Edtech Insiders
Edtech Insiders
Practical AI That Teachers Actually Love with Levi Belnap of Merlyn Mind
Levi Belnap is the CEO of Merlyn Mind, where he has been instrumental in driving the company's vision and growth since joining in 2019. Before assuming his current role, Levi served as Chief Strategy Officer for nearly four years and later as Chief Revenue Officer. Prior to Merlyn Mind, Levi built an impressive career in business development and entrepreneurship. He worked for Defy Ventures, served as Vice President of Business Development and Strategic Partnerships at Wyzant, and co-founded FindIt, where he served as CEO. He is a graduate of Brigham Young University with a BA in Political Science and received his MBA from Harvard Business School. He currently resides in Houston, Texas, where he continues to lead Merlyn Mind in transforming educational technology.
💡 5 Things You’ll Learn in This Episode:
- How voice AI is helping teachers regain control of the classroom
- Why AI should be invisible, not overwhelming, for educators
- Real classroom impacts: higher engagement, fewer disruptions
- How multi-language support is changing access to tech
- The future of AI in education: enabling, not replacing, teachers
✨ Episode Highlights:
[00:01:20] Levi Belnap’s journey to leading Merlyn Mind
[00:02:36] What Merlyn Mind’s voice AI actually does in classrooms
[00:04:19] Evolving AI strategy: Before and after ChatGPT
[00:07:29] How teacher needs drive real edtech innovation
[00:09:23] A day in the life of a "Merlyn-enabled" teacher
[00:17:16] Voice AI’s impact on student focus and behavior
[00:25:46] New Spanish-language capabilities at Merlyn Mind
[00:36:59] Why embedding AI in real workflows is the future of edtech
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🎉 Presenting Sponsor:
This season of Edtech Insiders is once again brought to you by Tuck Advisors, the M&A firm for EdTech companies. Run by serial entrepreneurs with over 25 years of experience founding, investing in, and selling companies, Tuck believes you deserve M&A advisors who work as hard as you do.
[00:00:00] Levi Belnap: We're actually finding that what teachers are telling us is my behavioral management issues are going down, my student engagement is going up. My progress in making through the requirements is going faster. And so we don't think this is a silver bullet, like we know that this is just a helpful tool to teachers.
But what it is, it's unlocking the true silver bullet. That's probably a bad metaphor, but like the most effective thing that we actually have in a classroom, which is incredible teachers that can do incredible things for students, now they can do more of it. The secret sauce is not us, it's teachers, and we're just allowing them to get back into what they do best.
[00:00:40] Alex Sarlin: Welcome to EdTech Insiders, the top podcast covering the education technology industry from funding rounds to impact to AI developments. Cross early childhood, K 12 higher ed and work. You'll find it all here
[00:00:54] Ben Kornell: at EdTech Insiders. Remember to subscribe to the pod, check out our newsletter and offer our event calendar and to go deeper.
Check out EdTech Insiders Plus where you can get premium content access to our WhatsApp channel, early access to events and back channel insights from Alex and Ben. Hope you enjoyed today's pod.
[00:01:20] Alex Sarlin: Levi Bell Knapp is the CEO of Merlin Mind, where he has been instrumental in driving the company's vision and growth since joining in 2019 before assuming his current role, Levi served as Chief Strategy Officer for nearly four years and later as Chief Revenue Officer prior to Merlin Mind, Levi built an impressive career in business development and entrepreneurship.
He worked for Defi Ventures. Served as Vice President of Business development and strategic partnerships at Wisen and co-founded Find It where he served as CEO. He is a graduate of Brigham Young University with a BA in political Science and received his MBA from Harvard Business School. He currently resides in Houston, Texas, where he continues to lead Merlin Mind in transforming educational technology.
Levi Bell Nav. Welcome to EdTech Insiders. Alex. Thank you. I'm really
[00:02:13] Levi Belnap: excited to be here with you.
[00:02:15] Alex Sarlin: I am really excited to be here with you too. Merlin mind is such an interesting place, and it's been changing and growing since we last talked to you, and we've talked a little bit at conferences, and I always feel like you have a ton to say about this space.
So let's start by just telling our listeners who may not know what Merlin Mind is, what is Merlin mind, and what is your role in growing it?
[00:02:36] Levi Belnap: Yeah, thanks Alex. Merlin Mind is a AI solution company for classrooms. We have an AI assistant to help teachers in the room really practically be mobile, roam the room, be with their students, and use their voice to control technology.
We've been doing this for almost seven years now. It was founded by the former IBM Watson team, and then a lot of the Alexa team from Amazon joined us, and so we've really tried to build this assistant that uses voice to allow teachers to more easily use tech in the room so they can be more effective.
[00:03:08] Alex Sarlin: You mentioned the IBM and Amazon team. It's a really serious tech pedigree behind Merlin Mines technology, and you are taking over as CEO and in a really amazing time. You've been at Merlin Mines since 2019. Tell us about the transformative period in the last year or so. As. Me mind has grown and as you're sort of moving to the next phase of evolution.
[00:03:30] Levi Belnap: Yeah, so I've been lucky to be here, like you mentioned, six years. The company was founded about seven years ago. I joined about a year in when it was still in stealth. Nobody knew what it was. There was the founders and a handful of employees. I think I was employee number eight, the first non-AI engineer in the company.
My background before that was leading different types of ed tech companies and startups, and so I've worn a lot of hats here. But over about the last year, I took over as CEO of the Merlin for Education business. Our founders were taking a more horizontal approach to do some things with AI agents across other industries, but myself and a lot of the team who joined here to make education better with AI if possible.
