Khanmigo Teacher Story - Ms. Bartsch
What I love most about using Conmigo is it gives me the agency as a teacher to be able to kind of set parameters for my classroom while still giving my students exposure to the AI that's going to be a huge part of the world that they're heading towards after they graduate. We know this is going to be a part of their lives; we want them to have exposure to these tools, but we do want to make sure they're also getting used with fidelity. That our classroom assignments aren't getting negatively impacted through the integration of AI doing, you know, too much for them.
Kigo does an excellent job of setting boundaries for those students so they can still engage and have those resources, but in a more tailored educational setting. I'm department chair of a very busy English department with a lot of course offerings, and one of the struggles that we had as we branched out into new curriculum was making rubrics and having the time to make these really effective pieces.
What I loved most about my time with Kigo was that create a rubric tool. I loved how interactive it was because I was able to take our actual unit plans and the goals that were written in those unit plans and create a rubric from scratch with Conmigo, going back and forth articulating exactly what I wanted. It was able to take a lot of the strain off of the amount of time that it would take to draft a rubric that is complex, that has different levels of constructive feedback in it.
It made that process that normally would take me about an hour, no more than 15 minutes. Using Kigo is absolutely an excellent starting point for teachers that don't know a lot about AI. If they're wanting to get that practice with their students and especially if they're wanting their students to be able to get used to asking the exact question they're looking for the answer to, that's a big challenge for our students that Kigo meets very well.
For new teachers who have not been in the classroom before or if they're running into a situation where they have a new prep this year that they haven't had in the past, the thing that Kigo does that can be very helpful for them is it really helps on that lesson planning side. When it comes to all of the steps that are involved with a first-time prep or content area, we know that so much leg work goes into creating worksheets, creating assignments, and creating these lesson plans that we would then use for years to come and modify.
But that first year takes so much time and energy, and I really believe that Kmo will be helpful for new teachers or teachers that are again in a new prep. It'll really make it easier for them to use their planning time in a more streamlined way. The refresh my knowledge tool, in particular, is very helpful for a teacher that is starting a new content area or a new grade level.
Maybe they need a refresher on a particular reading that they haven't taught in a long time or a particular subsection of a different science field. It will go through the different parts of that concept and kind of break it down in a way that would, you know, give the teacher kind of that background that they need without them having to go to a bunch of different platforms to find what they're looking for.
As a teacher, I think the thing that I appreciate most about Conmigo is the fact that it takes a lot of the shoveling that is involved with being a teacher out of the way. That heavy-duty leg work of drafting a rubric, drafting a lesson plan, building that email that you're going to send out to all of your parents to notify them about a novel you're about to teach.
Because it can help me with that initial step in the process, my plan time is able to be used more effectively on all fronts. I can give students more tailored feedback. I can attend more one-on-one conferences with my kids. I can have more of that face-to-face interaction that brought me into the profession to begin with.
No one signs up for teaching because they love writing rubrics. No one signs up for teaching because they love writing a lesson plan and putting all the standards in there. They sign up for it because they love children and they love working with kids and helping them grow.
So more of my time can now be spent doing what I love, which is working with my kids.