, myself as the host and then I'll let my amazing panelists go ahead and introduce themselves. So nice to meet you! My name is Danielle Sullivan. I am Senior Manager of District Partnerships in the Northeast for Khan Academy. Before all of this, way back when, I've been with edtech for a little bit, but I was also a fifth and sixth-grade special education teacher in Upstate New York and in Washington D.C. So I'm excited to be here today to talk all about SATs.

Uh, Sarah, why don't you go ahead and kick us off with the panel introductions?

Sure! Hi everyone! My name is Sarah Taylor. I am a District Success Manager. I work primarily with districts in Michigan and Ohio. Prior to being at Khan Academy, I was a high school science teacher for about 10 years, then was in administration as a K-12 curriculum director, and then for about nine years I was at College Board. I was working with State Departments of Education, helping to administer the SAT Suite of Assessments for their state federal accountability assessments. So I am very happy to be able to apply my knowledge of the SAT to the districts that I work with at Khan Academy.

Great! Sarah, thank you. All right, Elizabeth.

Hello! Good afternoon! My name is Elizabeth Hadley, and I am also a District Success Manager, working with districts all across the United States, focusing on their digital SAT implementation with Khan Academy. Prior to my arrival at Khan Academy, I was working in a county in Orlando called Osceola County. I was a teacher, former literacy coach, and spent four years in a research and evaluation office implementing assessments, PLCs, short cycle formative assessments, and also implementing Khan Academy with our 20,000 high school students. So it’s just a pleasure to be able to share all of that information I have with the districts that I work with now at Khan Academy. No big deal, just implementing with 20,000 kids— a little bit—just like working with several state departments. No big deal!

Um, and Raven.

Hey, everybody! So happy to see you all today! My name is Raven Cassus. I'm a District Success Manager mostly working with districts in the Northeast. I see somebody from Greensboro on, so welcome! Formerly, I was in K-12 for about 22 years. I was a science teacher, an instructional coach, and most recently, a high school principal. So very familiar with the SAT and getting parents, students, and teachers ready and involved in the process. So happy to share my expertise today about all the things that go along with the SAT.

Wonderful! So I'm going to stop sharing my screen because the point of today is to really just have an interactive, collaborative conversation around how we're going to support you in thinking through preparing students for the digital SAT. We understand that, wherever you're watching this, those of you here today are in different journeys. And if you're watching this in the future, um, you might be in a different journey on the timeline. But our goal today is really to help you understand, through different perspectives and points of view, how students can help them catch up in ELA and math, especially after the pandemic, which was a lot! I mean, does anyone remember the year 2019? Does anybody? I—no, right? I mean, who even knows?

So how we can transition to the new digital assessment format can be challenging, so we're here to support you and understand, um, pieces and our perspectives. You can ask questions in the chat, you can collaborate with each other in the chat, or you can submit questions from the Q&A, so I’m both up and ready. I’ll be asking questions of panelists, but please, we would love to hear from you as well!

So to kick us off, Sarah, the SAT has been around for a long time. We are now several months into the transition to a digital test. How has the transition been for schools? And how have you observed the preparation for the test and how that's? Um, how's that been?

Sure! You know, change is hard, and there was a lot of it this year. If you administered the SAT school day or if you were a weekend test center, um, you're probably, we like likely focus on a lot of the administrative changes that had happened with the digital test, so how to install Blue Book, how do students log in to Blue Book, test toolkit, ordering, registration rooms, training your staff—all of those logistical things were a lot for educators this year if you administered in your building. But now, hopefully, maybe you have had one or more administrations under your belt, and you feel a little more confident about actually administering the test. You can focus now on, you know, helping students and really diving into the data that you might get for that.

Great! Elizabeth, what about what have you seen from your perspective?

Well, you know, just like Sarah said, change is really hard. I have to be honest—I've worked with intensive readers for a very long time, um, trying to get them to the finish line with the SAT, and I was really nervous about all of the changes. I was nervous for the teachers, especially in Reading classrooms, having to transition from annotating text and working with text with their fingers, chunking text to a digital format. To be honest with you, as the course of the year went on, the transition was a lot smoother than I had anticipated. If you were talking to me last summer, I was pretty nervous. But once we got into the swing of things and students were practicing on Khan Academy and they were getting exposure to those digital items, I started to feel like the districts were reporting back to me that they were doing really well with it and they were doing well with the online calculators and things like that.