Doubled down and said, we're here to bring a really unique solution to classrooms because we think the world needs it. We can talk more about that, but that's the mission, and we're still very committed to that.
[00:04:19] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, and you've been the chief strategy officer, so you've played a lot of key role in both building the strategy of the company and building its revenue pipeline and everything.
Tell us about Merlin's growth over this time. It's an unusual story because as you mentioned six or seven years ago, from very serious AI engineers. That's pre generative ai. That's pre this moment that everybody's talking about AI all the time. You were doing AI in classrooms for longer than that. Tell us about what that was like and how your strategy has sort of evolved as AI has become something on everybody's mind for better or worse.
[00:04:51] Levi Belnap: Yeah, that's a great question, Alex. Yeah, I mean, almost the cliche would be, we were doing AI in schools before was cool or something like that, right? We started with a pretty. Simple hypothesis, and this came from the founders and from their time at IBM and looking at ai, which was, we think the way humans interact with computing with computers is gonna change.
And again, this was seven years ago and the idea was people are gonna start talking to computers. And this was before chat, BT and everything. And so we looked at like, okay, Alexa working in home series on your phone. That ability to talk to tech is really transformative and allows you to do cool stuff.
What if you could do that in classrooms, but what if you could do it so it's safe and effective and it integrated with the systems that were in classrooms. So that was kind of like the guiding principle that started the company that led us to building our own large device that was like a speaker and a microphone and allowed you to kind of do really interesting things in classrooms.
But it was more expensive and it was more complicated. It was another new device. And over the years we kind of learned a few things. One was. We needed to integrate into the existing tools and systems and classrooms. And so that led to a much simpler version of Merlin that just connects to a teacher laptop or to their interactive panel.
And then we also basically shifted from saying we need to create everything ourselves to wait the AI development just rapidly. Caught up to where we were and surpassed us in some ways, and it allowed us to say, what do we need to build and what can we integrate with? So a few years ago, we were building our own models, our large language models that were purpose built for education, and now we still have some of those around appropriateness and safety and security.
But we're also leveraging models like Gemini and Llama and others to say, how do you use these things more effectively so that we can get the right solutions in classrooms safely?
[00:06:38] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. You know, I remember speaking to Satya a couple of years ago and how the idea of these tailor made models for the education use case for class appropriateness, for avoiding bias in responses.
It's such a powerful idea, and I think Merlin was because of your pedigree, having built AI tutors and all these things for so long. Really sort of seeing where things were gonna go. So the combination of using your own custom built models and then leveraging the frontier models, as you say, they move so quickly, they're constantly releasing new versions, and they're more and more powerful.
That's a really killer combination. So let's talk one more thing about this, which is the reception. So you were doing AI in classroom before it was cool. What did it look like talking to schools and districts and teachers about using ai? On an everyday basis in 2019 versus in 2023?
[00:07:29] Levi Belnap: Yeah, that's a great question.
It's been a fascinating journey. Early on, we basically, people didn't really want ai. They weren't looking for ai. In some ways, we almost had to like. Go away from talking about ai. We talked about like a digital classroom assistant. We talked about voice for the classroom. AI was a scary word in many ways, and so we were forced to position and market as like AI was behind the scenes.
I think what's interesting now is now everyone's talking about AI and it's so hyped and almost like overhyped to where nobody knows what AI means anymore. Right? But in some ways it's like brought us back to the same position ironically, which is. What do teachers actually need and how do we solve their problems?
Like it doesn't matter what we're building with or how our solution like is developed. What matters is, does it meet the needs of our school customers and teachers and students in classrooms? So we can get more to that and the philosophy that we use to build and guide the company. But it brings us back to that.
Let's worry more about them and less about us and our ai.
[00:08:33] Alex Sarlin: Listeners will know. I always compare this AI moment to the beginning of the internet and the first internet companies were like, we're an internet company. We're pets.com, it's dot com, it's on the internet. Isn't that so crazy? And then over time it became, well, the internet is not the interesting part.
What's interesting is what you're doing is what you're actually enabling is what people think of your solution. The internet is just the plumbing, right? And I think AI is becoming that more and more. You use AI to enable all of the functionality that you offer teachers, but that's. Necessarily the headline.
So the headline is, what can teachers do? Tell us about what it looks like for a teacher using Merlin Mind in the classroom. What are some success stories? What are some of your power users? What does it look like when they're zigzagging around talking into their Merlin mind? And this is happening in this corner, and that's happening in that corner.
I help our listeners get a sense of what a Merlin enabled classroom looks like.
[00:09:23] Levi Belnap: Great question, Alex. So if you walk into a classroom with Merlin, what will probably surprise you is that the teacher has this really unique, cool looking remote control in their hand. And they're talking to it, and they're talking to it while they're walking around the room, leading individual instruction, group instruction, project-based learning, while they're doing transitions, while they're starting the class, ending the class.
And all of this happens in a very kind of natural, free flowing way. Where teachers are using tech when it's helpful and useful, both their own tech, like their laptop and their interactive panel, as well as student devices like Chromebooks on their desks, and we can talk about that. But like day in the life of a user, Merlin's in the classroom, the teacher's in the classroom, students come in and the teacher says.
Start a timer for five minutes. Boom. A timer pops up on the screen without the teacher doing anything. Okay, class. For the first five minutes, we're gonna do this entry ticket. I want you to go to your Chromebooks, open it up, send this to the LMS, right? So you can say with Merlin, like, send this link to all the students'.
