AI for improved literacy scores

Hi everyone, my name is Danielle Sullivan. My role at KH Academy is I'm the senior manager of Northeast District Partnerships, and my educator former role is I used to be a fifth and sixth grade special education teacher. I taught ELA and math in Washington DC and Upstate New York. And I will let Sarah go ahead and introduce herself.

Hey everyone, welcome! I am Sarah Robertson. I'm currently the senior product manager of literacy and classroom experience teams here at KH Academy. Just like Danielle, I'm a former classroom teacher. I taught middle school ELA and had a brief stint as a history teacher, but mostly reading and writing. I'm also coming from another literacy-focused edtech company. I think Danielle also joined us from another one as well, and I will pass it off to let's do Di.

Hello, hello everyone! I am Dian Klingman. I am a professional learning specialist with Khan Academy. Just like my colleagues that are on the panel with me, I am a former classroom teacher. Elementary is where my heart is. I have taught second grade, third grade, and fifth grade. I've done behavior intervention. I've been a building principal as well as a director of academics. So I've been in all levels, definitely understand and love connecting with other educators, and with that, I am going to pass it over to Bernardette.

Hi, I am Bernardette Bennett. I am a professional learning content specialist with Khan Academy. I am a former middle school teacher and district social studies supervisor from Florida, and I'm so excited to be with you guys today.

Great! So here's how this is going to work. I'm going to stop sharing my screen because the focus is going to be on the conversation. We will be having some really rich, interesting conversations around the transformative role of AI in improving literacy scores. Because, as you know, I’m sure you're feeling this— a lot of students have felt left behind after COVID, especially in literacy. I mean, I would say math too, but today, we're focusing on literacy. So we want to delve into and just have a really in-depth conversation around how you all can start to think about AI’s adaptive learning and personalized feedback to help students improve their reading and writing skills. And actually, just let’s talk about a little joy too, right? Love literacy!

So we'll be talking. Please post comments in the chat and questions in the chat. I'll be able to see those, and we are going to kick it off with this question. So, Sarah, KH Academy isn’t often thought of as a go-to tool for literacy instruction and support, but here we are! We are doing a literacy and ELA webinar, so what has changed?

Yeah, so I actually joined KH Academy about a year and a half ago, which was right around the time that KH Academy had partnered with OpenAI around how we might use large language models in order to create really rich learning experiences. And so on my first day at KH Academy, my manager sat me down and said, “By the way, we have this partnership with OpenAI. Have you heard of ChatGPT?” I had just come from another literacy supplemental edtech tool product and had literacy on the mind. I was very excited to come to Khan Academy, knowing that there were opportunities to build new tools and content for literacy.

So this felt like a sign that I had come at exactly the right time. What we were seeing with many of our different explorations we were doing with ChatGPT and the large language models that we were experimenting with was that some of the best experiences that LLMs could support were related to reading instruction and writing instruction. So we dove headfirst into the different ways that we could leverage AI to create really innovative, rich learning experiences for students when it came to reading and writing.

The very, you know, first month I was here we did a hackathon, and one of the features that came out of that was our current essay feedback activity, which I’ll talk a little bit more about later on. But I'll also just say that the more that we at KH Academy have partnered with districts over the past few years, the clearer it is to us that the demand for high-quality and flexible resources for ELA is higher than it's ever been.

I think, again, just coming out of, you know, the pandemic and coming into this age of AI, reading and writing classes have been disrupted, and we need to be thinking of really creative, innovative ways to be reaching students now in a way that's maybe a little bit different than, you know, when I was actually in the classroom and definitely when I was a student myself. So we're really excited about some of those new activities we're building. We also are launching brand new ELA courses for middle school and high school starting. I think we just launched the sixth-grade one already, and we'll be launching, I think, 9th and 10th grade as well for this back-to-school season. So it's definitely a new age, a new era of KH Academy, and we're really excited about the new reading and writing resources that we're building.

Yes, and how many of you who are watching this sometimes have struggled with supporting your students in writing? Anyone? Anyone feel that pain? That would be me! Yes, facts, exactly. So the goal is how can we engage our students to be more thoughtful in the way they express themselves?