Now, with the districts I've been talking to, the students are reporting back to the educators that, you know, they liked it a lot better. It wasn't as long, it was a little bit easier to get through some of the questions. Obviously, the data will tell us if it was easier or not, but, you know, the fact that the students are responding a little bit better to that digital format was not only a nice surprise to me but was also exciting, you know, to hear that feedback and news from our district partners.

Oh, absolutely! Um, do you all remember taking the SAT? Remember back when in '19? Change is always hard, right? Raven, what are you seeing from your perspective?

So, I just wanted to say that last year we partnered with College Board, which is such a great partnership that we had, and we started transitioning our districts last year. We started getting them ready, we started prepping them, we started giving them as much information as we could to kind of get them ready and get their students ready, kind of have a plan in place. So I feel like they were ready. They did reach out for assistance from us, which we were happy to collaborate with them. And then, with the help of the new Khan Academy SAT course and the Blue Book app, we were able to get the students up and running. And like Sarah said, I think the biggest change was for teachers and administrators. Our kids are so resilient, right? They take to technology so quickly, so this wasn't that hard for the students; it was harder for the teachers to prepare, I think, for most of all.

But, um, like Elizabeth said, only the data will tell. I think that with the preparation that students had on Khan Academy, I'm excited to hear from districts once they start getting those scores back.

Absolutely! And again, in the chat, if you want to chime in—what was your experience with the change? Did it work? How are you feeling about it? Um, but Sarah, since we're going to make the College Board connection, I'd love for you to think about Khan Academy's approach to SAT preparation. How do we think through this at Khan Academy to help students be prepared and ensure that they are understanding what to do?

Sure! I mean, I think when we think about SAT prep, we think about all those prep activities, you know, getting familiar with Blue Book, how many questions, the type of questions, time management. And while important and students need to have those skills, what we really want to try to focus on, and to really improve SAT scores, and of course that means college readiness because that's what the SAT is designed to measure, we really need to focus on the skills. These are not just skills on the SAT; these are enduring reading, writing, and math skills that students need to know, not only for college readiness but to be successful also in their other high school courses. So I think our focus on those enduring skills is really, really important.

Thank you! So, Elizabeth, walk us through how we approach skills at Khan Academy.

Yeah, great question! Like Raven said, you know we are partnered with College Board, so they help us design those questions to make sure that they're 100% aligned. But, you know, talking specifically about the skills, both of our digital SAT courses, the math and the reading and writing, have a series of skills. The math one has like 111; the ELA one has about 41 to 50 skills. When we talk about mastery learning and we talk about our students authentically learning those skills, like Sarah was mentioning for college and career and just life in general, um, what I love about Khan Academy is that the students, the teachers, and the administrators are able to track the students' proficiency level on those skills. So all year long, starting in August, we're tracking the students working through those skills and whether or not they're reaching proficiency in those skills. Because if they're proficient, then I'm, as a teacher, more confident that they're going to be able to answer that question on their own when it comes to the PSAT or the SAT on test day. So that's something that myself, Sarah, and Raven work really hard with our district partners: here are the skills your students are excelling in; these are the ones that we need to lean into and really get some more support going. Um, and so that's really what frames our conversations with our partners all the time is—what are the skills and how are the students doing on those skills?

And Raven, from your perspective, um, what else are you thinking about when it comes to skills? Because I know you're thinking about skills a lot.

Yes! So, um, just to piggyback off what Elizabeth and Sarah said, the great thing about Khan Academy is it's a one-stop shop for SAT prep, right? Like students can go in, they can take the course challenges, that can give the teachers from right from the beginning of the school year where they need to lean in. So instead of, um, wasting time having kids just kind of drill and kill, we're going to take the approach—let's lean into what they need. If they already know it, let it be. They will get those skills throughout the school year from their teacher. But the skills that they need a little bit of extra help on— we're going to lean in there, and then teachers are going to look at their reports and then go back and maybe make small groups or give extra reinforcement assignments outside of their course mastery goal.

So, we did a good job aligning with College Board and making those three different categories in our SAT prep course. We have the foundations, the medium, and the advanced. So just like the SAT, because it's adaptive now, we want to make sure that, um, our students are getting all that they need in all the areas of the test.

That's great! So I want us to start to now layer on how we're thinking about AI and use of the courses. So Sarah, thinking about AI, what are some of the challenges and opportunities that are presented when using AI for the digital SAT prep?

