Working Smarter with Khanmigo

[00:00:00] Shanna Martin: Thanks for listening to the Tech Tools for Teachers podcast. For each week, we talk about a free, these are two of technology that you can use in your classroom. I'm your host, Shanna Martin. I'm a middle school teacher, technology and instructional coach from my district,

[00:00:31] Fuzz Martin: and I'm our producer and husband, Fuzz Martin.

[00:00:33] Fuzz Martin: And I can't wait for you to experience season eight.

[00:00:39] Shanna Martin: Yay.

[00:00:41] Fuzz Martin: Hello,

[00:00:41] Shanna Martin: we're here.

[00:00:43] Fuzz Martin: Hope you had a good summer.

[00:00:44] Shanna Martin: Yeah, ours was quite busy.

[00:00:47] Fuzz Martin: An adventure.

[00:00:49] Shanna Martin: Yes, it was quite an adventure. Saw all kinds of cool things.

[00:00:53] Fuzz Martin: Yeah. Went to a national park. We haven't, uh, been to and

[00:00:57] Shanna Martin: yeah.

[00:00:57] Fuzz Martin: Lots of, lots of great stuff.

[00:00:59] Shanna Martin: Yeah. So it's been busy.

[00:01:00] Shanna Martin: Mm-hmm. But fun

[00:01:01] Fuzz Martin: and hot. Yeah,

[00:01:02] Shanna Martin: hot. Yeah. Yeah. It has been hot.

[00:01:04] Fuzz Martin: Yeah.

[00:01:05] Shanna Martin: Yeah. So it's been hot. You're in Wisconsin, but we are back, it's season eight. We're here at episode two 15, which is super fun. And there's so many cool things to talk about. There's so many tools that I've gathered throughout the summer and end of the school year and ready to start year 22 in education.

[00:01:29] Shanna Martin: Wow. 22 years of middle school amazingness. Yeah. And instructional coaching and all those fun things and. Man, I've, I've learned a thing or two

[00:01:42] Fuzz Martin: about teaching kids.

[00:01:44] Shanna Martin: Yeah. So it's good. I know some people are at the point where you might have already been in school for a week or two and some are starting, you know, after Labor Day.

[00:01:52] Shanna Martin: And so it's that time of year when things are exciting and school supplies are out there and everyone's got new markers and we're ready to go with our Ola extravaganza of amazingness and yeah. Here we go. New

[00:02:08] Fuzz Martin: batch of kids and for the kids, new batch of teachers. It's just, uh,

[00:02:13] Shanna Martin: yeah, it's fun. It's a good, it's always like the fun time in the school year.

[00:02:16] Shanna Martin: Yeah. Because you're like fired up and we're ready to go. Mm-hmm. Let's get fired up.

[00:02:21] Fuzz Martin: Fired up. And then February, uh, it falls off. Uh, so I was losing

[00:02:24] Shanna Martin: their mind. So let's all be a part of high school musical. There we go. So season eight, episode two 15. I have one tool to highlight today. It does lots and lots of.

[00:02:39] Shanna Martin: Purposeful things within the tool and obviously AI is all over the place and very much a part of our lives. So I figured let's find some actual AI tools that will be helpful for teachers because we're always looking for time. Time, right? We need more time. Time. So we're gonna talk about coning.

[00:03:00] Shanna Martin: Kahnmigo, Kahnmigo. Kahnmigo. I was, IHN Ngo.

[00:03:06] Fuzz Martin: It's like a, it's like your friend, you, you're amigo, but it's Kahn Academy, so it's the Khanmigo.

[00:03:11] Shanna Martin: So we like Khan Academy we've talked about before. It's done ton of things to support our students. Mm-hmm. Um, for additional learning to help at home. I know when our.

[00:03:21] Shanna Martin: Oldest was in elementary school. There was a lot of Khan Academy happening to help with math,

[00:03:26] Fuzz Martin: especially in the summer to make sure she retained.

[00:03:28] Shanna Martin: Yeah. Extra math practice. Yeah. So Con MIGA is an AI tool, Kahnmigo ai. So the actual site is KHAN. Try again. K

[00:03:44] Fuzz Martin: you had it right? K-H-A-N-M-I-G o.ai.

[00:03:50] Shanna Martin: Perfect.