So I want to think through—it's been a rough couple of years. Can you believe it's 2024? By the way, 2024, we're just thinking about students that are graduating this year; they started in 2020! So there's a lot that's happened in the last four years. So thinking of the last four years, Diana, how can AI be leveraged to address some of the gaps that we're seeing exacerbated by the pandemic or learning opportunities, if we want to spin it the positive way?

Yeah, absolutely! I am not only an educator but also a parent. My daughter is a senior this year, and so some of that personal impact of the pandemic not only has affected me as an educator but also as a parent as well. My mind, when I think about AI and how we could use it to help leverage some of those gaps, goes to that targeted instruction. You know, the bigger the gaps, the more of that targeted instruction that you want to give to your students right.

But I also know that it's easy to say targeted instruction or small group plans. What do you want to do with your small groups? But in reality, that's a whole other set of planning. So I'm thinking of that small group planning, and when I think about AI, I think about some of these tools that we have, such as the ability to just use Kigo to help group your students. You know, it's helping you with grouping your students. It's even an assistant to you. You can just ask it, “What do my students need to work on?” So cutting that time out with that small group planning just by having that in-the-moment support as a teacher to know how I group my students and what are those things that, you know, they should be working on.

I also think about the social-emotional approach, right? Thinking about the whole child and addressing those needs and we know that one of the things is are students even feeling safe? Safe, feeling as though “I don’t know,” right? I don’t know what’s going on. And so students having that ability to discuss and ask those questions with Kigo, just to even when you're thinking about text analysis, right? “Help me understand.” I have a question about this text that maybe they don't want to ask out loud in front of their peers, and so just leveraging it in that way, I think it's just one of many.

Oh, yeah, absolutely! I mean, all of what you said—the small group instruction. Again, how many of you watching have ever struggled with small group instruction? I see you, middle school educators! I see you, high school educators, right? We know that this is really important in practice. So, Sarah, can you talk to us about your point of view, or some of the things you're thinking about with post-COVID years?

Yeah, so I mean, I taught in a classroom where students ranged. I taught in a seventh-grade classroom for most of my time in teaching, and I had students who were on a second-grade reading level to 12th-grade reading level—all the way in between, just a very wide span of skill levels. A lot of my students struggled with both comprehension or a mixture of both. There were all kinds of different needs across the entire room, and I know that one of the best things we can do for students who have gaps in reading comprehension skills, specifically, which I would say for my seventh graders was the biggest challenge, was really making sure that they had access to grade-level text.

Way too many students do not even get the opportunity to try and access and read a grade-level text, but knowing that so many students are below grade level, how can we scaffold instruction and how can we create opportunities for students to be able to fill in what's missing in between? Some of the best strategies for doing that are related to pre-teaching and pre-reading prep, which means it looks like activating prior knowledge, making connections to what the text is about, and building background knowledge for any schema that the student needs to have when it comes to what the text is about—whether it's fiction or non-fiction.

Pre-teaching tier 2 and tier 3 vocabulary and giving students opportunities to practice and get to know words they may be unfamiliar with. And then, of course, supporting them when it comes to breaking down complex sentences.

One of the really cool things about having an AI presence around to help students with this and help teachers with this is that many of these things are now extremely easy and quick to do with AI. So when you think about, you know, activating prior knowledge or making connections, all you need to do is go to Kigo or an AI tool and have it look at the text and identify questions and different engagement tactics for getting students to think about what this text means to them or if they have any kinds of connections to the theme or the characters in the text.

Identifying what background knowledge is necessary to understand what the text is about and pre-teaching that—having Kigo summarize that for students or ask the students questions about what they already know or what they want to know. Identifying and having Kigo even identify from a text what vocabulary words a student likely needs to know in order to be able to comprehend something, and then using some of our pre-built learner activities like word safari and word architect to practice some of those different words before they even get to the reading piece. When the student is actually reading a grade-level text, having Kigo there on Khan Academy to support them if they run into something that's really complicated or hard for them to parse. It is a, you know, a judgment-free space—an AI to support, yeah—to go to when they are stuck and when they really don’t know, you know, even why they don’t understand something. They can go there to ask questions.