Yeah, one of the immediate examples that came in my head is when I was, uh, teaching science. We did an SAT prep boot camp. It was like a two-week kind of course that we had students take during the summer; they could sign up for it. But I really struggled with figuring out how to teach that, how to keep students engaged in some of this content that isn't, you know, terribly exciting probably to them. I know lots of you probably have SAT prep courses or electives in your school, and so I think where AI could have been an opportunity for me and saved me a lot of time is to use our Kigo teaching tools. And so this would have made my life a whole lot easier. I spent so much time trying to figure out how to keep students engaged and do these things, but we have lesson plan generators that would have been super helpful.

Um, there's a Kigo teacher tool where it creates informational text, and as we know, kind of reading and having those close reading skills are super important. So generating that informational text for my students to be able to practice with, um, we have a Kigo teacher tool about keeping it relevant—real-world context generators—all of those things that I just spent so much mental energy trying to come up with on my own, Kigo could have done it for me. And so I wish I would have had those tools back in my teaching day, way back in the day!

Anyone else feel that way? Anyone else spending any time on planning? Just kidding! I know you are!

So Elizabeth, I see you empathically nodding. Why don't you add to the conversation?

Yeah, I mean, I remember lots of Sundays preparing for my multiple preps and, you know, making sure I had everything planned out for the week. And it's amazing to me how quickly some of this is now automated with Kigo. Um, you know, AI is new to all of us—Khan Academy, and my colleagues on this call, but, you know, it’s new to our teachers, it's new to our parents, our district admin. Um, and it's been really a great year just kind of discovering and learning. And I think, you know, one of the challenges that educators are facing today in the classroom is students understanding how to interact with Kigo and with AI.

And I, I have really come to the conclusion that there's a lot of modeling that needs to be involved for our students. You know, this is not Google; um, it's not a quick way just to go get an answer. You really have to work with the students on how you talk to Kigo and how you can authentically use Kigo to help you learn and, you know, grasp onto new skills and tasks. Where I see it being really beneficial, just like SAT prep, is, you know, small group instruction in the classroom and, you know, having a personalized tutor at every single desk. Um, so there's only one teacher usually in the classroom—if, if they're lucky they get two or an aide or a helper—but being able to have students get that immediate feedback and work through something that they're trying to learn right at their fingertips without having that teacher right next to them, I really think is powerful in all of this. And when it comes to SAT prep, you know, all the students deserve all the help that they can get, and, um, that's definitely something I see being super powerful in the future, um, in classrooms.

Oh, absolutely! I mean, technology's come a long way, but as we've shared, change can be hard. I mean, I remember SAT prep was a giant book like this—again, you all remember? I mean, in the year, blah! So thinking about the evolution, thinking about AI, Raven, what are you seeing in the districts that you work with about opportunities and challenges?

So, you know, the opportunities are just the equity, right? We know that everyone doesn't have a mom that stays home or access to a tutor. So the fact that we have a tool that all students can use, um, no matter what grade level, what state, um, that they're in, is amazing. You know, um, and honestly, I have two teenagers, and I don't know all the stuff that they're learning now, even though I'm an educator! So just imagine a non-educator parent trying to navigate all the different things that students are learning nowadays.

So not only can it help the parents because I use Kigo quite often to help my own children, um, but this is like Elizabeth said, this is a personalized tutor for every single student in every single classroom all over the country. And, you know, just like any new tool, the challenges always come with time, right? When am I going to train my teachers to use this? How am I going to use this so that, um, you know, they're using it safely? Those are all the things that, um, are always challenges. But I feel like at Khan Academy, we really did a good job at figuring all those things out—um, you know, while having the moderation and having teachers being able to monitor the chat and having parents being able to link to accounts and monitor their chat.

So there's always going to be challenges because, um, ChatGPT and all the AI technology are constantly changing, right? Large language models hallucinate, there's all the things. Um, but, you know, even with any new technology or any new curriculum adaptation or any of those things in a school, it is always challenging, and it just takes, you know, the right leader and us guiding you through implementation in order to make sure that, um, the challenges are minimal. Um, but I would not be a former High School principal if I sat here and said that there aren't going to be any challenges because they definitely will be. Um, but, you know, hopefully those are things that our team can figure out for you and help you navigate some of those things.

