How to Implement AI in Your Classroom

Okay, big welcome to everyone who's joining! I know it takes a little while to get every possible Zoo member line signed up, but I have to tell you all I am so thrilled to be here today with you with a rock star panel of teachers. We have so many great Educators from across the country who are here to share their wisdom and share their expertise with you, and I'm thrilled that so many of you are here to listen in.

We had over 2,000 registrations just from the U.S. alone, and I cannot wait to get you all kicked off. So with that said, let me go ahead and dive in. I just want to make sure that we have everyone signed up here, and we've got a rockstar team. We've got Emily Norden from the Khan World School, our new partnership with ASU down there in Phoenix, serving Educators and teachers around the world. We've got Brennan and Malia from the Khan Lab School right here in California, where I'm sitting. And then from our partner School District, the School City of Hobart in Indiana, we've got Tim, their director of secondary curriculum, and Madeline, their English department head.

It's such a great group that we are thrilled, thrilled, thrilled to have you all here. Now, that being said, before we dive into all the Q&A—there's going to be so much of it—I want to make sure that we get to know you a little bit better. So here we go with a little poll just to kick things off.

So come ahead and tell us about yourself. Tell us, where do you sit in this broader ecosystem that is education in 2030? From teacher to instructional coach to curriculum developer and beyond, tell us about your grade level. Are you serving younger students, older students, or everyone? And then finally, if you had to pick a primary subject, what is your big focus? Or maybe, as a former kindergarten teacher like myself, you cover everything. So let us know right in the chat.

We're going to wait about three more seconds, and then we'll end the poll and share the results. I just want to give a big shout out also to Peggy Buffington, who is the superintendent at the city schools of Hobart, Indiana. So thrilled to have Peggy with us as well.

Okay, so let me just end the poll and share the results. And let's see here, it looks like the whopping majority is 80% teachers, which totally makes sense. We also have 8% administrators and principals, and then a bunch of teaching assistants, counselors, librarians, instructional coaches, curriculum developers, and more. So thank you for joining across those different roles. Then I see probably a majority—or not a majority, maybe a plurality—in high school, followed by middle school, elementary school, and then a lot of folks on the higher education end as well, in adult education, which is fantastic. Even some early childhood folks! Again, as a former kindergarten teacher myself, I love to see that.

And then finally, primary subject area—obviously, lots of folks serving every possible area, but certainly a lot of folks in math, science, ELA, social studies, and beyond. So with all that said, I know that the summer is beckoning, and I want to be respectful of your time. So let's hit the ground running!

The way we're going to do this today is we are going to take your questions through the Q&A format. So, if you go to your Zoom screen and you click that little Q&A button, those little speech bubbles, I want you to do two things for me: number one, I want you to put your own questions in—the spicier, the better, the more burning, the more important. And then number two, I want you to upvote the other questions that are really important to you, and we're going to answer those questions based on how many votes they get to make sure that we really answer the most important questions.

So if you've got questions about AI in the context of lesson planning, AI in the context of working with students, whatever it is, put those questions right in. Just so you know, this session will be recorded; it will be shared out automatically. And everyone who's joined live—which is you—will be getting not only the recording but also a certificate of professional development and then a chance to win a free year's access to Conmigo, our new AI tool.

So with that said, let's start off with some juicy questions. I'm going to start out with this question that we received ahead of time, which is: how can I use AI to design lesson plans? I can't tell you the number of questions we got about this, which I think speaks to the pain point of coming up with new lesson plans over and over again.

So for our August panel, if you've got a juicy answer to that question, if you've tried that out already, just go ahead and raise your hand, and I will call upon you to give that answer. So, Emily, I saw your hand go up! Feel free to unmute, Emily, and share your response.

Emily: Okay, this is actually a really cool feature of Conmigo that they are working on continually developing and making more and more robust all the time. I just was in with one of their research people last week and did an interview, and she showed me some of the new features that are coming along. You can put in, you know, I need to develop a lesson on polynomials. I'm not a math teacher, but I could put in a lesson like I am teaching about theme in literature, right, as an English teacher, and it will come up with a lesson plan that includes things like a warm-up activity, guided practice. It will walk you through and give you ideas for each and every part of a lesson, all the way down to the exit ticket at the end.

And when we tested it out and she's like, "Let's go ahead and put in what did you, you know, what do you want for a warm-up activity?" And it was a math lesson that came up. And she was like, "Look, it came up with a scavenger hunt!" And it totally explained the way to do a scavenger hunt in order to engage and get the students. So you can literally ask for a lesson plan on any topic. I think the math topics will probably be the most robust because that is what Khan Academy is really known for, but when it comes to those, it will not only give you just basic objectives and things like that, but it will actually give you ideas for activities that you can incorporate throughout the lesson to keep things fresh and new.

And so that was one of the prime things that I love as a teacher—that it's constantly feeding me new ideas to help me keep my classroom fresh. And this is sort of illustrating that! I'm going to show you what this Khan Academy Conmigo tool looks like. And so sure enough, you can say create a Humanities lesson plan. You could say I really focused on fifth grade, you know, writing, and it can build something really great for you.

That being said, I don't want to make this all about Conmigo, so if there are other great tools, feel free to share those out as well. But thank you so much for getting us started! Let's go over to Malia. Malia, what's your experience been with lesson planning with AI?

Malia: Well, just to kind of build off of what Emily was saying, the great thing is that it's interactive. So if it gives you this lesson hook idea, and it says like, "Hey, you should do a scavenger hunt," you can type back and say, "Actually, we did a scavenger hunt last week. Is there anything you can suggest for us to do in pairs?", right? So you can have a conversation with it as kind of like a thought partner.