Another really helpful activity that I would recommend for students who are below grade level is we have this teacher tool with Kigo called the text releveller, and obviously, like I said before, it's super important that students don't just get texts that are far below grade level for an entire school year. It's really important that they do have opportunities to access grade-level text. So one of the best ways to use the text releveller is to re-level a text that's at grade level for students, relevelling it down a couple of levels and then have Kigo take that re-leveled text and re-level it back up again to where it was before. Then have students look at all three versions—have them look at the easier version that the AI re-leveled down, and that will help them kind of get a baseline understanding of what the text was about. Have them look at the re-leveled version, and then have them compare that to the original text and look at what did we lose.

You know when the AI took this text and re-leveled it, what changed? What aspects of the author's craft or different linguistic elements changed, and how did that affect the text's meaning? So there are many different creative ways that you can use AI not only to just, you know, get students accessing grade-level materials more easily but also to create kind of fun and engaging learning experiences.

I mean, you said so much, Sarah. A lot of really amazing gems! But I want to hear Bernardette's spin because, Bern, you have a little bit of a different perspective and a background in social studies. Some of what Sarah was sharing is from vocabulary and seeing authentic text and making sure that students have the ability to access rigorous texts. So I’d love to add some color and context from your point of view on how you see that we can help close these gaps.

So when I think about social studies teachers who were also working a lot with vocabulary and with reading and primary source documents, so many times when students are looking at primary source documents. You know, they're looking at some archaic vocabulary; they're looking at sometimes a cursive document. So you can use AI to focus in on those primary and secondary source documents. You can have AI modify it but still have that original document right there next to it so that a student will see that original document, what it looks like at a different grade level, but always be able to go back and reach into that original document, reach into that original vocabulary, and help students understand, you know, the nuances that were put into that original document.

As Sarah said, that might just be missed when we have a document that is not modified. But the whole key when we're looking at disciplinary literacy and social studies literacy is ensuring that students are looking at that original document. So being able to take that original document and have them be able to access and understand those concepts is really important.

As you pull it all together, thank you! So there's some chatter in the chat around what the heck we're talking about. I'm going to give you a resource at the end or QR code to find out more, but there are links in the chat. We are talking about, first and foremost, we want to just have a great, rich conversation about literacy and post-pandemic and how we can leverage AI tools.

But we do have some really great AI tools as part of Khan Academy that you can absolutely find out more about when you find the link in the chat. But I want us to really dig into more reading and writing because as somebody said, "Preach!" in the chat, struggling to get students to really engage with meaningful writing. I mean, my students, as a former special ed teacher, they had a fear of putting anything on the page. Can anyone relate?

Just getting started, not having idea generation. And it was really difficult because I was full inclusion, so I was trying to support so many students in a sixth-grade ELA classroom and help my students, as Dian was talking about, feeling safe, feeling validated. So how could personalized feedback enhance students' reading and writing abilities? Di, let's kick off with you.

Absolutely! Again, I think about that safe space, right? Just feeling okay with, you know, being able to speak in front of everyone or being able to know am I writing the correct sentence or just getting them comfortable. So I like the fact that we have, for example, like the Tutor Me tool with Tutor Me in Humanities. Students have the opportunity to either get quizzed on certain skills, and again, it’s that safe space! I just keep going to that because I know a lot of my students came to me with not a lot of prior knowledge—we talked about that before—and so when it came time for those class discussions, what did some of them do? They either behaved their way out or they might just shut down because they don’t want to—they don’t have anything to contribute to the conversation.

So having tools such as Tutor Me, you know, in Humanities where you can ask those questions about the text prior to or even during you know as the teacher if I had it in my classroom, I would definitely model for them and create opportunities for them to, you know, answer specific questions. Go reach out to Kigo, ask Kigo, you know, “Why is this happening?” and then that will give them that context. The other cool thing about it as well is for those students that may have those issues with reading that, you know, reading fluently may be an issue, Kigo can speak to them!

