Edtech Insiders
Edtech Insiders
Week in Edtech 5/14/25: AI Lawsuits in Classrooms, Utah’s EdTech Surge, Youth Unemployment Rises, Google’s Gemini Targets Students, Corporate AI Layoffs Accelerate, Personalized Tutoring at Scale, and More! Feat. Sam Chaudhary of ClassDojo
Join hosts Alex Sarlin and Ben Kornell as they explore the latest developments in education technology, from AI in classrooms to workforce shifts and EdTech innovation across the globe.
✨ Episode Highlights:
[00:03:16] Ezra Klein podcast brings AI and education to mainstream conversation
[00:07:20] Alex and Ben compare and critique GPT-4, Claude, Gemini, and other AI tools
[00:09:28] Utah emerges as a leading hub for EdTech startups and innovation
[00:12:21] New AI bundles help educators explore tools like Superhuman and Perplexity
[00:13:19] Surge in media coverage on cheating, lawsuits, and educator use of AI
[00:16:17] Lawsuit filed against professor for using AI-generated content in class
[00:18:00] Concerns grow about students using AI tools to bypass cognitive learning
[00:23:10] Direct-to-student AI sparks debate about academic integrity and design
[00:25:20] Google plans to roll out Gemini to students under 13
[00:29:41] AI enables hands-on science learning like virtual frog dissections
[00:33:43] AI compared to electricity as foundational infrastructure for the future
[00:36:09] Rising youth unemployment signals early impact of AI-driven disruption
[00:38:57] Major firms lay off workers while shifting strategy toward AI adoption
[00:40:34] EdTech must define and prepare students for new AI-native job roles
Plus, special guest:
[00:41:22] Sam Chaudhary, Co-founder & CEO of ClassDojo on tutoring, gamified learning, and community building
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[00:00:00] Alex Sarlin: I think people are starting to get the message. As you say that AI actually really might be the thing that truly actually changes education, which is such a hard thing to change, and that competing narrative that's sort of high level and then low level on the ground. I think it behooves all of us at EdTech to really think about how to keep the conversation higher level, because all of this integrity, all of this nonsense about.
People getting in trouble for ai, it seems so dumb to me. It's like it's just the dumbest conversation, but it's starting to get louder at the same time as the higher level one is.
Welcome to EdTech Insiders, the top podcast covering the education technology industry from funding rounds to impact to AI developments across early childhood K 12 higher ed and work. You'll find it all here at EdTech Insiders.
[00:00:55] Ben Kornell: Remember to subscribe to the pod, check out our newsletter, and also 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.
Hello everybody. It is another week in EdTech. Here with my co-host, co-founder of EdTech Insiders, Alex Arlin. I'm Ben Cornell, and we are so excited to cover everything going on in the EdTech space this week and beyond. Alex, how are you doing these days? Lots going on in the
[00:01:36] Alex Sarlin: pod. Lots going on in the pod, lots going on.
We're planning a bunch of really, really cool webinars coming up. One is at the end of this month about co-design with our friends at a lean lab and PlayLab and UX and EdTech. We have one coming up next month all about accessibility for AI and education. I'm really excited about that one and we're just putting all the pieces together.
There's so much cool stuff going on in this space. It just feels like the world is coming to us. Don't you think, Ben? I mean there's a
[00:02:03] Ben Kornell: way in which like the things we've been talking about for the last four years are finally starting to pierce the veil of public. Consciousness. Oh, it turns out like school is not optimized for children's learning.
Oh, it turns out stackable credentials could be great. Turns out AI could do a lot of things to supplement and augment teachers, like, okay, hello everybody. Like, listen to the bot. Exactly. Actually, before we dive in, I think it's just worth noting that we had an incredible turnout at the happy hour this past week in San Francisco, Salesforce Park.
There's a way in which, yes, it's piercing the veil of public consciousness, but it's also a movement on the ground where there's so much excitement about EdTech, and it's in contrast to, I think, the economic headwinds that everybody's talking about. So it's just, I'm like so in awe, so impressed by our community.
So if you weren't able to make it, we're planning to have our next Bay Area, EdTech happy hour in June, and then potentially another one in September for kickoff. And we're still working out our Isti plans, but we also have had some great happy hours there. So make sure you mark your calendars. Who's coming up on the pod, Alex?
[00:03:21] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, there's some really fun conversations coming in the next few weeks. We talked to Margaret Honey, who is the head of the Scratch Foundation and as well as the legendary leader of the New York Hall of Science at a longtime education and ed tech leader about everything happening in the sort of coding world.