Right, and there was a question in the chat about a visual demo. Um, we want to focus on more of a conversation today, but before we leave you all today, we'll give you some—uh, point you in a direction where you can access things and see the things, and there are lots of resources. But we're trying to give you more the educator perspective instead of showing you a bunch of stuff. It's awesome, it's very awesome! However, we want to talk more about the why and the how behind it. And like Raven said, um, I'll give you a little bit more information on how we'd love to support you in this work.

But I want to go back to learning and mastery learning. That is a term which is really interesting that I feel like we need to talk way more from the education rooftops about protecting learning. What does it mean to master skills? So, Sarah, I'd love for you to think about how, what role does mastery learning play in helping students with even the new digital SAT format?

Yeah, I think the inherent nature of mastery learning is to make sure that students have a strong foundation and that prerequisite knowledge to build upon, so there aren't any gaps; there's no holes in their learning. And then the digital SAT prep course mirrors this, and Raven mentioned this before—by scaffolding those skills. Um, we have those foundational levels, the medium difficulty, and the advanced difficulty to ensure—not only the breadth of the skills that we are offering to make sure those align to what's being assessed on the SAT—but again, those enduring skills, but the depth of those skills as well.

Yeah, absolutely! I mean, even thinking about the SAT, why are we taking that? Anybody? Just kidding! We're taking—it’s so students can continue to learn, continue to master learning hopefully at, uh, different institutions. So Sarah or Elizabeth, what have you seen from your perspective around mastery learning?

You know, mastery learning to me has always been, you know, the students truly getting to the depth of that skill and being able to reproduce proficiency on it many different times. Um, and really for our students to show proficiency in a skill on Khan Academy, they have to see it at least two times and get that skill correct on an assessment or a unit quiz or a course challenge. So I always feel more confident knowing that when the student has mastered this skill, this is something they've been able to do multiple times through practice.

Um, another thing that I see that is really beneficial is the students, the parents, and the teachers and admins can track how the students—and like or how many skills the students have mastered. So, in our platform, you can track mastery progress, um, by unit or even by the entire course. And you can keep students engaged. When we're talking about student engagement here on, um, you know, all year long, how much of this course have you mastered? Um, and making sure that students are continuing to, you know, progress and continue to gain mastery. Um, I think that's always, like, the big piece of this puzzle is motivating students. And so, if students know that end goal in mind and they know that, like, hey, if I can get to 80 or 90% mastery in this course, hey, like, I'm going to be a lot more confident the day I have to sit for the SAT.

Um, so yeah, that's what I like, and I also love how it's transparent from the student all the way up to the district admin. That’s, to me, really important so everyone can be involved in that conversation with the students.

Oh, absolutely! I mean, data needs to be owned and visible for all stakeholders in a district, period. Like, that's the way it's going to have a profound impact. But Raven, from your perspective, even as a former building-level leader, what do you—what are your thoughts on the engagement and mastery of, well, mastery of skills and student engagement when thinking about SAT in particular?

Yeah, I'm just thinking about in the secondary world, you know, right? You have kids on different tracks doing different things, um, different schedules across the district. So the fact that mastery learning is something that teachers can set day one and kind of just let it flow, and the kids will go on their own path—that is great! Because it's less time, right? For teachers, um, now teachers can focus on student FaceTime and going over those skills that students are not proficient at, right? And giving them, um, doing small groups and, um, managing that.

And then, you know, doing during their PLCs, using the data to kind of track—okay, maybe this is something we need to change in our curriculum or instruction. I noticed that most kids are really doing poorly on linear equations, so maybe we need to loop back around and try that skill again. But the great thing about mastery learning is if I have six different levels in the class, it's okay, because Khan Academy is going to pull them through in the path that they need that fits their learning.

Um, and there's nothing that can beat that because that will take a teacher—like Danielle said back when I was in the classroom, some years ago—that will take a teacher a very long time to outline who needs to learn what in a short period before the SAT, and it's just not a manageable task. So, using Khan Academy in order to filter some of that out and have the teacher, um, put the students on and kind of have that path, and then they can focus on that student FaceTime and that one-on-one interaction, um, is just a game changer! And for those students who are high flyers who don't want to sit there and listen to you, guess what? They don't have to; they keep going on Khan Academy where they need to be! And that, to me, is just, you know, something as an educator and a teacher that, um, is, you know, what my kids—all my kids are getting what they need, and that's the most important thing!