Chromebooks. Boom. Now they have it in the Google classroom. We can all open the entry ticket for today. The students focus on it. Timer goes off. Okay, class, it's time to go into the lesson. Search Google Drive for my photosynthesis presentation today. Boom. It pops right up. Go full screen. I can navigate the presentation with my remote.
There's an air mouse on it so I can point and click on anything on the screen, but I can also just use voice to say things like, oh, hey, we're learning about photosynthesis. Let's look up a video about that. Search YouTube for videos of photosynthesis. Boom, it pops up. Hey, go to one minute. In 30 seconds I can jump around timestamp.
So you have all this like very granular control over the actual tools and applications that are being used. But then you have really interesting uses of ai. It that we've built specifically for classrooms, right? So things like, let's have a discussion about photosynthesis and AI generates relevant questions to the grade level.
So like we can have an interesting topic now that's generated by ai, or we could say like, let's start a brainstorm board on this and pull up instantly like a collaborative space. We've launched a formative assessment tool and a social emotional tool that allows teachers to instantly pull up experiences on student devices.
So all of this now happens. Where a teacher basically doesn't have to think about it, they just say it. And so the end result is I'm present as a teacher. I'm paying attention to my students. They're paying attention to me. Behavioral issues, issues are going down. Transition time is basically eliminated in many ways, and you just have way more like engaged learning.
And so the responses we get from our teachers are, wow. I am so much more effective with Merlin because I. I don't have to turn my back of my class. I don't have to put my hands on my laptop. I don't have to like lose the flow in order to use a tool. I can just do it instantly.
[00:12:07] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, I bet they feel more like TED speakers where you, as you're talking, things just appear and it feels very smooth.
Let me ask a question. This feels like a very natural extension. I'm sure people use this for this all the time. You mentioned how the AI within Merlin can generate discussion questions. If a student asks a really unusual question, let's use your photosynthesis, and they're. Are there any plans in the world that don't use photosynthesis and the teacher goes, huh, maybe I would probably look that up.
Or maybe I'd have to sit and remember. They could probably just ask the AI to help answer that. Right. Is that part of the system as well?
[00:12:39] Levi Belnap: A hundred percent. So Merlin has its own classroom chatbot experience. That's for question and answer. It's built on top of our own models. For privacy, safety, security, making sure that these are appropriate models.
They're also customizable by the school district so they can decide like what they want to be answerable and what's not answerable in these classroom environments, what models it's using. And so anytime I ask like a who, what, where, how, question, we respond to that with an ai. Response that reads it verbally and also shows it visually and pulls in relevant images, so you'd get a response back about photosynthesis, and that's really exciting for rewarding student curiosity.
Teachers actually love, I mean, let's be honest, we still get pushback of like, it's ai. I'm not gonna use that thing. Especially teachers that have been there for a long time, like, I don't need that. What we find very often though, is they instantly start to realize, oh my gosh, setting a timer takes me a few minutes right now.
That's amazing. I could do that. So I'll talk to it to set a timer. Then they start using the air mouse and I wait. I can point and click and navigate the screen without going to back my app. That's incredible. I. And we had this happen just last week in a session where a teacher was saying like, I'm not gonna use this thing.
You can actually see it. I think it's on LinkedIn. The trainer profiled this, so it's actually a story out there in the wild on this. But this teacher was like, I'm not gonna use that. Like, just try. They tried. I'm like, oh my gosh. Came back an hour later and was like, you can't believe what just happened. I set a timer, started doing this.
I asked some questions. A student had a question about Rosa Parks. I wasn't ready for it. I asked the question. The response came back from the ai. The class was blown away. I'm gonna be using this thing every day now because it just makes it so much easier for me to manage my classroom, engage my students, respond to curiosity.
[00:14:22] Alex Sarlin: Totally. It's funny that when I hear you say this, one of the things we've been thinking about, we've been starting to think of different use cases for AI and education and this concept Lawrence Halt and and Jean Stafford Ard have this idea of team teaching with AI as one of the future modes of teaching might be your team teaching.
It's as if your AI is a assistant teacher in the classroom, live in real time. And we weren't actually sure if that was happening, but it sounds like that's exactly what's happening with Melin. That's how I would sort of dub that reaction you just said. It's. You almost have like an assistant setting up all your tech in real time, but also able to actually jump in and assist with answering questions or creating on the spot assessments.
It's a really interesting model.
[00:15:01] Levi Belnap: Yeah, for sure. I think that's a fascinating idea, and if we look at it almost in the, like the SAMR model or a hierarchical model. In many ways, the first things we attacked at Merlin were what you could call like really boring problems. They're not thrilling to talk about.
It's like, Hey, how do I control the browser tabs from the other side of the room? 'cause right now to go to another thing, I gotta walk back to my, how do I switch between applications? How do I access content that I use every day? How do I set a timer? It's like boring. You're substituting for something that was super simple.
Like show me something that redefines technology, redefines learning. And what we basically have found is at the end of the day, what teachers love using every day are those simple things that actually solve the problems they're facing. And then we've marched up kind of like the path of, okay, now that you don't have to go back to your laptop and you can control your stuff, what do you wanna do next?
Right. And what we found were some really interesting examples of teachers saying, okay, I love that I can control my laptop and the interactive panel and what we're doing together, but I have all these students on their devices that are often. Maybe distracted or not using those devices effectively. I wish that I could do a quick check for understanding, but that requires prep work.