We talked to Juan Zla from New Markets Venture Partners, which is obviously always doing incredibly interesting things from K 12 two Workforce. We've talked to the CEO of Jotted, which is a very hot ed tech company right now. And you know, just last week we put out a bunch of interviews with some really cool ed tech startups, brain Freeze, which is sort of burst into the space as a teacher suite from a privacy perspective.
We talked to Panopto, which is installing all of this AI into its video creation software and, and a guy named Brian Malkin, who is a Chicago entrepreneur who basically put together a rewards platform for schools called Rang. So it's just like. Every moment something is happening. We're constantly getting news about new reports coming out, new startups, starting new funding rounds.
So we're trying to keep on top of all of it and make it all accessible. But man, it is just like a torrent. It's like when it rains, it pours. We talked to Jerome Passi from Sizzle ai, which has been a really interesting hot ed tech AI startup for a while. That's coming in a few weeks, so stay tuned. I mean, all I could say is like, hold on.
I know there's a lot of content coming out. Sometimes it's maybe a few too many episodes we've heard from people. It's just like, there's a lot, but pick and choose the things you wanna listen to because there's so much happening and it's fun to try to stay on top of this crazy amount. We also talked to Mike Gates last week.
That was a really fun conversation. It's just a nonstop, uh, we're doing another like whole bunch of interviews in a couple of weeks that's gonna be really exciting, including with Merit America with Up Limit, all sorts of really, really cool things.
[00:05:04] Ben Kornell: Yeah, it is one of those two where I feel like our guests are coming from so many different angles, whether it's K 12, higher ed, for profit, nonprofit, but one of the themes that we're hearing about is accelerating velocity in terms of product velocity, in terms of change in the space.
And so one of the things I've been doing is actually running some of our podcasts through ai. And asking it for, what are the trends and themes that you're hearing? I'm curious what you would guess. Those aren't, by the way, what's your favorite AI that you're using these days? Are you still a Claude Believer or where are you at?
[00:05:44] Alex Sarlin: My sort of go-to is a combination of Claude Pro and Chachi bt. Pro. I think chat g PT has gotten a lot better recently. They increased their memory in a way that is really interesting. I don't know if people who haven't used chat GPT recently, it remembers you and your former conversations a lot better than it used to, which means that you can actually sort of build on yourself in a much more cohesive way.
And I really like their voice mode as well. So it's a great one to go with. Anthropic just keeps launching amazing things. They have their learning mode, they have integration with Google Draw so you can upload things really easily even through your email. And they just launched search just this week, which is also incredibly powerful.
So you just like you feel the competition. I still use Gemini and I still use Notebook for the kind of thing you're talking about, Ben, when you need to put a big amount of context. But Philanthropic learning mode has some of that too. So I have a browser, I use all of the different tools. Yeah, love suno for music.
It's just so much fun making songs for my kids all the time.
[00:06:40] Ben Kornell: Are you on the GPT Pro like 200 level? Is that what you're on?
[00:06:44] Alex Sarlin: No, I'm still on the GPT Pro, I think 20 a month level. I have hit the limits a few times and they've sort of encouraged me to upgrade, but so far I haven't found enough use because when I hit the limit I can just shift over to Gemini or shift over to Claude or do some other things.
So, so far it's been a little bit of a, you know, like a juggling act. What's also fun is you can literally pass things from one to the other. I've had GPT make outlines of things, which I then pass to Claude to actually write, which is can be really useful. 'cause Claude is a really excellent actual draftsman.
I don't know. Yeah, it's a learning curve for everybody where everybody's trying to put the pieces together.
[00:07:18] Ben Kornell: So I splurge on the GPT research just to try it out. Yeah, it is really good. Now what I will say is I've gone through the details and sometimes it's inaccurate, which also it's like having a intern who you've gotta check their work.
But in terms of really doing deep research and finding stuff, it's been great. So I ran all of our, and by the way, my usage pattern is through work. I get clawed, and so I'm doing a lot of practical stuff like reviewing contracts and creating company communications or reviewing those company communications and just very general stuff where I either need to get to the heart of the matter quickly or I just need some help drafting stuff.
Kind of like you said for GPP, I'm using the deep research where it's like, okay, I've got a big question. That's amazing. Okay, what does the math market look like over the next 12 years? Or how have funding trends changed for parents and so on? Give it the bellwether report and say, okay, give it these trends.