Yeah! And just make sure you go back and just re-listen to what Raven just said. She just dropped a lot of great data, best practice strategies, um, just around making sure that you were thinking and using skill-based, an analysis to support student learning.

So now we're going to go back in a time machine. This is not Back to the Future, but maybe it is; but it's not just I want you to think back—think back to when you were back in teaching, um, in your high school classrooms, thinking about getting started for the next school year. How would you think through preparing students for the digital SAT? And how now, we’re like right Back to the Future where he’s like from the 8S but on the hoverboard. So, you're back when you taught, and then now you have Kigo and you have Khan Academy to help you. So how would you think about it, and then how would it change with the introduction of the AI?

Why don't you kick us off, Sarah, in the DeLorean? Too much with this analogy. All right, go ahead, Sarah.

So, I think most everybody knows science isn't directly measured on the SAT, right? But within the reading and writing section and the math section, there are questions that have a science context. So I was a science teacher, and just because science isn't being measured doesn't mean I'm off the hook. I can still help my students with, um, preparing for the SAT. So what I would do is have my students go on to Khan Academy in the science courses. So, go to the biology course or chemistry course, physics, or science, whatever you want to do, and within those courses, there are articles, and those articles have a lot of rich, informational science-based text.

And so the more I can get my students reading those science-kind of context texts and being comfortable with reading those, that’s just going to serve them so much better when they're going to take the SAT. So I would really focus on the reading, close reading skills of, uh, science informational text. Um, and then if students have access to Kigo, they can, you know, use Kigo on those articles as well, "Hey, explain, I don't know what this word means, help me with this." Um, so again, it's that personal tutor helping them go through that informational text, which again will help them on the SAT.

That's amazing! And I love how you're sharing, even though you—you know science isn't directly assessed, I think a lot of, um, content teachers sometimes are like, “What does my subject have to do with it?” But just supporting students in being critical thinkers and engaged learners, like, it takes a team effort, so thank you for pointing that out too. Elizabeth, what's your perspective in your DeLorean time machine?

Well, you know, I taught 11th-grade ELA for five years, and I always felt like I was very systematic. I like things to, like, happen at a certain time. Um, and so I'd really kind of like backwards plan from, “Okay, when is my SAT school day? When should I have my students practice on Blue Book?” And really start in August with two things. Um, the first thing I would really start is with the course challenge. Um, so the cool thing in our digital SAT courses is you can assign something kind of like a pre-assessment; it's called a course challenge. It gives the students, um, you know, a random sampling of the skills from both of the courses, and you can do that really early on in the school year and immediately start getting skilled out back.

Um, so you can start grouping students by skills; you can kind of start to get an idea of what skills students may be already a little bit proficient in and which ones they may need help with. Um, so I would definitely start with the course challenge just to kind of get that initial data. And then I would, you know, with AI and with Kigo, would probably spend a lot of time modeling at the beginning of the year with my students of, you know, “Hey, this is an example of a problem that I don’t know how to answer.” If it was me, it would be a math problem that I would bottle with my students.

Um, and really kind of show the students how you can engage back and forth with Kigo to answer the question or summarize a video or summarize an article. I also think collaborative pairs—students working together with Kigo to see what they discover and see what they learn—would also be part of my routine early on in the school year. Um, and then moving into the fall, you know, starting to really look at the skills data and my mastery data. So, you know, have my students mastered at least 15% of the course by, I don’t know, October 15th? Um, and just making sure that my students were on track to keep moving through the skills would definitely be probably my approach if I was in an ELA classroom today.

And, um, you know, going into January, making sure that they practice on Blue Book is super important, and, um, you know, going through the features and all the tools and the calculator and all that that’s embedded there I think is also super important to be transparent with the students on.

I really love that you're calling out modeling. Um, I was a former middle school teacher, and I—maybe you can relate—has anyone ever handed highlighters to middle school kids? Yeah, without modeling? Just, you can imagine, you know, what happens. That's the thing! AI is another tool, but it's still important to model. I think times middle school and high school teachers forget. They assume that students should know how to use things, but in this new world, no! No, modeling is really, really important, especially when there's so much changing, there's so much innovation happening.

So I really, um—plus your approach is very linear, so thank you for that. Raven, what about you?