[00:03:51] Shanna Martin: Thank you. Because it opened up in a different screen for me. Yeah. So I clicked on it. So you'll find it. You can also find it through Khan Academy. Mm-hmm. So it's in both like spaces and so all when you, when

[00:04:04] Fuzz Martin: you signed up too, just for when people who do sign up. It was a little confusing, right, because it,

[00:04:09] Shanna Martin: yeah, because you sign up through Kahnmigo.

[00:04:12] Shanna Martin: Mm-hmm. Which is like the teacher support resource, but it will connect to Khan Academy if you already have a Khan Academy account. So just be aware that it's like separate. Yeah. You click separate, but the same,

[00:04:24] Fuzz Martin: you sign up on Khan Academy or on Con Migos site. You click the sign up button, it takes you to Khan Academy's site too.

[00:04:31] Shanna Martin: To access everything. Yeah. And then under teacher, so like, you can also find it under khan academy.org/teacher/Kahnmigo tools. Yeah. So you can get there in a variety of ways. You will find it. But just be aware,

[00:04:46] Fuzz Martin: Khan Academy, if you're listening, improve your,

[00:04:50] Shanna Martin: just make a separate login or a, a login that connects in the same way anyway.

[00:04:54] Shanna Martin: And there probably is a workaround, just, I haven't found it yet. So con miko. Is where we are today. And so Kahnmigo Tools gives you this whole collection as a teacher of resources and there are several AI tools out there. Now. We've talked kinda about Magic tool and things like that in the past, that we are looking for ways to support teachers.

[00:05:16] Shanna Martin: Mm, lesson planning, things like that. But what's really cool about these Academy Go tools is when you open it up. You have a whole collection. So there's a Bookit generator, so I don't know out there if you're using Bookit. Bookit is a hot commodity in my classroom. There's a lot of bookit for reviews. The kids like to make their own bookit, we make them educational.

[00:05:37] Shanna Martin: It will a Blooket generator, so it will create bookit questions for you that will connect to book it. Amen. They will chunk text, so it'll break complex text into manageable sections. There's a class newsletter, there's a class snapshot. So as I'm talking about these, some other places have these tools, but not, or some of other sites that have support for ai, for teachers, they do not have these resources.

[00:06:02] Shanna Martin: And remember, these are all free, so there's not like a trial. And then you pay, like this one is, you can have 'em all.

[00:06:11] Fuzz Martin: Great.

[00:06:11] Shanna Martin: There's exit tickets, class snapshots where it will like review student performance and trend, which I love pulling some data. So if I'm looking at like the top five things as to like why con Migo is so great, free for educators, we love that there's tons of easy to use AI tools to help teachers plan and to teach.

[00:06:29] Shanna Martin: Mm-hmm. Like, you can actually like take it and teach, like it creates a book for you because. Well, we love, look, it just takes time, right? Yeah,

[00:06:36] Fuzz Martin: sure.

[00:06:36] Shanna Martin: Edit on the spot before you share a print or save. So it will pull it up and I'm explain this kind of in detail where it will create the AI tool. And then you can edit it right from where they have it.

[00:06:49] Shanna Martin: You don't have to copy and paste it anywhere else. You can edit right on it and then print and save right off of it.

[00:06:55] Fuzz Martin: Great.

[00:06:55] Shanna Martin: It's super easy to look at student data from there, which is great. And it also connects to Khan Academy. So if you have students using Khan Academy, it actually pulls data for you and it kind of helps you that way.

[00:07:03] Shanna Martin: And then there's all kinds of UDL supports for students. So if you're looking for, you know, working past those barriers, if kids are struggling in different ways, you have lots of options. So. For example, if you go under all of the choices of things, you can create a class newsletter. And I made mine for the start of the year using this because I was like, well, I'm gonna try it out.

[00:07:22] Shanna Martin: Let's see what happens. So what's super cool is the newsletter sets you up. What's the name of my class? You know, Ms. Martin's eighth grade Soche class. What did we do last week? And again, you can tweak these. So this would be like a weekly newsletter? Mm-hmm. I switched it out later on. They wanna know key learning objectives, talk about the things you learn, you can just slap in bulleted points these, the things we covered this week.

[00:07:45] Shanna Martin: And then I ask you, what are you doing next week? Slap all that information in there. What do we make next week? And then other guidelines. So you can put in like, these are the standards that we're covering. This is what's coming up. This is our field trips, this is whatever's happening, all of the school stuff.