I've gotta go build that out. I've gotta go access it. I get it to students. So one of the things that we launched this year was the ability for teachers now to not only control their own device and the flow of how they use their tools and their tech. But also now to instantly pull up engaging experiences on student devices.
So the first manifestation of that is I wanna do a quick check for understanding, let's pulse check the class. And so you say, let's start a pulse check activity. Merlin now pulls up instantly on all the student Chromebooks. A visual thermometer where I can drag like I'm red. I don't understand. I'm yellow.
I get it. I'm green. I really understand. Great. Now the teacher has instant feedback without having to create that ahead of time. Even think about it, they can pull it up. We do the same thing with a social emotional check to just check, is everyone ready for learning? Like what's the mood in the classroom?
That's where we're going in the future, is basically saying, okay, now that you can think at it and it can happen. That's one of the beauties of what large language models did is it can understand you. How can we make those things happen in really interesting ways in this complex physical space of classroom and devices and different learning experiences.
So we're really excited about what's possible now, and we've laid a pretty interesting foundation to do it. That's
[00:17:16] Alex Sarlin: really interesting to hear. It strikes me as I listen to you talk about the sort of modern classroom environment that I don't know if teachers would've defined having to change browsers or set timers or type in passwords or help that student get his password or her password as necessarily like problems, even though they obviously are, they're everyday problems.
They totally disrupt the flow of the classroom, as you mentioned, but it. In the last five, 10 years, especially, especially with Chromebooks, the classroom has become a very tech enabled environment and different teachers have different amounts of comfort with tech, but even teachers with a lot of comfort with tech are still, like you said, touching their laptop or having to go change a browser or go search in real time in front of a class.
These are problems, but they almost feel like pieces that naturally flow out of technology being integrated into the classroom and what you're doing with Merlin is saying. Yes, this takes up so much time and energy. There's all of this stuff. Let's integrate it into a voice assistant, integrate it into a remote, a little device that you have in your hand all the time.
And what interests me, I think maybe even the most about it is, as you said, what can you do next? Once you get all that time back, once you have the ability to pulse, check a class at any time or to check for understanding at any time or. To be able to chase down a tangent of curiosity of student says, what about this?
And you say, you know what? Let's talk about that for a few minutes. Let's put the lesson plan aside for 10 minutes and we can actually do it without causing a problem. That's just fascinating. It feels like it completely changed what classes feel like your teachers sort of coming back with that kind of response.
[00:18:50] Levi Belnap: Yeah, I think you get it Alex. One of the things we've had challenges with through the history of our company is how do you express to a school buyer. What they need to a teacher, what they need, and show the impact on student engagement and learning, et cetera. It's hard, right? Yeah. So one of the things early on we thought was like, okay, it's about time savings, right?
We're gonna save time. Turns out people don't really value time savings as much as you'd hope or think, right? At the end of the day, it's show us student test score improvements, show us student engagement. And those are hard things to tie to directly and to impact what we've learned and what the data has started to show us.
And what we kind of always believed was. Teachers are going to be the most impactful variable in the classroom. Everybody kind of knows this from the research, and so if you can allow a teacher to be more effective, you're likely gonna have really incredible impact on all the students in that room. We often get in the way of the most useful and effective thing in the classroom, which are incredible teachers that know how to.
Adapt, learning, individualize, personalize, go back and solve for a student's gaps in understanding. But turns out we're getting in the way, a lot of letting the teacher do what they're really, really good at. And so what we found is, and the teachers have kind of told us this, okay, now I can do what I came here to do.
Like I came to teaching because I want to help students. So much of my time teaching is lost in the, not just administrative back office work of grading and papers and communication, but in the actual logistics of running that class and trying to make sure that students are paying attention, that this student is being corrected for behavior that's not appropriate, and all that stuff ends up making it so that.
That moment of time could have been used to personalize learning to one student who needed something in that moment in order to grasp a concept that was foundational to everything going forward. But because the other things that were taking up that space and time meant that didn't happen, that student just falls further behind.
And so we're actually finding. That what teachers are telling us is my behavioral management issues are going down, my student engagement is going up. My progress in making through the requirements is going faster. And so we don't think this is a silver bullet, like we know that this is just a helpful tool to teachers.
But what it is, it's unlocking the true silver bullet. That's probably a bad metaphor, but like the most effective thing that we actually have in a classroom, which is incredible teachers that can do incredible things for students, now they can do more of it. The secret sauce is not us, it's teachers, and we're just allowing them to get back into what they do best.
[00:21:28] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. There's this sort of. Narrative sometimes in the AI and ed tech and education space, and I've been on the receiving end of it many times from lots of different comers. I've had people unsubscribe to the Ed Tech Insiders newsletter because they're like. You talk so much about ai.
AI is just gonna take teaching jobs. It's just gonna make teaching even worse than it already is. Like I've literally had comments like that. There's this feeling of AI as the enemy of teachers. Even though obviously when we talk to ed tech entrepreneurs, that's not how they feel at all. But I can understand it sometimes the feeling is AI is yet another technology to deal with yet another.
Device, yet another set of tools, but another set of protocols or trainings. And what strikes me as so interesting about what you're doing with Merlin is it's so far on the other side of that, it's literally AI to get everything else out of your way, to empower you, to allow you to teach more, to teach more directly, to build a relationship with your students, more to follow curiosity, to be able to pulse, check how people are feeling in the classroom.