So I'm going to just take the perspective of a building administrator, um, just because Sarah and Elizabeth share so many great tips as a class teacher, but right now is the time that you're going to be planning out scheduling, right? Because what is everything that teachers say? “I don’t have enough time! I can’t do that! I don’t have enough time for this! I don’t have enough time for that!” Well, we’re in charge, building administrators—you’re in charge of the schedule, you’re in charge of giving teachers that quote-unquote time, and that's really important.

Um, even if it's not changing your schedule, like in my high school, we had 90-minute blocks, so I gave them, you know, several different options of how they could set up their class in order to prep for all the different things that you have to prep for in high school—all the different exams. And, um, teachers just have to know that you’re supporting them in this journey, and part of that is giving them ease of access and that's what Kigo does, right?

So they don’t have to have that big book anymore. They can go on, they can align their content throughout the year with the SAT questions. Why can’t they have SAT Fridays? You know, say, “Hey, guys, if you—like Sarah said, it doesn’t matter what content you’re teaching on Fridays for the first 30 minutes of our last block—we’re going to do SAT prep on Khan Academy.”

Um, you know, it’s also parents can link to their accounts, so maybe if I have a good success rate with homework, I’m going to use it for homework. Um, but Kigo can give the teachers data, like Elizabeth was saying, so that can, um, be done right before class instead of them having to dig through; Kigo will make groups for you, it will tell you the skills that need to be worked on, um, it will give you lesson plans, it will even, um, allow the students to practice! You just say, “Kigo, give me some practice questions.” So even just giving the kids enough time to do that is going to be, um, definitely an agent of change for them to be able to move forward.

Um, we know that time is of the essence, um, for students and for teachers, so this is just another way for teachers and administrators to save time, have a plan, and make sure that students are prepared and not waiting till the last minute to cram but be working on this all year long, like Elizabeth said, from the fall with that course challenge and then keeping it going throughout the year until test day, instead of, um, you know, having that anxiousness of cramming everything into one bit of time because you don’t have the time! I’m sure nobody who’s watching has ever crammed for anything and felt that—especially not in college when you’re trying to manage your time as a young person, right?

Um, that’s the key is preparedness planning, and we try to support you, um, in our partnerships at Khan Academy and doing this essential work. So now I want to—we're running—speaking of time, we are running almost out of time. Um, so I want us to think about one last perspective: future developments. So, in thinking on that, you know, the way the SAT has moved to the digital format, what are we doing at Khan Academy, or what do you think in the world of education is happening, or what do we hope for, um, for the use of AI and helping to continue this work for the digital SAT?

Why don't you get us started, Sarah.

I think there's a lot of concern about using AI in education, and rightly so, right? We're in a— we're in a brand new world. But I also think we tend to think about it in the way that we were taught or the way that we were taught to teach. And so, kind of moving into this new world of using AI in education, what I would hope to see is that AI is a tool to help us, um, teach critical thinking a little bit better, a little bit easier. It's a hard thing to teach, um, and it's a hard thing to do. I would hope that, you know, increased collaboration— we’re taking AI, you know, for all that rote knowledge that it can do for students, right? But then how are we going to get them to collaborate effectively? And I think there's a big, um, kind of place where AI can help teachers and students improve those critical thinking skills and collaboration skills, and I'm hoping that's where we're headed eventually.

And what I heard you say is human skills, right? Right, critical thinking, collaboration— a computer can't do that! That’s what humans—and that’s actually a great way for us to just learn in general! So, so I just, again, I know I have a lot, there’s a lot of talk in education. It’s good, the computers are taking over; this can be a tool to help with the human-ing—humaning skills. That is a new word, everybody! Humaning? Maybe it’s a real word!

Elizabeth, save me! What do you think?

You know, I hope for the future that, you know, everyone gets more comfortable with AI, but also with that understanding that that teacher in the classroom can never be replaced and that the teacher is still just the most important human connection in the world. I, I remember, you know, we go back to the modeling, and I remember in the classroom, you know, my students looked up to me, you know, and I spent more time with my students than I did my own family on many, many occasions, and I know they did the same. And they would take long bus rides, you know, to my school.

I hope that for the future, students, you know, still have, you know, that human connection with their peers and with their students in the world and the community around them, but that they get more comfortable using AI to enhance what they have and what they know and what they can learn. I would also love to see AI have a role in assessments. I believe data is so important, uh, not only to our school district leaders but our principal schools and our students and our parents. And I would love to see some sort of, um, incorporation of AI in our short-cycle formative assessments that we give our students. Um, what that looks like, I’m not exactly sure, but it’s definitely something I’ve been thinking about in my mind of how this could change the world of assessments for the future.