[00:07:59] Shanna Martin: And then you click the button and magically it writes you your super cool. Start of the year letter if you want it to be. Sure. So it will set up your then letter for the start of the school year and you can have your newsletter and it's like, welcome to Mrs. Martin's class. And then it goes on to talk about my super cool newsletter, about what eighth grade is.

[00:08:24] Shanna Martin: So you have these options. And when you're in that document then, which is also super cool, is. It becomes a Word doc so I can edit all the things in there. It even puts like little pictures in there if I wanted to, but I also click the button to translate. So my newsletter is created in English and in Spanish, so I'm able to support all my family's needs and it's ready to go right there.

[00:08:50] Shanna Martin: Share, print, export, and after editing it, my documents are ready to go. Which is awesome.

[00:08:56] Fuzz Martin: Yeah, that's cool. So

[00:08:57] Shanna Martin: like, it's a huge time saver because we want our parents and our families to be informed. We want them to have this information, but we all know that it takes time to put all those things together.

[00:09:07] Shanna Martin: And when it does it for you, why not try it out? It does things like clarify directions. So another button you can create concise, easy to follow directions or assignments if you need to simplify. For some students there's an IEP assistant. There is, a lesson hook button. So if you type in lesson hook, you can say like, I'm gonna teach about, let's pick the grade first.

[00:09:29] Shanna Martin: Let's do fifth grade.

[00:09:34] Shanna Martin: Gimme something.

[00:09:35] Fuzz Martin: You want a, a subject? Yeah. Lesson

[00:09:37] Shanna Martin: topic like the solar system. But that one's not fun.

[00:09:41] Fuzz Martin: That one's not fun. Okay. Let's

[00:09:42] Shanna Martin: fifth grade.

[00:09:43] Fuzz Martin: Let's learn about pronouns. Tardigrades. Okay.

[00:09:46] Shanna Martin: Tart, no animals. Um, uh, uh,

[00:09:52] Fuzz Martin: hippopotamus.

[00:09:53] Shanna Martin: Uh, okay. Hippo,

[00:09:55] Fuzz Martin: give you something easy to spell.

[00:09:57] Shanna Martin: How about ocean creatures?

[00:10:02] Shanna Martin: Awesome ocean creatures. Lesson context. We wanna know about ecosystems. Ready? Start, go. Boom. All right. It's going to create me all of the things that I need. Lesson hook, options, activities begin with who eats whom. Challenge presents students with a set of cards showing different ocean creatures and have them work in small groups to build simple food chains.

[00:10:27] Shanna Martin: Webs sparking discussion and about predatory prey, predator prey relationships. Launch a mystery creature. Creature investigation, show students closeup images. Or short video clips of unusual ocean creatures and like deep sea angler fish and leafy sea dragons. And then have them hypothesize what the creature's adaptations are or facilitate a mini debate pose.

[00:10:48] Shanna Martin: The question show humans should humans create protection areas in the ocean to help endanger species and have students discuss pros and cons. Go. So cool,

[00:10:58] Fuzz Martin: cool.

[00:10:59] Shanna Martin: Comes up with your lesson hooks right away. Boom. Ideas moving forward. Our kids know stuff.

[00:11:05] Fuzz Martin: Yay.

[00:11:06] Shanna Martin: And again, we love a tool that's gonna help us out.

[00:11:08] Shanna Martin: They have informational texts, they have the usual lesson planning that a lot of places do create a multiple choice quiz. This one I tested out in theory, which was super fun. You drop in all the information, answer choices, number of questions. It makes you a quiz. Ready, set, go. So like when you're looking at these tools, some of them are similar to other places, but a lot of the ones in Kahnmigo are different or, a little more specific.

[00:11:31] Shanna Martin: They're not so. Like, I'll create you 10 things and the same 10 things come pop up all the time. Mm-hmm. And also, once you've like created your newsletter, create it, it says it wants feedback right away. Like, how many adjustments did you make? Was this helpful for you? And so then it adjusts to how you create things.

[00:11:48] Shanna Martin: So many cool things. There's smart goal writer. I dunno how many of you have to write smart goals at the start of the school year because we all do for our evaluations as teachers. But they have a smart goal writer. They have a text rewriter so you can custom meet instructional needs for all your students.

[00:12:01] Shanna Martin: So if you need to rewrite text. For different kids' needs, you can do that. Awesome. For UDL purposes, report card comments, real world context generator. So it helps like lesson topics and real world examples, which to me is huge when you're talking to kids, like how are you gonna use this in life? It's gonna talk about different ways to connect that.