That's awesome! And then let's go to Madeline. Madeline, what's your take here?

Madeline: So I have a couple of examples that I've screenshotted from when we had access this past spring, so I'm going to go ahead.

All right, Madeline, I think you got muted there. If you don't want to mute in one sec, but we can see your screen. Great! Let's see if we can unmute Madeline here.

Okay, awesome! Can you still hear me?

Yeah, we hear you great!

Wonderful! Okay, so we were going through a massive curriculum change this year—our district is K-12, and every single grade level of ELA had no curriculum this year. That was pretty overwhelming for some of our teachers. So I worked a lot with Conmigo to see if I could find some ways to help teachers make some resources, like anticipation guides. So, I was able to actually—these are just some screenshots of my chat history with Khan Migo. I had just put in, "I'd like to make an anticipation guide about Civil Disobedience," and it came up with some ideas for questions.

And I wanted to actually kind of just build off of what Malia said. I wanted to make some tweaks to what it had suggested, so I asked it, "Can we rephrase to not contain the critical vocabulary words? I want them to focus on the ideas rather than shutting down through vocabulary." And it was able to immediately tweak those questions. I've also asked it before to lower the Lexile level of some of those questions, and you can even specify, like, "Hey, I want this to be at a Lexile level of about 700. Can you adjust the ideas to suit that?" And it absolutely will.

I've also used it to then take, you know, that anticipation guide—I've turned it into a worksheet from there—but I've also used it for readings. So, I have examples here of, you know, Henry David Thoreau's Civil Disobedience. I had some anticipation questions there, and I asked it to simplify those questions. So, you can see it's pretty adaptive to meet the needs of your students and of your particular lesson or worksheet that you're planning.

That's awesome! Thank you so much for sharing that, Madeline! That was super helpful.

Okay, so now let's go to a really juicy question, and I know so many teachers are thinking right now. Beth asks, "How do I make sure that students aren't plagiarizing when writing by using AI?"

So we talked a little bit about the educator side, and we'll come back to that, but now let's talk about the student side. Who's got thoughts there? Again, feel free to raise your hand as a panelist, and then we'll see who's got some deep thoughts.

So, we'll start again with Emily. Emily, what's your take here?

Emily: This is a really tricky one, and it's one that I have to admit I'm still working out and working through as a high school English teacher. I can definitely—here's the thing about AI writing—especially when it's a new bot and it's learning, it tends to be very, very formulaic. And I know that there's a professor at ASU, which is our umbrella school that ASU Prep is under, who I work for, and he has embraced it. And I've read a lot of articles from him. He has embraced it in his writing classroom as being a place where students could start with it as like a rough draft.

But then you're going to work with it because the bot is going to turn back very—like you're going to see all the transition words boom, boom, boom, boom, boom! But if you let them start with it as a rough draft and then you teach them the process of revision, then I feel so much more comfortable, and they're actually learning the process of revision, which I find to be the most valuable piece of teaching writing personally. As a writing teacher, I think that's where the power is, learning to take those ideas and really hone them and make them much stronger and more robust than the initial bot will turn out.

So I've tried to embrace it that way. Okay, if they turn in something, but that's just going to be a rough draft, and then you go from there.

I love that! Let's go to Madeline next.

Madeline: So I think for this one, I would probably be inclined to be a little bit more blunt: how can we make sure that they aren't? I think the reality of the world that we live in is that they are going to use it, right? When we had our pilot access to Conmigo this past spring, I actually caught 10 of my students using the program incorrectly at the first go where they were using it for more than I had set in terms of parameters. It is pretty easy to identify as long as you have them do some kind of, like, let's say, writing diagnostic at the beginning of the year so that you're able to get a feel for like, what is this student's voice actually like?

I like to tell my students, like, "I can still read with my human eyes and use my human brain to tell that that's not your writing." So the key thing that I did in my dual credit composition classes—I teach early college writing for some of my classes at Hobart—the biggest thing that I said to them is I'm going to set parameters of what is acceptable, what is going to be allowed.

And so, I had them use it for brainstorming. I had them use it for outlining. I had a student who wanted to write a paper about the theoretical likelihood of nuclear warfare, which is a topic I know absolutely nothing about. And I looked in his Conmigo chat history and was able to see him brainstorming with the AI. He was using it to help him generate these better, more sophisticated ideas for his argument that I wouldn't have been able to provide him.

So the fact of the matter is that they will, but it is still pretty accessible in terms of like that identification factor, right? You know your students better than the bot knows your students, and so you'll be able to see the difference pretty easily.

Very cool! I love that Madeline, combining sort of the best of this new technology with the best of our uniquely human teacher intuition. From one last thought, let's go to Malia, and then we'll move on to the next question.

Malia: I think one of the fun things that I've said to my students is this is brand new, so let's figure it out together! Right? Like, I've been writing for 20 years, and you've been writing for less, but it's new to both of us. So you tell me, you know, what do you think it's good at? And I'll tell you where I think it's falling short. But so that kind of process of we're all figuring this out together, I think has been helpful and making it just like a part of our classroom conversations.

But to answer the specifics of the question, I think you want to think about writing as a process and introducing Conmigo as part of that scaffolding, right? So at least for me and for my teaching practice—I'm mainly working with high school students, right?—so they'll pick a paper topic, they'll read books on it, they'll take notes on it, right? Then they'll develop their thesis statement. Then I'll ask them, "Okay, parents, here, talk to a friend. How would your friend improve your thesis statement? Okay, let's throw it in Conmigo. All right, now what? How did Conmigo suggest?" Right? And so then we have your friends, we have Conmigo, and then we say, "Okay, so you're the author. It's your voice, right? How do you want to re-craft it?"