What should our strategy be? All that is really, really deep and interesting stuff. And then the Gemini, it's just so convenient. It's like right there with you. In your Google Docs and everything, it's like, oh, create an agenda. Oh, create a summary. Oh yeah.
[00:08:40] Alex Sarlin: I use it to summarize Google Docs like almost every day.
[00:08:43] Ben Kornell: Yeah. But I will say one thing that really shocked me when I ran the podcast through, so I also had like a database from A-S-U-G-S-V, and I combine that with our podcast. One of the really funny insights that came out interesting was that Utah is becoming. A hotbed of EdTech innovation. I would not have put those pieces together.
I mean, obviously there's a bunch of stuff that came in the bullets that I'm like, oh, okay. I get all these trends we talk about all the time. But it started connecting the dots to say, if you were gonna start an EdTech company today and you wanted to raise money, money, the most successful place to start it is in Utah.
[00:09:28] Alex Sarlin: Yeah.
[00:09:28] Ben Kornell: Now, causation, correlation, we can debate all that stuff, but there is like a huge Utah contingent of companies. I think in part it's the canvas diaspora. In part, it's like the affordability and cost of living is great. In part, there's a like a lot of mission-driven founders who go there. I am like, it opened up an insight that hadn't even thought of and so then I'm like going through the list and I'm like, wow, GP T's really, right.
[00:09:58] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. I wouldn't have put that together, but as soon as you say it, it makes a lot of sense. I mean, we saw at A-S-U-G-S-V, there's a statewide AI K 12 sort of czar in Utah, basically leaning really into it. You also plural sites out of Salt Lake City and Utah. There's been a Mastery Collective, I believe was there's a lot of ed tech companies that have come outta Utah.
I think one thing that is also part of it is the Mormon influence. I think there's been incredibly, I mean Christensen, one of the original disruptors is, you know, latter Day Saints. Advocate. And I think that there's actually a really interesting correlation between the Mormonism in Utah. There's a lot of global thinking, there's a lot of future orientation and there's a lot of sort of, I don't mean this in a bad way, but like mission orientation, like desire to improve the world.
And we've seen a ton of impact companies out of Utah and a ton of EdTech. So I don't know, it's weird. I wouldn't have put that together, but I'm also not surprised. And school AI, I believe is based there. Really cool stuff. I'd love to see that report. Maybe we could put something out about it, about the Utah effect then in the newsletter.
[00:11:02] Ben Kornell: Yeah, so I mean, as we dive into the news, I think it is just helpful for everyone to kind of connect the dots that the high level trends that we've been talking about, the big shifts. They're also coupled with a groundswell of just practical use cases that people are finding for ai. And in some ways it's the micro that is most compelling rather than the macro.
And I really do. Everybody I talk to now, I'm like, what do you use AI for? Which tool are you using? And people are super excited to share.
[00:11:35] Alex Sarlin: Oh yeah, if anybody, this may be over, but I, I also signed up for the, Lenny KY has this incredible bundle right now where you basically, if you subscribe to the newsletter, which is a hundred something dollars a year, you get a year of superhuman and perplexity and build io and Lovable Bolt.
Some really amazing tools cursor that it might be a little too late for that. I think some of them are sold out. But that's been also a really cool way to get your hands on. I think there's gonna be more of this kind of bundling idea where, because there's so many AI startups and they all wanna be noticed, I think they're starting to find distribution channels and ways to get out there and get people to try them.
So I would encourage everybody listening to look for these sort of AI bundles that are gonna start popping up everywhere. And it's a great way to get your hands dirty on a whole suite of different tools. Wonderful.
[00:12:21] Ben Kornell: Well, let's dive in. I mean, I think speaking of tools, I think there's a lot of AI headlines this week from basically every company.
What actually struck me as the most interesting is some of the like non-corporate AI headlines. The big one for me was Ezra Klein's latest New York Times podcast where he basically covers how AI could intersect with education, and it's this mainstreaming of AI thinking around disrupting education. And then I also was really interested in the Figma release.
Yeah. Where they're offering new AI powered tools for creating sites, app prototypes, and marketing assets. There's a way in which these tools are going to really get into classrooms, get into students' hands, and ultimately unlock things like entrepreneurial websites and the startup ecosystem. What caught your attention?