Yeah, absolutely! And Raven, I love that you keep, giving us the admin perspective, so let's just keep on going! What are your thoughts?

I mean, I was just thinking that, you know, from when I was a student myself to when I was teaching in the school, and you know, admin, and then even this perspective that I have now working with districts every single day. Um, you know, there’s always going to be something new, and for education, I think we’ve got that down pat, right? We get a new curriculum every other minute; we get new tools; we get all the things!

So this is one of those things, but this thing we have to treat a little bit more delicately, right? We have to make sure that we’re modeling, we’re exposing not only our teachers and our students and our admin but also our community and our parents. Because, um, it’s going to affect everybody! It already is, right? Like, we use it on a day-to-day basis, sometimes without knowing if you have an Alexa in your house, if you have, you know, Google, if you have any of a Google Nest or any of those things—you know, yeah, Siri, you’re using AI every single day, and you know, you don’t think twice about it!

So that’s what it needs—that’s what I hope for the future, that it’s something that you won’t even think twice—you know, before COVID, not everybody had even one-to-one devices. We never even thought, like, “Okay, everybody’s going to have a computer and you’re going to be doing your work on a computer, not even in the school building—but we did it!

So this is just another one of those things that has come, you know, to the forefront, and we have to take it, and we have to learn it! Don’t be afraid of it! And then teach, teach, teach! Model, model, model! And make sure that it’s being used in the appropriate way, and that students know the value of it! Because it is valuable. It’s not just a tool for students to cheat or to, you know, um, mess around because I know that’s what a lot of people think, but it is really valuable.

And I'm going to say one little short story because I know we're running out of time, but, um, just as everybody else, when you know Kigo came out—was born one year ago, you know, March or so—I was like, “Oh my goodness! What are we doing? Like this is crazy! Like an AI? Like, you know, I was trying to read books and look up articles and all the things to try to, you know, help myself understand what was going on, and I’ll never forget my manager saying, “You know, this is here, guys! We have to embrace it; we have to use it; we have to know it so that we can help our district partners.”

And I thought about that, and I was like, “You know, she’s right!” And, um, but I'm like, “I just need to see it for myself.” So I had the opportunity to go to a school in California and see it in action, and this school using a special population, so they use it with, um, AVID students, special ed students, and ELL students—and that changed my whole perspective! Because basically, just as we wanted it, the one teacher, all the kids, they had Kigo to help them, and they didn't skip a beat!

So there was no kids sitting there waiting for me to ask for help. I—you know, there's no one—I don't have to worry that I'm gonna have to do this lesson for three more days than I have to because half my class didn’t get it! They had someone there that could help them and change the language so they could be supported in the language that they needed.

So with all the future shortages, with all the shortages that are going on around that, just really, you know, was a special thing that I saw and really made me feel that we’re doing the right thing and that Kigo is going to be really something that is going to change the lives of a lot of people.

Well, Raven, Sarah, Elizabeth, this was a wonderful conversation! I appreciate, um, all of your time and your thoughts and your perspectives. And to Raven's point, hopefully you can see this—here we go! Can you all see this? We are here with you! Kigo, right with you! We would love to work with you; we’d love to partner with you. We want to step into the future with you!

So if you want to partner with us at Khan Academy, you have many different advantages. First off, all the courses are free. All know—hopefully you know this—but you get the courses for free!

But when you partner with us, we help you—these amazing, uh, humans on this panel are partnering with districts every single day. You get white glove service; you have professional learning; you have, um, auto rostering, customized data. We also want to support you in empowering all students to have that equitable access to grade-level content, to have that engaged learning, to make sure that they're doing, um, all of the things and building those skills.

So we help you track the progress, and, most importantly—I mean all of that's really important, but most importantly—we have developed a safe and ethical AI in Kigo. We value, uh, we know that student data and privacy is really important. We have particular guardrails in because you all work with wonderful amazing humans, and there are teacher shortages and sometimes students are needing help, and sometimes they're going to ask for help with Kigo, and we want to make sure that we are enrolling the adults and the humans that can help with that.

So if you are interested in learning more, we did put a link in the chat. Um, this is our district partner team; please reach out to us. You can also scan this QR code. You can go onto our website, look at it today, and just— we so much appreciate you, and until we meet again, it was wonderful learning with you! Have a wonderful rest of your day!