So using it in that kind of scaffolded approach and using it with them as opposed to kind of like something that's happening away and outside the classroom, I think that's where you're going to get the best dialogue with them over how to use it.

Love those answers! Thank you for the great feedback, the great sort of framing of this big tricky question. And thanks to Beth for asking such a powerful question to begin with.

Now, speaking of really popular questions, there are two questions that actually go hand in hand. The first is from Robert, which is, "Which AI app should I be using to help design classroom materials and experiences?" Because obviously, there's a whole panoply of options. So I'd love to hear people raise their hands about that one.

Then Shalom, who's one of our All-Star Khan Academy ambassadors, wants to know, "Hey, what kind of Conmigo ever become free for individual teachers and their students?" And I would love my amazing colleague, Kristen Deserbo, who's our chief academic officer, to speak a little bit to where our future is headed.

So let's start with the teachers! Tell us about your favorite apps in the space, and then we'll go to Kristin on the Conmigo front.

Okay, let's start this time with Tim. Tim, what do you like using so far?

Tim: I think I would just first say real quick to piggyback on the plagiarism conversation, if I may, that that conversation needs to take place, right? And it's a bottom line. It's a good question for this group, but that's a conversation that should also be taking place within your respective districts, right, with your staff and with your students.

And perhaps later we can share more on how we're approaching that proactively this year under Dr. Buffington's leadership in our district. As far as tools, what I would say is, you know, you can find ultimately, you know, AI—Khan is not obviously the only vendor, if you will, that's going to broach this, right? And they don't aim to be the only one in the market. What I will tell you that our superintendent—and by all means, she might want to speak more into this—is that you need to be wise stewards and ambassadors of what you're promoting because obviously, just because students can access things and/or staff doesn't mean that they should, right?

And so for us, a big sell with Conmigo has been, you know, we're a Khan Academy District school, and so for us, it's the embedded administrative portal and access whereby we can see what has gone on. And so, you know, attach EPT, for example, how many students are using that per se that aren't of age? It doesn't mean they're not going to, you know, use it even if they're under 13 or whatever the parameter is. But for us, we've broached the Conmigo beta test as such to where it allows for oversight internally on our end to protect our staff and students.

So know, it may not be the end-all be-all, nor was it designed to be, but it allows us to enter a space in a safe way with our staff and students.

Hey, call out Jim, and then speaking of speaking to the elephants in the room, Kristen, I know that we have been known for 15 years now as the place that Educators can go to get free tools anytime, anywhere. What's the future of Conmigo when it comes to making it free?

Kristen: Yeah, so first I'm going to address the other question, which is yes! Yes! I'll give a little pitch for why you might want to use Conmigo to help do some of your teacher tasks or some of the student tasks. And part of that is because we have drafted those prompts. So when you're interacting with Conmigo, say, you know, "I want to make a lesson plan," we're sending not just you saying, "I want to make a lesson plan" to that AI, we're also sending a prompt that is about, you know, 250-300 words about what makes a lesson plan.

And so, when you're doing that, as we're seeing on the screen right now, we've said, "Hey, here's the parts of a lesson plan: it should have objectives and standards, essential questions, materials." So you, as the teacher, don't have to tell the model what you want the lesson plan to look like; we're sending that to the model, along with the information you've given to customize it, so then that's all done and you don't have to do as much work on that.

And the same is true—I actually wrote the prompt for the writing rubric. And so, you know, my background in educational psychology has, you know, a lot of thoughts and research about how to write good rubrics. So that's another one where we've already put in behind the scenes what makes a good rubric so that if you just give it, as we see here, a grade and a topic, it will help you start to think about what are the criteria and then what are the performance standards.

So anyway, that's a little bit of why what we hope we are adding to the AI space is that education focus. Back to the cost issue—right now, the reason, if you haven't heard this, the reason that there is a cost now is not because we at Khan Academy have that cost; it's because actually accessing these large language models is costing us money.

So that’s measured in these things they call tokens, which is about three-quarters of a word, and every token is money that comes that goes back and forth costs. Then there’s a cost associated with that. What we have seen—so right now the model that we use is what OpenAI calls GPT-4, and that’s their most recent and advanced model that when they released 4, the price for 3 came way down. And we also see lots of other organizations who are starting to, you know, who are coming into the space and doing things for lower costs.

So we expect in the future that yes, we will be able to offer this either at greatly reduced cost or potentially free for some users. So the price right now is based on our cost to access these models, and those models’ costs—we and everyone in the AI space anticipate to come down. We're hoping six months, a year—we'll see what those prices do.

Oh, I love that! Thank you for sharing that backstory, Kristen. I'm also going to share a little context for anyone who's curious about these different models and what the differences are. But for now, let's go to Peggy, who again is the superintendent over there in Hobart. And Peggy, I'd love for you to speak to sort of these different tools and what you're considering for your district.

Peggy: Well, I mean, obviously when all of us look at the genie let out of the bottle, I love looking at the chat history here—embracing and trailblazing with these technology tools and not lagging behind because we know our students are out there with ChatGPT, as Dr. Krieg alluded to. So I want to go back to what it is that I love about Conmigo because I think that this is, to me, one of the best parts of this new feature, this new programming that we're talking about with AI.