[00:13:19] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, it's interesting 'cause I noticed a related trend to what you, especially what you're saying about the Ezra Klein, the Times has always been, it's an air times. They're always looking for these sort of major trends, these trying to figure out where things are going. And there's been a whole series of really interesting sort of, at least in our world, feels like a blockbustery articles over the last few weeks about AI and education coming from the New York Times.
There was one from New York Magazine called Everyone is Cheating Their Way Through College GBT. Very interesting. But there was one this week that really caught my eye. It was so interesting. It was about a student in Northeastern who discovered a Chad GPT instruction inside one of her notes. So basically she found out that her professor was using GPT to generate content and actually sued.
School saying that they're paying for human teaching and they're paying for top level teaching and that they basically, he, she asked for $8,000, I think so like a quarter of the semester's cost, basically saying you are using these tools. And there's been a few different articles from the Times talking about how students are using ai, how professors are using ai.
There was a whole big one about how professors were not allowing students to use ai, but they were using it themselves. And it feels like there's this narrative forming now. On one side, there's this Ezra Klein higher level, what's the purpose of education? What are we actually trying to do here? How might AI sort of help save the education system or transform it?
And then there's this other one, which is this sort of on the ground, all the battles that are happening in classrooms and in colleges about AI policy basically. And the sort of what is coming out of this new world that nobody has their head around quite yet. And those two things together, I feel like they tell a really interesting story, which is one we've been talking about on the pod for a long time, which is that I think we're on a knife's edge here.
We're like, there is a narrative that's trying to be formed right now by mass media, and I think by certain people inside the education system of, hey, this is a disruptive technology and it's causing chaos. We have to be careful with it. We have to be thoughtful about it. We need really clear hard line policies about it, or else things are gonna go crazy in terms of plagiarism and cheating.
There was a story a few weeks ago about a family who sued. A school because they had penalized their kid for using an AI tool, and they said that was not actually appropriate. So things are getting hairy on the ground and those create interesting stories. At the same time, the high level, which you and I love to talk about, I think people are starting to get the message, as you say, that AI actually really might be the thing that truly actually changes education, which is such a hard thing to change.
And that competing narrative, that sort of high level and then low level on the ground, I think it behooves all of us at EdTech to really think about how to keep the conversation higher level, because all of this integrity, all of this nonsense about people getting in trouble for ai, it seems so dumb to me.
It's like it's just the dumbest conversation, but it's starting to get louder at the same time as the higher level one is.
[00:16:17] Ben Kornell: Does
[00:16:17] Alex Sarlin: that make sense
[00:16:18] Ben Kornell: to you, Ben? Yeah. I mean, this is the disruption, right? The disruption of the disruptive technology. And as much as I would love to believe we're on a burning platform.
Now finally, where education and learning needs to evolve into project base, competency base, like stuff you can't fake with an ai where the real benefit is the intellectual lift and not the kind of compliance elements. I wonder how people are going to respond. I wouldn't be shocked if we saw people just attempt to outlaw all of this and create close proctored rooms where you are devoid of technology and you have to do the old school methodologies.
'cause I don't have a lot of evidence that the educational systems and institutions are primed to change, nor are the incentives of each individual adult in the system primed for change. That being said, what an interesting lawsuit. The professor is teaching me using ai. Is that an abdication of their duty or is that actually what they should be doing?
Because then they're able to give more time to me as a student. In thoughtful feedback and reflection
[00:17:44] Alex Sarlin: and support. Exactly. I mean, and that's the debate, right? I mean the assumption that, hey, this professor used AI to do content, therefore they're lowering the bar is like the opposite of what we are, have been arguing for a year.
[00:18:00] Ben Kornell: Yeah. And then when we talk about what is education for, what is the role of the teacher, I think there's an over focus on content generation or like instructional material pieces, right? Where the research shows is like relational is super important and the ability to guide and foster student learning.
The reality is most teachers have not been able to do that at scale because the instrumentation of the instructional time has occupied all of their capacity. And by the way, one thing I liked with Ezra Klein is he was like, basically every other industry is asking the same question. With the efficiency of ai, does that mean workers work less or does that mean workers work differently?
And if it's differently, could it be better? Right. And so unfortunately, I think we've created systems of employment in schools and institutions where it's not clear that on the margin every teacher is going to reallocate that time towards high value, high impact. Or are they gonna take the time back and just do the minimal amount of work?