So they can have their headphones in, and it almost feels like an actual conversation because what happens is even if, you know, typing is not my strong suit like you were talking about for some of your special education students, you know, you can speak into Kigo and say, “You know, hey, why is this happening?” Kigo is going to generate it, and then it has the ability now to talk back to you. So if typing and reading is not a student’s strong point, they’re able to now feel more empowered because now it's almost like having a conversation like you and I are having in this moment to help them, you know, get stronger in those skills.

Absolutely! So Sarah, what are your thoughts on this?

Yeah, so I mentioned earlier one of the first things that we started exploring when we were dipping our toes into the AI pool was essay feedback. So I taught both reading and writing at the school where I taught; they were separate classes and writing was a lot harder, I think, than teaching reading for the main reason that the feedback piece is just such a challenge if you have more than, you know, 20 students in a class, which I think most teachers do.

And so the way that we designed the Kigo academic essay feedback activity was a way for students to get instant high-quality feedback that was actionable and organized by, you know, specific feedback area without having to wait for, you know, days or even weeks to get any kind of information back from their teachers. The way that it works is that a student submits their essay draft as well as information about the essay as it was assigned by their teacher; anything related to the essay's genre or the grade level that they're in.

Then we put the essay through all of these very, very meticulously configured AI prompts that generate feedback in five different areas. Students can then navigate between those five different areas. If they click on a piece of feedback, it will highlight what part of the essay it's talking about. The student can then also chat with Kigo about that piece of feedback and say, “I don’t understand what you mean. Can you explain this?” or “Can you give me an example of, you know, you're telling me my thesis isn’t very strong. Can you give me an example of what a strong thesis looks like?” It will do that without actually giving them any of the writing for the essay itself, so it's programmed in order to prevent students from using AI to cheat.

The best part too is that students can then update and revise their essay and ask Kigo, “Hey, what does it look like now? Like, what do you think now?” Kigo can look at the feedback that the students are referencing and the edit they just made and say, “Yes! Like, you know what you just did, you checked the box! Like, that looks great!” Or it can say, “You know, I think you still need a little bit of work here.”

It's this safe space for students to get follow-up support they can ask for more help, and as a teacher, again, I just remember being in a classroom where, you know, sometimes I would have like a sea of hands in the air where kids were just like, “I’m stuck!” or they had— you know, it was maybe a student who was just like “Can you read this sentence?” and every time they wrote a sentence, they'd be like “Can you read the sentence?” and then there were other students who just had their heads down. The ones who usually needed the help the most didn't have their hands up at all.

The best part about this is that it empowers the students to do to ask Kigo for help when they need it, but it also allows Kigo to do some of those checks for students even if they are not asking for it. So one of the things we're working on now is called Writing Coach, which builds upon the essay feedback activity. It actually walks students through the entire essay process. First of all, before we even get to that, I think kids have to be able to know, you know, where do we start? Sometimes using tools like chatting with a historical figure or chatting with a literary figure are great ways to get kids to start thinking about topics.

So they can chat with a literary figure or historical figure, ask them about claims and evidence. What do they think? And they can go and develop those arguments. The other thing that Kigo does is it does debates at the elementary, middle, and high school level on specific topics. So if a student is having trouble trying to figure out a claim or evidence or an argument, starting with one of these and giving them that practice with Kigo to develop those themes is a great way to get them started in that writing process.

I think so many of my middle school students and, you know, teachers that I worked with at the high school level were always asking, “How do we get my kids started?” and this is a great way to get your kids started. Again there's lots of ways to look at that when we come back around and start looking at, you know, how do we make sure that they're citing correctly? How do we make sure we're doing that? Kigo can help with that as well, and that's also a good check. It's important for students to understand what it is to cite, what is plagiarism, how do you cite AI, how do you cite that you used an AI tool in your paper?