When our group was piloting, one of the number one things that I heard them say is that when I'm not available, they're going to ChatGPT, they're going to Conmigo—that was that whole pilot group. So I like to look at it into aspects: it's a teaching assistant, and it's a tutor, right? And what do I love most about it? I like the tutor.

Because what do I know about kids today with COVID? It was starting to happen pre-COVID a little bit—we were getting kids to not really engage with us in a classroom. They would hold their questions; they just didn't want to participate. They didn't want to be embarrassed or so forth, right? And so they have no problem talking to a box or their device, whether it be a phone, a laptop, whatever. To that point, I was at one of my elementary schools—second and third graders sitting with their Chrome book hitting the microphone, "Tell me about a green snake! Tell me why the snake is green!" And they love interacting that way, right? That’s starting with your youngest kids.

So I had a middle school student that was not part of this pilot group yet. She knew that I had talked to her about this new AI component in Khan Academy that had a writing tutor, right? So here’s what happened: she was dying to use that tutor. She was struggling with it, and so I pretended to be Conmigo, and I tried to like do a Zoom with her, and I tried to go back and forth with those little questions to get her to write. And before you know it, she had six paragraphs in this beautiful mystery that she was writing.

The point is sometimes kids just need a little extra, and they need to be able to ask without feeling intimidated or feeling like someone would make fun of them. And then boom, it's right there in front of them. Now, Maddie would know this on screen, is that we have kids that sometimes don't go to bed at one o'clock in the morning, and Maddie is trying to sleep to prepare for a 7:45 class, right? They're out using Conmigo when their teachers aren't available.

So to get back to the ethical, moral aspect of it: digital footprinting and citizenship are really vitally important for teachers to tell them how they can use it, what their expectations are. But you can't get past the fact that they've got a tutor anytime they want it, and we have to teach them that they can go do that. And the thing that I love the most about it, they walk away confidently that they've completed an assignment because confidence is the number one thing.

Right? If I can come to school and I feel like I've done my best and I got a little help from this thing on what I was allowed to do with it, I'm going to have successful students! And I think that we can—we have to sell this on that merit— that kids are confident in their ability because they have a tutor. It's the guide on the side that all of us have always wanted and we could never afford it, right? Like wouldn’t you like every kid to have their own aid? I would!

So keep trying to make it affordable, Kristen, because it's too good of a tool to be closed up in a box. The beauty of Khan Academy is that it's always been free. I understand the logistics behind all of it, with the different layers, the different, you know, whatever. But the beauty of Khan Academy is that it's always been free, and now it has something that will change and revolutionize the way kids do school, because they have instantaneous help.

And guess what? That chat history gives us what they've been doing, right? So we know whether it's authentic or not authentic, and if they've been out on ChatGPT where they're not supposed to be, right? So keep working on the price, but you sell it to the rest of your staffs with what wouldn’t everybody love to have a teaching assistant? And wouldn’t everybody love to have a tutor for their student? There’s no better way to sell this program than that!

Okay, I'm done!

I love that value! Thank you so much for sharing that view from the admin perspective. I think that's such a great compliment to what our Educators have already shared. Thanks also to Robert and Shalom for asking those really, really important questions.

So let's go to another really important question that Amy asked. This may be the question of our generation, of our age, which is: how can I make AI an instructional tool instead of an adversary in my classroom?

So the dark side, the light side—how do we choose that path forward for ourselves? Let's go to Tim this time. Tim, what's your take?

Tim: Well, I will briefly share an example as well. Over the course of the summer here, we were working on some curriculum things, and I was with a group of teachers, and we were going through, oh, you know, how do I work with curriculum in a backward design manner, right? Whereby I think about the standards and I think about the course objectives, but I want to deliver them in a palpable way where it's engaging and staff feels like this is relevant.

And there’s some things that I may feel more comfortable with than others, right? And so basically what we did—and this is from last week or June 27th, I suppose—is basically what we did is we said, “Hey, so I pulled this up in chat history, by the way.” We took this notion of cultural diffusion, and this was one of the essential questions in the curriculum map that we were working out of. And we were talking about how to deliver this, right?

So you know that you have pedagogy, but then you also have instruction and thinking about your end users. I just put this question—I copy and pasted it as an essential question from standards—so you’ll see this very much all over the place with Common Core standards as well as many of our state standards adapted from there. So, “What is the role of cultural diffusion in the spread and change of civilization?” Ultimately, what we're talking about is increasing depth of knowledge, right? Moving past rote memory—what we used to call googleable stuff—right? If you can Google it, then is it really relevant and necessary for us to be doing that together in the cherished time we have?

Teachers will then say, "Well, you know what? What if this and what if that? I need to get their attention!" I’ll say, "Hey, let’s just hypothetically say you have their attention! What do you do with it, right?" So let’s say you’re teaching this lesson on cultural diffusion and how it can spread and change civilization. I want you to check this out.

So first I was like, "Let’s just level set: like what is it?" And so you can see the response there, and I’m like, "That's too confusing for me. Can you simplify it?" And you can see, you know, Conmigo simplifies it. And I say, "I still don't understand, help me." But quite frankly, I learn best a lot of times through analogy, okay? So I said, "Can you just give me an analogy?" So they said, "Sure! It's like a potluck dinner." Okay, so you're taking this abstract thing, right? And you're trying to make it palpable, and now they provide an analogy through a potluck dinner.

And then I’m like, "That didn’t help me! Conmigo, give me another one!" So it said, "Sure, it's like music!" And then look what they're doing! And now I'm just having fun! So I'm like, "Give me another analogy!" Right? I want all my learners in the room; I want this to stick.