It's. It is so far on the other side that I think it's a false narrative, but that narrative of AI is actually makes teachers' lives harder, and I bet you get that a lot when you talk to districts or you talk to educators or principals. I can imagine seeing that sort of change where they're like, oh, we get pitched AI things a lot and we just don't want to burden our teachers.
And you say, well actually this is something teachers love. What does that look like?
[00:22:49] Levi Belnap: Yeah, that's dynamic. It's changed a lot over the last two years and we talked about this a little bit, but it, like right now, what it looks like is. Teachers are realizing that AI can be a tool in search of a problem, like they've experienced it themselves, right?
Okay. Not all AI is actually helping me. That doesn't mean it's there to steal my job, but they're recognizing, okay, I still have to like do a lot of work myself. I can't just hand it off to whatever tool and suddenly my lessons are created, my lessons are graded. My, there's still work to do. Yeah, so I think what they found with Merlin is the work that they spend most of the time doing in the classroom is work that most AI isn't really touching very effectively.
So a lot of the tools have been more useful outside in preparation for class or assessment after class. But there's a lot of time spent with students in classrooms and it's really hard time. Like it's not easy for a teacher in a classroom to. Keep everybody's attention to focused lessons to make sure everybody's making progress.
And so when they realize that Merlin isn't ai, like they now think of AI as a chat bot, that can create a lesson, right? I think what they're seeing is, oh wait. This is a tool that allows me to be present with my students to use tech and to adapt and change quickly without a lot of lost time and frustration where I gotta go deal with tech.
They don't even think about it as ai, like let's just be honest. We don't care about it. Like whether it's AI or not, it doesn't matter. There's a ton of AI in Merlin that makes it work, but at the end of the day, it's we are helping teachers make progress they're struggling to make today, and they're helping students make progress they're struggling to make today.
That's what's so amazing about it. That's why they're so excited about it, and that's why they're coming back saying. Oh my gosh, like I can't live without this now because it's critical to how I teach.
[00:24:39] Alex Sarlin: It probably becomes incorporated into their daily routines. Being able to just say, set a timer, open this window for all my Chromebooks.
You take that away and it's like, oh no. What am I gonna do now? Now I have to ask every student to do it, and I have to set the timer on my own. It makes a lot of sense. And yeah, I mean, I totally agree. The narrative around AI is such a tricky thing to follow. You know, everybody feels differently about it, but I love the way you're putting it of like.
The AI is really behind the scenes. What it feels like and what it actually accomplishes for teachers is making technology work better, more smoothly, and getting outta their way and allowing them to teach and be more directly connected to their classrooms and connected to their lesson plans and connected to their the outcomes, and not feel like every time they turn.
Left or right, they have to type something or change a browser tab or something like that, which I'm sure teaching has felt like for quite a while. One thing you just recently introduced that I think I'd love to talk about, 'cause it seems so relevant because you're voice-based, you just introduced Spanish support, Spanish speaking educators, Spanish speaking students.
I can imagine why you would do that given the US classroom makeup. Tell us about what that's looking like and how you decided to do that as a strategist and what it's gonna mean for Merlin.
[00:25:46] Levi Belnap: Yeah, it's, it was a really exciting evolution for us. We always knew that our voice assistant should work in any language of instruction, but it's hard to get it done in one language, harder to get it done in a second and third and fourth, et cetera.
But Spanish ended up being very important to lots of our school customers in the United States and in other places. But sure, with all the second language learners in the United States, we had. Spanish instruction happening in certain close schools, immersion classrooms and whole schools that were doing Spanish instruction, and then classrooms where you had Spanish speaking native teachers, and for lots of reasons, having Merlin be able to speak Spanish so the teacher can talk to Merlin in Spanish, Merlin can talk back in Spanish, just created a equity of how this technology can impact classrooms.
That was really important, but I'll tell you where we went with it. In addition that I'm like, I'm actually really excited about. Was we saw an opportunity to go beyond just interacting in Spanish and we saw the ability to suddenly have instruction that students can like reference in their native language on their device.
So one of the things I mentioned before was like control of student devices. So one of the things you can do now with Merlin is you can say. You go into instruction mode, you hold the button on the remote, and then I can say, students, take out your Chromebooks. Open today's lesson, read the first page, and then write a summary and prepare.
Be prepared to speak about it in class, whatever the instruction is for the next period of time where I want students working individually in a group effectively. That instruction often gets lost in translation. Not every student understands it. Not everybody listen. They, so the teacher might spend a lot of time now kind of like giving that instruction again, making sure everybody's in, like by the time we're done, half the students didn't actually use the time effectively 'cause they didn't understand the instructions, et cetera.
Well, now that instruction shows up on every student's Chromebook. Translated into right now Spanish, but we're adding every other language because we've heard from schools saying, oh my gosh, can you also do it in Czech and Russian and Chinese and Arabic? And the list is very long because you'll have a classroom of learners where one or two students speak languages that are very different than Spanish.
They're having the ability to also personalize to that student to at least have instruction present on their device, in their language, without the teacher having to go through a lot of process to do that or having a, a translator in the room. Just creates a much more equitable, effective learning environment.
And so we're really excited about multi-language capabilities with voice because it feels like a, we always wish we could have done that, and now technology's making it possible.
[00:28:17] Alex Sarlin: So one thing that I think is so interesting about what you're doing in terms of controlling Chromebooks and being able to pop instruction or pop engaging experiences up on people's Chromebooks or all of that kind of thing, is that it allows the Chromebook to be the center of students.
