A Possible Cool Tool Alert!

 Let me share a personal story. My daughter struggled mightily in math. In fact, her junior year in Algebra II, she barely passed. Math was always a hard subject for her, and as she progressed through school, her grades got worse and worse. When it came time to register her for classes her senior year, I told her NOT to register for a math class (which would have been pre-calc). She would have for sure failed math her senior year and screwd up her graduation, and I was not setting my kid up for that kind of emotional blow her last year of high school. She had enough math credits to meet her graduation requirements, so she took no math class in high school. However, I knew she had holes to fill in her math learning, so the summer between her junior and senior year, I enrolled her at Kumon. Their testing of her showed learning deficits going all the way back to 4th grade math, which would explain why she was in a downward spiral as the curriculum upward spiraled. She spent that summer and most of her senior year going through her program at Kumon (she was REAL happy with me, as you can imagine!) and when they tested her at the end of the year, she was testing at Algebra II. How in the name of all that is holy did my kid go from 4th grade math to Algebra II in one year???? I can tell you I attribute it to 2 things:

1.) A personalized curriculum, designed to address exactly where all her deficits were.

2.) One-on-one instruction from her instructor at Kumon.

Before you start pointing out to me that a classroom teacher simply cannot do this for every student in their class, let me say you're right. That is simply too herculean a task for the average teacher, creating a personalized curriculum and offering individualized instruction for every student in your class.

But AI can help. 

Let me introduce you to Khanmigo, the AI assistant in beta testing from Khan Academy. Check out this TEDTalk from Sal Khan. It's 15 minutes, but it is well worth your time to see.

Highlights, in case you didn't watch (and some teasers to MAKE you watch):

• Khanmigo is not a cheating tool! If a student asks it to give an answer, Khanmigo will instead tutor the student, trying to find out where they need help.
• Khanmigo will look for a student's mistakes in solving a problem, ask they student to explain why they did what they did, and then tutor the student to guide them to the right answer.
• Kahnmigo works within Khan Academy for math, coding, history, and ELA.
• In the video, see how a student chats with Jay Gatsby to help understand why he acts the way he does in the novel.
• In the video, see how Khanmigo works with a student on working together to write a story.
• In the video, see how a student can practice a debate with Khanmigo.
• Khanmigo can work Socractically as a guidance counselor.
• In the video, see how Khanmigo addresses the student question, "Why do I need to know this?"
• Khanmigo will create lessons, generate progress reports, and evaluate student work.
• Sal Khan says that this will free up teachers to have more time to get back to their human interactions with students!
• Khanmigo thinks before it acts! Watch the video to see how it thinks and therefore tutors a student!

Finally, a point to consider that Sal Khan says so much more eloquently in the video than I can summarize: You might feel the need to slow down with AI or even eschew it altogether. But the problem with that is that the bad actors out there aren't going to slow down and then we end up in a situation where the bad actors have better AI than the good actors, and that leads to some pretty big problems! Instead, we as the good guys in education, can embrace AI and use it appropriately and teach our students the same which will help keep the good AI in the game. Plus the time we can gain back allows us to get back to what Sal Khan calls HI -- Human Interaction, which is what we all want to make sure isn't lost as AI gains ground. Watch the video. He says it so much better!

Now, why is this a POSSIBLE cool tool? First, we don't have an AI policy in place for using AI with students yet, so we can't jump into it. Plus, there are privacy issues that need to be reviewed (hello, SOPPA, we meet again). But I felt that Khanmigo was powerful enough to talk about now so that when we can hit the ground with AI in our classrooms, we have a really cool tool we might be able to use!

Talk to me in the comments -- did you watch the video? What did you think? Was your mind blown like mine?