So they’re like, "All right, fine! It's like a garden!" And then you can look through here! So now I was like, "All right, well one of the teachers I was with is a basketball coach, and the other is a football coach." And I was like, "All right, let's think sports." So I said, “Give me a sports analogy to explain cultural diffusion.” So they give me, "Well, it's like the game of soccer." So then I'm like, "All right, what about like pop culture?" So then they explain cultural diffusion to us through an analogy of the world of fashion.

So you get the point! This literally, you can see timestamps was minutes, okay? And then I said this: “Alright, fine, Conmigo, thanks for the analogies. How can I assess my students on whether they know the role of cultural diffusion and the spread and how it changes civilization?” And you can see that it gives me examples. Okay? This is literally minutes, then I say, "Can you give me an example of the role-play activity?” Because I kind of like that, right? Like I kind of like the role-play activity, but I don't know how to do that!

Look what it does! Sure! It even names it: "The Cultural Exchange of Fair!" And it gives an objective, materials needed, etc. So this is a simple example of minutes, right? How this can partner with you to create relevant, engaging, meaningful instruction that increases depth of knowledge.

Thank you so much, Stephen! Again, I really appreciate that visual example because it really drives home what's happening here.

Madeline, what's your take on this big question—sort of AI as adversary or as instructional support?

Madeline: Sure! So I think it has everything to do with the framework that you use, right? You do have to do a lot of front-loading with this. One thing that I noticed come up in the chat—it was just a question that I saw briefly as I was scrolling through—was about Shakespeare, right? Obviously, some of these greater-known figures and their works—they are public domain, and so Conmigo is able to interact with those pretty well. If you're looking for it with any AI program, an easy way to circumvent that to an extent so that it's a resource but it's not, you know, doing the work for kids, so to speak, is with those more like public domain classics and what have you.

I would recommend doing synthesis-based prompts with those. Give them something that is more current to pair with that classic work, and then that way it will be able to yes help them find some of the information they might need or, you know, circumvent part of your prompt for the classic element. But they are still going to have to make those connections to something else on their own.

So even, I think the person who had typed that in the chat was a college professor. I get that essays are still by and large the method of assessment there. That's a really great way to get around that. Another fun thing that you can do with those types of texts—I’ll use my own classroom as an example—my freshmen had access to this through their math class because I piloted this with my juniors. We had just finished "Romeo and Juliet," and I had my students debate with Romeo Montague because one of the biggest questions in our classroom was did Romeo actually love Juliet? Was that genuine love or was that teenage infatuation?

And so they debated with the AI who role-played as Romeo, and Romeo argued with them, and he stood for his passionate love. And many of them, based on the quality of their debate, they were able to get Romeo to cave and agree, "You know what? You're right! Maybe I didn't actually love Juliet in the way that you would define it today. But let's explore how history was different," and so it added some different levels to my lesson, and the kids were having such a great time.

And some of them were able to vent some very valid frustration at Romeo's behavior! And so they left the lesson enjoying the text and engaging with the text in a way that's just different than what we used to do. We do have to adjust and adapt, and the more front-loading you do, the better of that.

Thank you so much for sharing, Madeline! And then last but not least, Emily—this classic question: friend or foe? Where do you stand?

Emily: I think we need to embrace it as a friend and use it. And I think one of the keys for that, in my mind, is transparency. I'll keep my answer fairly short: If you are using it as a teacher, share that! Like, you know, Tim used a great example, and he showed—it—show that! Share that with your students! Project it up! Show them what you're doing! Empower them to be able to use it for effective ways themselves!

That way it's an open thing in your classroom, and you don't have to feel like, "Oh, are they trying to get around? Are they—no, they know when you're using it; you can know when they're using it." I know with our students this last semester, who were piloting it as well, they would flat out tell us when they would turn in some type of assessment, they would say, "I used Conmigo to help me with this!"

And it was really helpful to know that and to see that they could be transparent, and we can be transparent. And then it truly does become a friend! And I loved Madeline's ideas about just being able to look at synthesis questions—deeper level questions—and different ways of creating assessments that will allow demonstration to move beyond what Khan Migo might project for them. But I think transparency is key for everybody to embrace it—to know that it's their. Everybody is having the chance to use it, and chat history can really help you kind of see what your students are doing on the back end in case you do have questions.

That's a great call out, Emily! I love that idea of bringing your students along with you on this journey as opposed to having this too formal divide.

Okay, thank you, Amy, for that really important question! Now, David's got a really juicy question that I think speaks to this changing world of norms that we're entering into: what are the best tips in terms of students using AI for research?

So we're talking about this idea of going back and forth with the AI bot—how do they cite these conversations with AI? If anyone has sort of had to think about that in the context of your own classrooms, how do you help students think about sourcing this information, citing it?

Let's go to Madeline.

Madeline: Sorry, I feel like I've been raising my hand a lot for this, but I literally used Conmigo with a rhetoric and argument early college class, so this is kind of perfect! What I had my students do is I encouraged them to use Conmigo as brainstorming, but the analogy that I used, because it is technically public domain, but it's public like ChatGPT, the content from it is considered public domain, but it is taking from other sources and other locations—I compared it for students to Wikipedia.

Right? We tell our students pretty regularly that even though Wikipedia is widely edited and most of the information should be pretty good and pretty trustworthy, we wouldn't use Wikipedia as a source for our paper, right? That's not something that would meet a certain standard of credibility. So I encourage them to use it more so in that brainstorming phase to help them build counterclaims, to help them explore perspectives that went beyond their own prior knowledge, but then they were responsible for finding sources that would support those claims.