That's an important piece that so many times, well, you know, if I co-wrote it, well you know what it’s like having a co-author: you have to write it together, and you have to be able to explain that to your teacher. So being able to use these tools at all areas of the writing piece and, again, being able to zoom in on things like claims and evidence or being able to zoom in on argumentation depending upon what kind of writing they're doing and what kind of testing they're taking because when we start now looking even at some of our AP and IB and ACE exams, they have to be able to do that as well, and this is great practice for all levels.

Yeah, and this conversation is making me want to go back and teach essays, which I wasn't very successful at, let’s be honest. Well, so a couple of people are chiming in in the chat, really excited about the Writing Coach, really excited. Yes, we are going to send the recording to everybody—so you get a care package by signing up for the webinar. You are welcome! And part of that care package, not to get that excited, it’s just a recording and some resources.

But speaking of resources, speaking of K, I'm segueing really randomly. I'm going to go into challenges and opportunities. I'm excited about a lot of things. I wish I could have had a really long conversation with, you know, Jay Gatsby. You can now through Kigo, but I couldn’t back then. But what are some things do you think people will be nervous to implement? Di, why don't you kick us off with some maybe opportunities or challenges?

Well, I think one of the things like with other AI—I mean, the cool thing about Kigo is students don’t have an opportunity to go to Kigo and say, “Write my essay for me.” Kigo is a Socratic tutor, and so because of that Kigo has a personality. Kigo is going to say, “Yeah, but as your AI tutor, I can’t write your paper, but let's think about this topic.” It always brings the student back, so it won’t just do the work for them. That process, especially in writing, is a process, right? So, you know, no matter what, you know, students still need to be able to speak to how did I come up with this idea? How, you know, what edits did I make? It's one thing if just on one day, you know, just yesterday you were only writing two sentences. Now today you can do a whole dissertation! Like, you know, it still has to make students accountable, but still have them have an assistant without it just doing the work for them.

I think one of the challenges that, you know, we're finding too is having to coach students on having these conversations back and forth with Kigo. You know, it's one thing to say, “I don’t understand, you know, this specific topic that we're studying,” but students are still having a mindset kind of that Kigo is a search engine, and it’s not. It's more so “ask it to simplify” or “ask it to clarify for you what do you mean by this?” What does it mean to analyze this text? Or, you know, any having those conversations back and forth, that’s one of the challenges. But you just have to make sure you're coaching your students and modeling for them how to, you know, have a conversation back and forth with Kigo. It's not a one-and-done.

Correct! And AI is meant to enhance the human intelligence and human experience, right? Because we want to still bring talking back into our classrooms—that's just that Justin Timberlake reference for y'all. So Sarah, when we think about challenges, right? I mean, and thinking about the human experience, what are some of your thoughts on that?

Yeah, I agree with you know everything that Bernardette and Di have been saying. I feel like there's this common misconception that AI equals chat bots, and you know, it's probably the most commonly known format for interacting with AI right now that teachers are aware of. But I don't think that we should be thinking about integrating AI into literacy classrooms as just finding more ways for students to chat with AI.

I actually, I mean, when I think back to the best moments as a teacher in my reading classrooms and my writing classrooms, it was the moments where we were talking together and with each other, with our peers and groups about books and about, you know, big themes, important characters, and all kinds of like, you know, just the rich experiences that you have when you are writing and when you are reading something together. One of the things that I want people to come away with is this understanding that bringing AI into literacy classrooms doesn’t mean taking that time away where we’re connecting with each other and we’re talking with each other.

I think it has more to do with enabling teachers with better tools to generate really creative learning experiences and materials. Helping students with the hard parts of reading and writing that are often experienced independently anyway. So that experience of, you know, reading a paper that your teacher marked up—it doesn’t have to be such an isolating experience. We know that every teacher doesn't have time to sit down and do that every time with every kid.

And then same thing with reading—you know, oftentimes, there're moments where you might get tripped up when you're reading something, and we don't want that to, you know, dismantle this whole classroom experience of being able to discuss a book and what it means. Those are the experiences that I think AI can help with a lot, and then again, just making it a lot more—easier for teachers to have access to a creative partner, to something that can help them plan projects or class discussions, to give students an opportunity to, like Bernardette mentioned, chat with a literary character from a book they're reading but then talk about it as a class.