I'm a teacher, I love teachers. I think every teacher gets into the profession 'cause they wanna make an impact on students. Otherwise, it would be an irrational act to become a teacher. But I do think that the Covid Pandemic showed us that many teachers were comfortable minimizing class time to an hour and a half a week.
And there was ample evidence that some subset were not spending full day work
[00:19:42] Alex Sarlin: teaching. I think you're putting your finger on a piece of this that I think is incredibly important that we maybe don't talk about enough here, and I think you know who wrestles with this a lot is all of these teacher suites, right?
The magic schools and Brisk, they're always trying to figure out the right combination of how to make things. Quote unquote, easier for instructors, but not in a way that makes it worse. Right? I mean, and I think that's the thing that we all wrestle with. I think there's this correlation in all our heads between easier and worse, right?
If the instructor used AI to generate their lesson plan or to generate their instructional material or to improve it, they took the easy way out, which means that they're not working hard, which means that it's worse. There's this sort of assumptive jump there, and frankly, I mean, it makes sense, right?
The reason it makes sense is that even though we all talk a lot about how getting all this time back could build relationships, could improve assignments, could do much deeper order thinking, that side of things is not very well defined yet, and there aren't a lot of go-to examples for that. It's very easy to point out those examples of, oh, this person used AI to do their homework.
That New York magazine article we mentioned is really all about how kids are increasingly. Literally just putting assignments from college papers or college essays into chat GBT, getting the answer and handing it back in. And it's like, it's very easy to imagine that. It's a very tempting thing to do.
You could imagine. And that does equate ease with outsourcing, ease with not caring. It's harder to make the case that you could do things so much more easily and quickly. It could be better. That's a harder case to make. And I don't, I think it's on us, again, I, I, I always say this, but it's on us as EdTech folks to actually paint a picture of what that looks like.
It's easy to say, oh, teachers have more time to build relationships. They have more time to do deeper level thinking, to do one-on-one time to do small group instruction, but we have to actually show that happening. We have to actually make people visualize and understand what that looks like, because otherwise I think there's a, a natural assumption that people wanna make that, oh, everybody just wants their life to be easier.
Everybody wants the quick way to do things. AI offers that, and that's just gonna lower the bar for both sides for students and professors and teachers. So we have to make that case. And, and I don't think it is made yet. I mean, I, I don't blame people if people, somebody who has, does not pay a ton of attention to AI and education.
It makes sense, I think for them to think, oh, everybody's just using AI for everything. It's gonna make things easy and dumb. We have to fight that by actually creating a world where that's not true. I don't know if that world is here yet.
[00:22:07] Ben Kornell: I mean, you know, there's the AI skeptics for sure that you need to address with that.
There's also the AI optimist where they have to understand that AI itself is not built to provide cognitive friction. Like there is, you know, a way in which AI is designed is to minimize cognitive lift. And that is against the goals of learning. And this is where I think that our best case is that AI for teachers is a win-win win for everyone because it allows you to create capacity for the educator who thereby creates like the cognitive lift for the students.
But direct to student AI is a slippery, slippery slope. And there's an arms race there that you know, if you are the kid who's not using it, you are going to be left behind. And so then, you know, the circular like logic of that comes back to teacher instructional design. If we're designing tasks that AI can complete, we are not designing appropriate tasks.
[00:23:10] Alex Sarlin: Another thing that is, makes a lot of sense in theory and is very easy to say, and I see people saying this on LinkedIn all the time, and we've said it too, the idea that, oh, if you're a teacher, you have to change your assignments so that they're not just AI able. But the thing is, you need concrete examples of that.
Just saying that doesn't make it so it's easy for somebody who isn't in a classroom to drive by and say, Hey, you need to upgrade what you're doing. You know that assignment you've done for the last five years, you know, you need to do a new one. But that's a lot of work. It's a lot of thought and there isn't necessarily a lot of support yet for it.
We're all working on it and I'm, I'm, you know, I'm a huge AI optimist. I think that we're gonna get past this idea of AI being, you know, dumbing things down. But at the same time, I think we have to actively fight it as an ed tech industry because it's a very compelling narrative. And you know, there's a third part of this, which is also really interesting.
I think, Ben, I know you have a lot of thoughts on this too, which is, so there's the. AI will change education. There's the AI will undermine education and, you know, make everybody cheat or take the easy way out. And then there's the AI as content, the AI is changing the workforce. AI is changing what the future looks like.