So really, it's kind of no different than if they were to discuss the prompt with you or with a classmate, do a think-pair-share—it's very similar to that where they would still have to do that legwork. It's just meant to be a supplement in that brainstorming part of the research process.

Thank you, Madeline!

Okay, thanks for the question, David! And now Frank asked a really big question, which basically speaks to what I was sort of getting out of the chat: you know, throughout human history, whether you were a princeling in the medieval times or Bill Gates's kids today, you have access to personal tutors and people there to support you.

Whereas the average student, even today, may be one of 30 students in your class, and you may have 150 other students in your other periods. How do we actually get to this Holy Grail of a personal tutor for each student? Does anyone on this call have a thought about how do we actually get there? How do we actualize that vision?

Again, feel free to raise your hand, panelists, if you have thought.

Kristen, I know you've been thinking about this a lot. Go for it!

Kristen: Absolutely! So this is where we try to go with Conmigo. So we know there are things that good tutors do. There are actually moves that good tutors make that research has said, "Hey, here are the things!" Here’s where a good tutor asks for more information, here’s where they make a leading question, here’s where they give a hint, here’s where the student’s getting frustrated and you actually give them a little more information—all of those are things that we know are things that good human tutors do.

And so what we want to think about is how can we make these other tutors that are artificially intelligent do things like those human tutors? And that’s what we’ve been trying to do and working on. We’re not—certainly, we're never going to replace humans, but we can take some of the things that we know humans do that we think that technology could be good for and move them in.

So there’s a question I was just starting to answer in the Q&A, but I'll do it here, which is: what’s the difference between ChatGPT and Conmigo? And so one of the things—ChatGPT, you are just interacting with what I call the raw large language model. So if you ask it a question, it’s going to just give you the answer. With Conmigo, we have given Conmigo instructions about how to act like a tutor.

So don’t give the students the answer—in fact, walk this, if it’s a math problem, walk them through the steps. Think about what—ask the student what they think the first step should be. Those kinds of things. So it’s as they’re engaged in solving the problems, the tutor’s there like a human tutor would be and saying those things.

And in the math space, I think it acts as an individual tutor. When you’re working on a math problem, it knows what that problem is and starts doing some of those things that human tutors do to walk students through those. So it's—as they’re engaged in solving the problems, the tutor's there like a human tutor would be, and saying those things.

And we've heard a lot about writing on this call so far, and in the same way, a human tutor—I was a writing center tutor in my undergrad years—and I would walk through, you know, starting with the big things, like, “What’s your thesis?” then thinking about organization, and then think you know you don’t start off with the grammar and spelling mistakes.

And so we are also starting to think about, you know, how we can do some writing feedback in those ways. But it’s certainly right now able to be able to brainstorm with you, think about ideas, go back and forth on those kinds of things. So, basically, the summary is we’re trying to look at things that human tutors do and build them into the tutor experience so that the AI acts in ways that humans might.

I love that! So not reinventing the wheel, but taking the best practices of the last two millennia and applying them for every student. Brennan, any thoughts there?

Brennan: Yeah, I mean, Kristen really nails it! And I’ll just kind of build off that because, you know, in my work as a college counselor, we know this really is about leveling the playing field, right? This tools like this really have the power to work with all students to do brainstorming and things like that.

So, you know, I work individually with kids on college essays, and help them brainstorm topics. But the tool and the way students can interact with it is just so powerful as they start to think through, like, “Okay, what’s my story, and what do I have to share?” And it’s this back and forth that a student might have with a tutor or a counselor that can really—it’s not writing the story for them, but it’s helping them think through kind of what in their background and I think, especially at this moment we’re having, is important, right?

Like how do students think about identity, and how can they share that? And I've been using the Craft a Story for the college essay—I know you’re in the college admissions section—but I’ve been using the Craft a Story in terms of brainstorming, in terms of research.

The college navigation for college admissions is beyond me. I mean, it’s amazing to see how deep students can go into, like, “Okay, I’m interested in a college or a career or whatever it might be that is, you know, I’m interested in a college where I can study black holes and play rugby, and has a strong sense of community, and is in the Midwest.”

And I mean, it provides a list that it’s exactly like I would have provided and better, because it can really dial in. And it’s the whole kind of trust but verify, right? Like I, as a counselor, make the same mistakes I might make, right? Like I, as a counselor, might tell a student, “Oh, you know, you really want to study molecular biology; you should look at this school!” And they come back to me two weeks later and say, “Um, that school doesn’t even have molecular biology,” right? Because they've done away with their program or whatever it might be.

And so they run into the same thing, right? That we’re teaching them to be curious; we’re teaching them to be researchers, and the ways they can engage with a tutor or a tool like this is just pretty astounding to me.

That’s awesome, Brennan, thank you for sharing that. And then one last response from Malia, and I’ll move on to the other side of the humanities versus STEM spectrum for both what Chris and Brennan said.

The greatest two uses for me have been Conmigo’s ability to be a time-saver and to be like a creativity tool, right? And so, as Kristin said, with a time-saver, she’s like when I put in a question there, there’s additionally, if I understood you correctly, an entire prompt that goes with my question! Because sometimes something will just come up, and we’ll have this awesome opportunity to bring this person into class or to do this activity, right?