Like, discuss with each other, “What did we think of that experience? Did it feel authentic? What about the AI seems like it might have, you know, gone against what the author intended in the book that they wrote and why?” That's a really wonderful jumping-off point for an essay they could write. So there are so many ways that you can integrate AI into classroom experiences that don't necessarily, you know, keep students just isolated in front of their screens. I think the best use case that we can all drive toward is ways that we can use AI to actually encourage more learning experiences that are collaborative and communal because, again, like that I think is where all the joy comes out.

And I think if we are able to get AI to help more students access, you know, rich and grade-level appropriate texts, then I think we could see a lot more opportunities to have that kind of class discussion and engagement. Absolutely! And I would love for us to take a minute and really—we have been wearing our teacher hats—but I want us to put our teacher hats back on and I want you to think about what was maybe something that was really challenging for you when you were teaching, you know, social studies literacy for me, special education that this tool could have helped immediately, like solve that pain point.

Bernardette, what about you? What is something that maybe, like, “I wish I had this?”

So I think there are so many levels to that because the Kigo teacher tools are so varied and so diverse. I think that there isn't enough time in a webinar to really go over all of those, but some of the things that when I think about it, you know, as a teacher I always wanted to make sure that my students were accurate and that we were ensuring accuracy.

I know when I first thought about AI, you know, it was the Wild Wild West. You know, it was this AI coming in and writing everything for my kids, and it was none of their own original work. That to me was probably the biggest pain point and fear when I started thinking and looking into AI. What I absolutely love about Kahn Academy and Kigo is the fact that that's not the case. This is your students' original work.

When they're working with an essay generator, the students have to put their own thoughts and ideas and develop their own characters. Kigo can help them expand that and update their vocabulary and help them look at those juicy sentences and juicy words, but those are the places where when we start talking about ensuring that accuracy, it’s student-generated work. It's not, “I threw in a topic, and this essay was spit out for me.”

I think that that's really, really important as a teacher, and that was always my fear with this. I think the other thing is that whole feedback piece. You know, when you've got a class of 20, 25, 30 or more students, how do you give that individual feedback on a regular basis? I would love to say I did that every day with every single student. There was no way, there was no way! But with Khan Academy and with AI and with Kigo, a teacher can go in and say, “Okay, I want you to put your essays in; I want everybody to look at your own introductions and do it,” and talk through, and then even have a class discussion about the feedback that they got from the AI—from Kigo—regarding that introduction, or their conclusion, or their claims, whatever those pieces are.

Now a student is getting that individual work, and even when they're at home, maybe they're writing at home, or maybe you're working with a small group and the rest of your class is kind of sitting there. This is an opportunity for your students to get that one-on-one when you physically cannot do it, which unfortunately, as teachers, ends up happening. Especially if they're taking work home and writing from home, you want to make sure that they're not, you know, just getting an AI to do it because when they do put it in the essay checker, AI is going to look at it and go, “Hey, you know, are you sure? Where did you get this?” And that's something that is important as a teacher for me to know that there's accuracy there and that they're getting feedback, and they're getting good feedback, and it's on their work.

Yeah! Last time I checked, we still can't clone teachers, so this is a really important way to be able to do that feedback. Danna, what do you think would be your—there's a couple right? There’s the rubric generator! The fact that I can, you know, I used to spend so much time going online trying to find rubrics, you know, that align with, you know, the writing that we're doing, you know, for my students.

And then sometimes, you know, it was a PDF, so I couldn't go in and make any kind of edits to it. And so the fact that there's an actual rubric generator, you know, to help with my students' writing is amazing! The other one that comes out to me as well is the fun class summary poem! You know when I think about my students and, you know, you want a way to kind of wrap up that lesson, right? You might have, you know, just been talking about main idea.