Technological experience, and we're in a moment right now where there's a huge pushback in schools against cell phone distraction, and people are, feel like kids are, I just read a statistic, it's like 72% of high school teachers think that their kids are so distracted by their cell phone. They're like having, it's a major problem in the classroom.
Like it's like. Everywhere now. So what's interesting about this, the ability for, you know, every student has a Chromebook in the class and the teacher has control over both the entire student body and every individual student. Feels like it can create a very different dynamic in terms of the technology and distraction in the classroom.
I'm curious how you think about that.
[00:29:09] Levi Belnap: Yeah, so we think about distraction a lot. First, actually, one, if you would've visited us at like the recent booths at FETC or TCEA. The kind of big statement we made was attention is everything. And that came from like the experience we've had over the last few years where we realized what we're doing is allowing teachers and students to pay attention, to use classroom time effectively.
To get there, you've gotta remove distractions. What we realized was a lot of those distractions are kind of a necessary trade off with having technology in the room. Again, this isn't even about cell phones in your pocket. This is about like, if I'm going to use great web applications and content and experiences that are digital, then I have to go to my laptop.
I've gotta interact with it. I've gotta get it onto student devices. I. And all of those moments create distraction and they mean people are not paying attention, and you kind of like lose the effectiveness of flow of learning. Well then you're bringing up cell phones. That's a whole like nother monster that's creating all kinds of attention problems.
I think we could go on a philosophical rant here about the broader problem with our species and our lack of attention. Now, we're so distracted all the time, but if you come back to a classroom, you realize this is incredibly precious time. We've created as a species, which is like you get to go sit as a developing human with another, more developed human that's gonna guide you through experiences and conversations and discussions and kind of like wrangle with philosophy and like ethics and everything.
And as a result, you're gonna be more prepared to navigate this world. Well, if I don't use that precious time I was given very effectively. It's a huge lost opportunity that every student kind of like is. Blessed with is given. So we look at that as like, this is sacred time. Like that classroom time should be effective for everyone.
As you look at cell phones, all this stuff, we actually think that the future looks something pretty incredible. If you have control over that room and the devices, and now you can start to say, okay, pause. We're not gonna be distracted. So devices aren't useful right now. Turn 'em all off. Focus on me. Okay, let's go back to devices, but you're only gonna be on this.
Application or this tool and you're only there for five minutes. Exactly. You just start to have a much more intentional use of technology. 'cause I mean, you know this as well as anyone, one of the answers could be, okay, so much distractions, let's just get the tech outta the room. That's a very common answer.
Yeah, you could go to that. Right? But I got three little kids. I see them using tech all the time, like they're gonna live in a world where tech is very important and interacting with technology is part of how you get work done, no matter what industry you work in. So to prepare them for that future world to navigate it, I think we have to have tech in their hands, but if we can make it super useful, we're gonna make that time more effective.
So this is like the, we see this beautiful future of classrooms that are very tech forward, but super easy to control so that attention and focus and presence is kind of like the outcome. It's music to my
[00:32:01] Alex Sarlin: ears. 'cause I've wrestled with this a lot. You know, seeing, I think it's like dozens of states now are, are putting in anti cell phone legislation.
As an ed tech person, I'm always torn, I'm like forcing students to get rid of their phones, which are their connections to the world. The devices they could look anything up on officially seems a little. See, I don't know. It's anti-tech obviously, sort of by definition, yet. Of course, I understand. I haven't been teaching in a classroom in a while, but I can only imagine the dynamic in a classroom, including college classrooms when students have access to devices that are, all their social media is on there, all their games are on there.
All their AI now is on their. The competition for attention is fierce. So I love the Hegelian synthesis you're talking about here, where it's like, oh, what if the technology was in the classroom but the teacher had control over it and could literally say, shut down everybody's Chromebooks, da da, da. Every screen goes off and you say, let's talk about this, and they go turn 'em on and let's everybody do this.
That is something, it feels orchestrated and it feels like a really beautiful use of technology that allows them to. Connected without being totally distracted. I just, I love that vision. It sounds really exciting. So, quick logistical question. Obviously this is a technology that's very, very useful and, and beloved by educators.
When you're going into a school district, do you have like a bottoms up approach ever? Can you ever allow a teacher to use a Merlin, like to buy a Merlin remote on their own and use it in their classroom and then try to convince the school that everybody should have one? Or do, is it always top down and then related question, are you in higher ed?
[00:33:29] Levi Belnap: So good questions all around. Let's just start higher ed. Let, yes, we're in higher ed as well, so we can just lay that and we can talk about that more if you're interested. But like we definitely focused on K 12 primarily for a very specific reason, which is the orchestration of classroom learning, student devices, small group, individual, whole class.
It's pretty consistent across all K 12 classrooms and all subjects in higher ed. You end up with like sometimes very different things happening in different types of like lecture halls, et cetera. And so like we're very focused on that idea of I'm in class, I've got 30 plus students, I've got 30 plus devices, I'm gonna use a bunch of different applications.
I got a flow from whole class individual, small group, back and forth, all the transitions and. So that's what Merlin is like built for. That happens a lot in higher ed too, but it happens everywhere in K 12. Right. So then your first question, this has been a interesting and hard way to navigate. How do you sell to education effectively and in a way that allows cutting edge technology like AI to be properly evaluated and to comply with the state and federal laws around student data privacy, or Kapa, ferpa, et cetera.