But I don’t have like so many hours to sit down and, "Okay, now I got to make the rubric for that activity. Now I got to make this." I mean, it takes a lot of time, right? But I can very quickly in Conmigo, kind of in my language, in my speak, be like, "I need to make a rubric. This is kind of how I want it. Can you help me?" Right?

And so then it’s gonna give me back information that is helpful, that is accurate, and that I can still modify. But as opposed to me just sitting down on my own or me going and putting the raw thing into a raw large language model, this is going to help me make effective use of my time for these things that often are time-intensive and are important.

So it’s helpful in that way! And then, as Brennan said, it’s just like a creativity tool. And so, like I like to think about it as especially with the stories and with the other things of like, "You know, how can this help me explore? How can this help me think? And how can I practice that with my learners in class?" And so that we’re all kind of doing this together to explore together on that.

Maria, thank you! Now, I know we’ve been talking a lot about humanities, and I love humanities as someone who is married to a PhD in labor history. But I will tell you that there are a lot of folks on this line who are curious about math and science on the other end of that spectrum.

Rebecca says, "What are some great ways to incorporate AI with teaching math and science?" So to focus on this line, have some thoughts for our friends on that end of the discipline spectrum. You know we’ve got a lot of folks in the humanities. Kristin, anything you want to share based on some of the best practices that we’ve been crafting?

Kristen: Yeah, I was going to give teacher space if they want to jump into, but feel free to raise your hands if you have some things to say. So a couple of things that we know in math, and then I’ll talk about science. So in math, we know that practice is a key component of improving math skills and developing fluency, and that’s a lot of what at Khan Academy we, you know, have traditionally had.

I was just visiting a classroom who was teaching college algebra in a Title I high school, and what happens is they’re kind of doing their independent work, their independent practice, and they get stuck. And so they sit there with their hand raised, and there’s one teacher, and there’s 30 kids, as you all know, and they’re, you know, the T—the students sitting there as if you can see my video, I’m showing, you know, their hands getting tired; they’re like propping it up with their other hand, waiting for the teacher, and no learning is happening for them as they’re waiting for this.

Well, as they were working with Conmigo, the teacher would just say, "Hey, check in with Conmigo. See if Conmigo can help you." And they could, you know, they were able then to get that little extra help they needed, because we know that when people are learning, if things are too easy, they’re probably not learning because they don’t—they're fine. And if they’re too hard, they’re getting frustrated.

But if you’ve got them on that learning edge, they just need a little bit of help to get that over the hump to get that one thing they’re confused about, and then they can keep going. And so I think in math that that’s a key place where Conmigo is really helpful and can really help students kind of move forward with what they’re doing. And you can do that, as we’re seeing on the screen here, in the tutor-me section.

So even if you’re not working on Khan Academy problems, you can do that in this space here and where things are. The other thing about science that I’ll add is one of the things that I love about Sal’s videos in science is their sense of wonder and the sense of like, "Oh my gosh, that’s so cool!"

And so, Jeremy, if you scroll down actually on the activities page to the—what am I looking for here—no, go back! Ignite your curiosity! And you can just type in a topic here, like biology for example, and it will just share, it’s gonna, you know, give you a couple ideas and just some questions that are like, "Oh, yeah, how do our bodies fight off germs and viruses?" or "What is the smallest living organism on Earth?" or just these questions that just can spark your curiosity.

And so I think that’s another good way to kind of hook kids in and get folks excited! And the final thing I’ll say is the lesson hooks in the teacher section is a good place if you’re like, "What can I do for the five minutes at the beginning of class that maybe activates prior knowledge and sparks curiosity?" That’s a great place to just get some new ideas! Even if you’ve been teaching for a long time, sometimes it's, you know, fresh ideas are good.

You give them a topic, and it’ll give you two potential things you can do with hooks, and then if you don’t like those, you can ask them to make them more exciting, or you can ask them to make sure they include baseball or, you know, whatever the thing is that your students are interested in!

So, there are some thoughts from me!

Cool, cool! Thank you so much for sharing that, Kristin! I know all of our many math and science Educators out there excited to see that.

I know we’re down to about our final 10 minutes, so I want to end with maybe one or two really juicy questions that I think people are excited about.

So, let’s start with this question here from Antonio. I think Antonio speaks to something which is even more important than the individual prompt, which is, "How would you use AI to track a student’s progress through the school year and beyond?"

So, again, our goal as Educators is just to make this one lesson fun. It's so that they walk out of our classrooms at the end of the year more empowered to be, you know, great members of our society, great citizens, great everything that we aspire for. How can we use AI to help with that more long-term progress?

Tim is a thought! Let’s go inside with Tim.

Tim: Yeah, I’ll just start the conversation rolling—not that I have all the answers to that! But what I would say is this entire narrative that we’re exploring together I think it really hinges on, you know, what, how do you measure learning, right? And we know that there’s metrics in place that are quantitative that you're trying to use, you know, metrics to evaluate growth, right? Achievement, things of that nature.

I would start the conversation by saying what I envision is the ways in which Conmigo, for instance, chat history inside of Khan Academy, etc., can demonstrate student thinking. Ultimately, I think about the work of Chris Tavani, for example, and Chris Tavani basically said, you know, "Why do we have a worksheet? Why do we have homework?" Like, what is that to demonstrate work? What if we were to replace a worksheet with the think sheet?

Isn't that really what we want to see is thinking? And so I think the question that we should be asking here is how can I utilize this tool, this resource, this portal to track—to have discourse with what thinking on the page looks like? And by the page, obviously, I mean the screen in some sense. And then follow that up with qualitative metrics.

And so I think when you look at mixed-methods approaches, this is a whole new layer to that conversation.