[00:12:21] Shanna Martin: So again, that's just the tools. You also can load classes in here so you can actually have access to students. If you are going to set up courses, you can do that with Khan Academy, have your student resources, and then they also have, like printable resources. So goal sledding, action plans, student printable, so they have all of those available to you as well.

[00:12:43] Shanna Martin: So Amigo has all kinds of cool AI teachers, teacher specific tools Yep. That are very awesome. And you can sort 'em too. Like you can sort by differentiation. Versus student support versus planning. Like they do organize them, if that's easier for you to sort through everything. But what a great resource for the start of the year for planning and getting things off to the right start.

[00:13:06] Fuzz Martin: For sure.

[00:13:07] Shanna Martin: So any cool things for learning and for teachers?

[00:13:12] Fuzz Martin: Yes. Uh,

[00:13:14] Shanna Martin: what are you creating?

[00:13:15] Fuzz Martin: Well, no, I'm, I'm looking at the, uh, the writing coach that Yeah. They have on there and just, pretty neat the, you know, the ability to flag for. Potential originality concerns, and

[00:13:26] Shanna Martin: because we all need to do that.

[00:13:28] Fuzz Martin: Yeah.

[00:13:28] Fuzz Martin: But to also help the students, make their sentences stronger and all that kind of stuff. I think it's, it's a good way of using AI to like 'cause to embrace ai

[00:13:38] Shanna Martin: Yeah.

[00:13:38] Fuzz Martin: Without leaning on AI to do the work for you. Everything. Yeah.

[00:13:42] Shanna Martin: Yeah. Using it, learning to use it as a tool.

[00:13:44] Fuzz Martin: Right.

[00:13:44] Shanna Martin: Versus trying to have it do your work for you.

[00:13:46] Shanna Martin: Yeah. And I think

[00:13:47] Fuzz Martin: in, you know, that's not

[00:13:48] Shanna Martin: gonna solve anything

[00:13:49] Fuzz Martin: in. You know, once students get to the professional world, especially as they're, you know, mm-hmm. Growing up in this, you know, as we tell our employees, like, you learn to use it and embrace it like a tool so that it, you know, people worry about AI taking their jobs,

[00:14:05] Shanna Martin: right?

[00:14:05] Fuzz Martin: Learning to use it is gonna be how you, you find job security. So, like this I think are fantastic.

[00:14:11] Shanna Martin: Yay.

[00:14:12] Fuzz Martin: Yeah.

[00:14:13] Shanna Martin: Cool. So check out Kahnmigo

[00:14:16] Fuzz Martin: k Migo, K-H-A-N-M-I-G o.ai. Yay.

[00:14:21] Shanna Martin: And then you have access to all those other tools too.

[00:14:23] Fuzz Martin: Yeah. So

[00:14:24] Shanna Martin: a great way to start the year. Super helpful for teachers, for planning, supporting your students and firing up for new,

[00:14:32] Fuzz Martin: new.

[00:14:33] Shanna Martin: Exciting year of 2025. 2026.

[00:14:36] Fuzz Martin: Yeah.

[00:14:37] Shanna Martin: There we go.

[00:14:37] Fuzz Martin: Cool.

[00:14:38] Shanna Martin: Thanks for tuning in. This has been the Tech Tools for Teachers Podcast. If you ever have any questions, you can find me on Blue Sky Threads, Facebook and Instagram at Smart nwi. And if you wanna get more information on the links to the technology discussing this episode, you can visit Smartinwi.com.

[00:14:55] Shanna Martin: If you'd like to support the show, please consider buying me a coffee or two. Visit buy me a coffee.com/ smartinwi. For Business Smartinwi.com, and click on that cute little purple coffee cup. Your donations help keep the show going. New episodes each week. Season eight. Season

[00:15:11] Fuzz Martin: eight. Thanks

[00:15:12] Shanna Martin: for listening. Go educate and innovate

[00:15:14] Fuzz Martin: the ideas and opinions expressed on this podcast and the smarts in WI website.

[00:15:20] Fuzz Martin: I haven't read this in season seven. Are those of the authors, Shanna Martin, and not of her employer? Prior to using any of the technologies discussed on this podcast, please consult with your employer regulations. This podcast offers no guarantee that these tools will work for you as we've described, but we sure hope they do and we'll talk to you on episode two 16 right here on the Tech Tools for Teachers Podcast.