My students used to love—you used to love rap music, so poetry and rap, you know, they kind of go hand in hand. And so I think it would have just been so cool to—because I’m not a lyricist, I can’t come up with, you know, quick things like that and then also include incorporating things that they like, you know, in this fun class, this fun class summary poem because the students have to give you feedback of what did we learn today? Give me some ideas!

And then it generates and it wraps up the lesson into this nice summary-like poem, and I think that, you know, it would have just been a fun way to close out that lesson. For me, it was also hard, you know, if your students say, “Hey, I like Fortnite!” or “I like this game or that game.” I only knew it because of them, but something right now, being able to generate and talk about those things without me having to go and interview a kid or take some more time that I don't have away from my planning to research this on my own to me is amazing.

So I just really wish I had that rubric generator, and like I said, the fun class summary poem would have been one of my go-tos! That's amazing! So we are just rounding out our time together. But I want—I’m just going to have Sarah have the last word. Let’s think forward 5, 10 years in the future. What are your dreams and hopes for literacy instruction? What kind of utopian world could there be knowing what we know now?

Yeah, that's a great question! So, I mean, my mind is like spinning with all of the different ways that the current tools we have and the current technology we have could have helped me in the classroom—in the hours I spent, hours and hours and hours doing things that AI can now do in seconds. I think one of the challenges though is, you know, like, I’ve learned now in my role here at Khan Academy how to be a fairly decent prompt engineer, which means I know how to talk to AI to get it to give me the things that I need.

But not all teachers have those skills. One of the benefits of the Kigo teacher tools, which all of you can go and sign up for right now on the congo link that I think we've put in the chat, but one of the benefits of those tools is that you don't have to be a skilled prompt engineer to do many of these things. But thinking forward to the, you know, the next five years or so, it's hard to predict where we're going, but I am imagining even more kind of like custom, flexible tools that are designed specifically for ELA teachers.

A lot of our Kigo tools now can be used by any subject, but I’m really excited about some of the things that we have in the works for reading instruction and reading comprehension where teachers don’t have to, you know, do much of that front work to prep. I just remember it took so long for me to find a text that I wanted to use and then prepare that text for my students in order for them to access it with the scaffolding and the questions and all the different ways we would discuss it.

So, I don’t even think that's five years, I think that’s like six months from now on KH Academy. But just like freeing up so much more teacher time! And when I think about it from a student perspective, just calling back to what I was talking about earlier with these just like rich classroom experiences where students are not focused on what's happening on a screen necessarily and maybe the technology is there to provide support where they need it or to, you know, be a partner when they need one to motivate students.

I think there's some cool things that we're dreaming up right now when it comes to, you know, student engagement and gamification and student motivation that we can use AI for. But yeah, I think the future is just let's bring students together more and let's bring teachers—let's make teachers more of, you know, a facilitator of learning versus just these taskmasters that are just having to do so many things all at the same time usually.

So I think that there’s just a lot of really, really exciting fun, innovative, rigorous, differentiated experiences that we're dreaming up here that will hopefully just make, you know, reading and writing classes that much more powerful and exciting for future learners. Oh, here! Here! Who does not want to have more of that in your classroom and save some time?

Anyone? Anyone want some time saved? Speaking of time, unfortunately, that is all the time we have for today. Thank you to my amazing panelists for sharing their insights and thoughts from their classroom experience. And I just want to point out that we want to continue to work with you if you want to work with us. I mean, a lot—we offer. You can go right now and sign up for KH Academy.

But if you want to have a deeper partnership, we do offer something called District Partnerships, where you get a success manager and tailored professional learning that meets your needs. We can help you with data analysis for MTSS, all the things—district tracking boards, you name it, we'll have it with the data when it comes to understanding where your students are with Khan. But most importantly, we really are making sure that Kigo is safe and ethical, and that there are lots of guardrails, and we are really thinking about this every single day. We're not just throwing it out and just making it scary; we are really being mindful of the way that we are building this.

So if you want to learn more, this is our District partnership team. We’d love to connect with you. Click on this QR code, and until we meet again, keep reading, keep writing, keep learning! We appreciate y'all!