I love that, Tim! Thank you!

Next to Madeline.

Madeline: So one of my favorite activities that I kind of uncovered using Conmigo during the course of our pilot was a subsection of the practice debate activity. So I had—it’s broken down, for those that haven’t seen it before, by middle school level debate topics and then high school level debate topics, I think Jeremy’s showing it to you now.

So my students at the secondary level, like the upper secondary level, they were obviously using the high school one, and I had just taught a mini lesson on logical fallacies, right? And so I paused the just basic practicing with the tool that we had been doing before, and I told my students I want you to try engaging with the AI in this debate using as many logical fallacies as possible. I want you to argue as badly as you can, right?

And then one of my students is the one who actually had the idea initially. She changed the entire lesson! She asked the AI, "What could I have done better?" And Conmigo was giving each of my students, when I had them ask that question, individualized feedback about how they could have engaged in the conversation in a more respectful way!

So what I had my students do to demonstrate understanding was I gave them a kind of exit ticket free write prompt where I had them explore the feedback they were given, and did they agree or disagree with it and what could they do a better job of the next time they engaged with the program?

So again, it’s that—I thought that was a great example, and it was, you know, student-directed! They were the ones who came up with the idea in the first place. I can’t take the credit for that, but I loved how it gave them the opportunity to not just take the feedback and copy and paste it and just kind of move on. It wasn’t this like standalone island; it was a part of a bigger lesson in the quality of their own writing!

So there’s ways that you can do that by using it like Conmigo or ChatGPT or whatever program as a part of the lesson, but then have them think bigger, and you can have them track their own progress over time, because that’s the world we’re moving towards, right? These kids are going to have access to so much passive knowledge where they don’t have to do a lot of the legwork; asking them to do that reflection for themselves is going to be so critical to keep them engaged.

Oh, great! I know—we’re down to just a couple of minutes left, so I just want to go to the panelists one last time. And this may go down as one of the most important summaries in the history of American education, in the sense that this was the summer that we, as Educators, had a chance to get ready for what’s to come in the fall.

And I know that there’s so much unknown still, but if you had any words of wisdom to share with your fellow Educators out there in terms of how you’re grappling with it yourself, how you’d want them to be thinking about it, or framing it up in their minds—any final things that you want to share with our incredible colleagues across the nation?

Let's go to Brandon.

Brandon: Yeah, I would just say—I mean, as with everything in education, we just need to model the process, right? We need to set expectations and be clear about expectations and discuss those with our students and model the process as learners of this new tool. Instead of pushing it away, how do we incorporate it into the work we’re doing to, again, kind of be creative and be more efficient and be better learners?

All that!

Go to Peggy.

Peggy: I couldn't agree more! Modeling is really important. I think one of the things that's really important for all Educators is that, I mean, what prevents them from doing anything new is fear, right? And so we have to do some hand-holding, and we have to let them dip their toes in the water.

And so I would say that to all my colleagues. I mean, we’re going to start off with a hand-holding session here! Not to be afraid of it! And then, in the teacher's mind, why should I use this? What are the benefits? And we have to be able to show them some wins right off the bat!

But as we know, in the progression of trailblazing Educators that go out there and give it everything that they have, they’re going to start off with replacement, right? I mean, like that is going to be the first thing that they do because they’re looking for something that will make life a little easier for them.

And once you have them hooked with that, I think that’s it, right? So I mean, like, what would my objective be? And Maddie is going to be helping me start the school year with this. I want them to start off with a small win with teacher resource, and I want them to have a small win with being able to maybe do some debate and discourse with their students to be able to see what AI can do!

And then we continuously just model what those good strategies are as we go forward and let them see it’s nothing to be afraid of! It is really going to make learning so much more exciting! And so that’s my philosophy here because I’m just going to tell you that it will start off as replacement, but then you can see, as Maddie and all of our colleagues have done, now it’s in a whole different realm! So we have to start them on the same foot.

Thank you so much, Peggy! And then finally, Kristin—some last words of wisdom for our amazing educators.

Kristen: Sure! So apart from fear, I think there can also be cynicism. I've been in the education technology space for about 20 years, and I know that sometimes there’s all this hype, and it never really comes to pass. I am optimistic about what this new technology, what this AI can do. But I think we also need to, you know, recognize that there’s been a lot of promise in the past that hasn’t come to fruition.

And we should be hopeful, but also just be clear that we know the value of humans; we know the value of teachers. And much of that is not going to be replaced by the technology. And so making sure that as you, as teachers, and the teachers you work with understand the value that they bring, and how technology can just help them improve the value that they have, I think is a good way to approach us as well.

That is an awesome note to end on, Kristin—is that AI is not this weird alien thing, but it was built by humans to serve our human needs based on what we've learned from our own expertise. So, I think that's a very hopeful note to conclude our session on.

I want to thank everyone for joining! I want to thank two groups in particular. First of all, this incredible group of panelists from all across the country who’s on the front lines of all this. Please, please, please come to the Q&A! I know it’s a little awkward, but send them a little love! Let these folks know that you appreciate them giving up an hour of their summer to share what they’ve learned.

And then for the second group, just a massive thank you to you! I mean, as an educator who craved his summer vacations more than anything when I was a kindergarten teacher, the fact that you invested this hour with us thinking about making the fall even more powerful for your own students—that is sort of the greatest representation of what Educators do, which is build a greater future for us all.

So thank you for your incredible investment, your time, and your expertise! Here’s wishing you a beautiful rest of the summer! Cheers, everyone!