We've done a lot of work to build AI solutions for classrooms that allow schools to comply with ferpa, that are compliant with coppa, that are compliant with state level student data privacy agreements, and we, and we agree to those and sign schools paper on those. Well, all of that means I. If you go bottoms up where an individual teacher brings it in, you're kind of bypassing the process that schools have put in place to make sure tools are safe.
And so from the beginning, we had a, this needs to come in through the front door, not the back door. We want the school to understand that it's built for them, that it's safe, that it's private, that it's useful, and that they're allowing their teachers to use it. We also philosophically. Don't really want teachers paying outta their own pockets for tools.
That feels kind of like wrong, but for all these reasons, we were very much like we're a top down solution for schools. That is built for schools. It's safe, it's secure, it's effective, and we believe that it's, it should be viewed almost as like a. Utility. It's a tool that should be in every classroom. And so we want schools to provide it that way to teachers.
That said, we do get teachers coming to us individually all the time, and they will eventually like go buy it, but they still need to get permission from their school and then they can buy it and hopefully the school's buying it for them and they're not having to buy it themselves. But, uh, we work with great channel partners who sell technology to schools, so.
Whoever schools buy their tech from, they can usually go there and, and Merlin is accessible through those partners.
[00:35:59] Alex Sarlin: Top down makes a lot of sense given all of the compliance that goes with a device like this. But you do have individual teachers hearing about it from other teachers or realizing the value of it and going and, and adopting it.
And when they do, they still have to go through a approval process to make sure privacy is protected and everything like that. That makes a lot of sense. It's a really interesting model, and I feel like we've talked on this show a lot about how the sort of next iteration of AI in classrooms will be ones that actually, you know, build relationships.
They feel like they can even help students interact with each other. It'll be much more about. AI facilitating connections between humans than it just being AI and a human together separated from all other people, and it feels like that's core to your mission. It's really exciting to hear it. So we end every episode with two questions.
The first is, what is the most exciting trend that you see in the EdTech landscape right now, specifically from your perspective as the former CSO of Merlin mind that you think our listeners should keep an eye on? Where is this all going?
[00:36:59] Levi Belnap: Yeah. It kind of goes back to what you were just talking about, Alex.
I think what's most exciting to me now and to our company, what we're seeing is almost this realization broadly across the market that AI is gonna be most useful when it's embedded in solutions that are solving real problems. We're kind of moving past a little bit of the hype of like, I'm gonna use AI for AI's sake, and we're starting to get a little more aware as an industry, both education buyers and teacher users and and the developers that.
Just throwing an AI chat bot at somebody is not necessarily the solution to the core education problems. Like how do we bring the capabilities of large language models and AI agents and automation and voice control and now bring them into tools that are solving age old problems around how do I better personalize, how do I adapt to the needs of every student?
How do I create effective learning time in classroom? How do I make sure I'm communicating effectively to all students of different needs and multi-language, et cetera? So I'd say the, the thing I would. Hope people are looking at and are excited about is kind of let's go to the next level of the internet.
To your point, like it's not just about being an internet company anymore. How do we create those internet companies, the AI solutions that are truly solving the hardest problems in education?
[00:38:15] Alex Sarlin: Including behavior, right. Including effective use of time in the classroom. I mean, you've said a lot of things here that are literally the age old, the things that were true of education for hundreds if not thousands of years, and they're still teachers still wrestle 'em every day.
Even though technology is now, I. Laid on top of them, there's still a how do I make sure everybody's paying attention and is engaged and cares and is actually getting the instructions that I gave them. Like you said, is actually making sense of the instructions that I just said in the front of the classroom.
This was as true in, you know, 1805 as it is today, and you're actually really making. Significant headway in it. And then our very last question is, you know, what is a resource that you would recommend? There's so much to read, there's so much to look at in, in AI and in ed tech. I'm always curious what people look at.
So whether that's a book, or a newsletter, or a blog, a Twitter feed, a report, anything. What would you recommend somebody look at if they wanna understand more about, you know, any of what we talked about today?
[00:39:08] Levi Belnap: Yeah, I'm gonna point to something that's outside of AI and education. It's a way of seeing the world that guides how I make decisions, how we make decisions at Merlin mind.
So it's popularized in a book and in a theory called Jobs to Be Done is the theory. You may have been be familiar with this, but I have a milkshake on my wall here. Not everybody would know I have a milkshake feature on my wall.
[00:39:31] Alex Sarlin: Yep.
[00:39:32] Levi Belnap: There was a professor at Harvard Business School named Clayton Christensen, who popularized this idea of jobs to be done.
He also wrote a book in education called Disrupting Class and others, uh, Michael Horn is one of his coates and but this idea of, I'll oversimplify, but there's good, the one book is called Competing Against Luck, but basically like. If you wanna know what problems we should be solving in education as a company, as a teacher, there's this really interesting way to think about problems, which is, let's look at what progress somebody is struggling to make today.
So like, let's just pause and say, forget about ai. Forget about all the noise with ed tech, and let's just go sit in a classroom. And this is what we did. I did this six years ago. When I joined the company. I sat in classrooms and watched teachers pre covid. And saw how much struggle people were having with a device, a laptop card, an interactive panel, a hundred different tabs on their browser, and it was really overwhelming.
And teachers were saying, don't gimme another app, don't gimme another tool. Just help me use the stuff I have better Well in jobs to be done thinking what that meant was can we just help them make that progress? So I would say like. There's a really interesting opportunity now to study. How do you better define the problem that needs to be solved?
Because now AI can solve problems in really interesting ways, but the most like useful skill potentially that we need to have as humans is how do we ask the right question? And the right question may be, what is somebody really trying to do? What are they struggling to do, and how can I help them? Rather than just trying to throw AI or some other tool at them.
So I spent a lot of time thinking about. Are we asking the right question? What is the problem we're actually trying to solve and how do we help people? And I, I use the jobs to be done kind of thinking as one of the ways that I approach that.
[00:41:19] Alex Sarlin: So we will put links to competing against Luck and some of the resources around the jobs to be done.
Theory. I also love the jobs to be Done theory as a product manager. The milkshake example is absolutely classic about, you know, why do people buy milkshakes, to have something slow to indulge in while they commute to work. And so it actually should be thicker. That was the original thing. Thicker because it takes even longer to eat.
'cause that's actually what people want. They wanna take a long time to drink the milkshake. That's what they're buying. They're not buying sweetness, they're buying a long time indulgence to make the commute feel better. The other example I always hear, I love the PST one, is like nobody wants a, you know, three eight inch drill bit.
They want a three eighth inch hole.
[00:42:00] Levi Belnap: There's another good one. So one of the co-founders of Jobs to be done with Clayton Christiansen was a guy Bob, me. He helped write a lot these books. He's part of this thing. But he's been a consultant. He's done all kinds of different stuff. Well, at one time he consulted for like the, is it Mars that owns the Milky Way and the Snickers candy bars?
Yeah. So at one point it was like Milky Way was dominating candy bars and Snickers was like about to die. This was decades ago. And Bob consulted with these guys and what they learned was he went and sat in an airport. He watched why people bought Milky Way, why bought a Snickers, and then he walked up to people and bought a Snickers.
And he's like, Hey, why'd you buy that over the Milky Way? And they said, oh well. The Milky Way is really sweet. It's like a chocolate caramel dessert. Like I love it, but right now I don't have time to get lunch. And so I'm grabbing the Snickers because like it's more filling. And so they dug into that and they realized like, oh wait, Snickers isn't a candy bar.
Snickers is like a substitute for a meal. And so then they made it thicker, they put more nuts in it, and then they went with this whole like hungry, grab a Snickers campaign, right? And it brought Snickers back to life. So the idea was. The job to be done was not, I want a candy, it was, I need a substitute for a meal.
And turns out that the Snickers candy bar was kind of like a substitute for a meal. So it's really like when you start to think about like jobs to be done and solving problems. Think about like when we are in classrooms, we're looking at teachers and we're like, oh, I. Going back to the laptop all the time.
That job to be done is like, I need a quiz to help my students, so I gotta go back there. But the real job was like, I just need a quiz to help my students. I don't need to walk back and touch that computer. Like if we can eliminate that, like thinking about how do we solve these problems, you end up with like really interesting progress.
I dunno, the candy bar thing is just fun.
[00:43:39] Alex Sarlin: I love that example. I've never heard that one yet. So Emine Mars, that's so interesting. Some people talk about the sort of social, emotional and functional jobs to be done. Yeah. Just they dive deep into it. Now, I've heard you say a few things in this interview that relate to that too.
The idea of teachers want to stay connected to their students, they wanna stay in the flow, right? That's what they really want. They wanna be teaching and not feeling like they're being the IT person. Wrestling with a computer, that's an emotional feeling. The social is staying connected, and then there's the functional, like, I just want this timer to start, and all of them are baked in.
[00:44:08] Levi Belnap: Yeah, that's a really interesting, we should geek out on jobs some other time, Alex, like, let's just bring it back to like AI in classrooms, Merlin. There's some really interesting and challenging jobs to be done that teachers have, like when they're in a classroom. So the functional one is what we spent most of the time talking about, right?
Like, I've gotta open my lesson, I've gotta use this tool, et cetera. But socially, like I don't wanna look stupid in front of my students a hundred percent. That's like a very real social job to be done emotional. Like I want to feel like I'm a good teacher. I want to feel like I'm in charge. I want to feel like all those things are part of this.
And so when you bring a new tool in like Merlin. Not only do you have to convince the teacher that like we are solving a functional job that's making your life so much better. You should hire us. You should pull Merlin into your life to make your classroom better. We also have to show them, it's going to allow you to socially interact with that classroom in the way you want to, that you're gonna emotionally still feel good about yourself and your role as a teacher.
And those are hard things to combat, right? And that's one of the reasons people kind of gravitate back to like, I'm gonna do it the way I know how to do it because. That's not challenging the way I feel, the way I interact with the classroom, the way my students view me, it's hard stuff to get teachers to adopt new tools.
'cause you gotta solve all of those problems. Right.
[00:45:22] Alex Sarlin: And the example you gave about the teacher with a Rosa Parks question, right? Somebody asked, threw me a Rosa Parks question that I wasn't prepared for and I was able to just roll with it and not look embarrassed, not look confused, not wrestle with technology in front of a room of.
20 giggling seventh graders like couldn't agree more. Really fascinating. I'd love to follow up on some of this stuff. Yeah, so this is Levi Bell, Knapp, CEO of Merlin Mind. He's been with the company since 2019. Was a Chief Strategy Officer, then chief Revenue Officer. Now chief Executive Officer. This has been a great conversation.
Thank you for being here with me on at. Insiders. Thanks Alice. Thanks for listening to this episode of EdTech Insiders. If you like the podcast, remember to rate it and share it with others in the EdTech community. For those who want even more, EdTech Insider, subscribe to the Free EdTech Insiders Newsletter on substack.