We better get ahead of that. So, you know, we talked a couple weeks ago about how China has already basically mandated AI classes down as low as second grade. And that hundreds of CEOs in, in the US I put out a letter saying, we should be doing that too. We saw Google this week put out plans to roll out Gemini to children under 13.
So they're breaking the, the 13-year-old, that core barrier for privacy and education saying, you know, I, we think it's important. And we all, there was a great article about Newark High School where they're putting together, this is from the 74, how they're putting together a whole career exploration program in combination with McKinsey and Google this like really cool program basically about learning about careers and exploring different types of careers using AI tools and learning AI skills at the same time.
So like there's this idea of. AI capabilities changing what education is, but there's also AI changing the world and education needs to keep up and, and of course we saw the executive order about that as well a few weeks ago. Ben, what do you make of that side of things? Because this is like, these conversations get intertwined, but I think the idea of AI as subject matter is a really important one.
[00:25:20] Ben Kornell: Yeah. Well, you know, I would say one, we've seen a flip flop from the federal department around what is the role of the federal government in education. Period two, we're seeing, I think that's in response to China's push around AI education for all. And then many of the leaders of companies and corporations, the top companies in America, have kind of come together with a joint statement on the importance of AI education.
AI as content is hugely disruptive to the computer science world. And potentially disruptive across STEM and so on. Imagine now that basically every science lab you could use Repli to have students generate like working model of a frog and then dissect it. So not only would you be able to teach science standards, but you could create a mastery of it through the creation of real technology tools and websites.
I think that's a really exciting future. I also think that the core competencies of computer science are up in the air because are we heading to a vibe coding world or are we heading to a like algorithmically complex world where understanding the algorithm actually becomes essential, and being able to author your own edits on top of the LLM is like a, like a human need.
You know, imagine a world where you have a humanoid robot in your kitchen, like preparing you near your breakfast and you can go up to it and you know, just enough code and enough like audio. Like you can do this all verbally, but you basically could reprogram them right at that moment to cook your eggs a little bit more hard or a little bit more soft.
Like that's the kind of future that is, you know, might sound super futuristic, but it's not that far away. And maybe it's not a humanoid robot, maybe it's just your egg machine that like, I have no qualms with the form factor that it takes. But basically omni modal, programmable AI embedded in all of your technology based things.
Is coming. And so I actually think this creates this like practical need to know computer science basics and to understand AI interactivity from a very, very young age. And what gets me even more excited is kids that are AI native, do they need to learn it in school or are they just gonna learn it because that's what they're gonna need to learn to do All this stuff, like my kids' voice instructions versus my parents' voice instructions.
When my parents talk to Alexa, they can't get it to do anything. When Sebastian and Nico talk to Alexa, it's masterful. So like we have to acknowledge that with this velocity of change, we need to prepare it. I will also say just you were talking about the federal government to tie in the last thread of this, we've got a workforce problem and one of our headlines that came up is really about rising unemployment rate around recent graduates.
It's between five and 6%. And that to me is the canary in the coal mine around the economic disruption that's coming from ai. And Ryan, Craig has been like seeing this from way far away. You know, he and I talked about Spain's talked Spain, uh, like unemployment of young people and the disruption that that's caused to their society.
Imagine like 20%, 30% of new grads not being able to find a job. We are on a pace, you know, if you just project the current trend line for, to get to that within five or six years. Then what are you gonna do when one in five college graduates can't get a real job? That is going to be when you need these AI skills to like kick in, they're gonna need to be engines of their own economic opportunity, creating their own company's jobs and so on.
And they'll need to basically be able to plug into an AI smart infrastructure. So here we are. We go from like AI education to federal to employment, but that's the kind of macro environment we're heading to.
[00:29:41] Alex Sarlin: Yes. Amazing points. I love that frog example. I think that is such a nice concrete example of how you might put together a programmable computer science concepts with other types of science like biology in that case.
I love that.
[00:29:54] Ben Kornell: I mean, you could do this example that I gave today, like
[00:29:57] Alex Sarlin: this is not futuristic. You know, I have been thinking about AI in education a lot, trying to get as high level as possible to sort of make sense of it from a truly, you know, 10,000 foot perspective. And I think one of the things that keeps coming up for me, and it's sort of an unfinished metaphor, but let me try it here.
'cause it's, I think it's so relevant to what you're saying here, Ben, is that AI. Is Andrew Eng always uses the metaphor of AI being the new electricity. And I always thought that's a really interesting metaphor because it that places AI not as a user interface or not as a skillset, right? Electricity isn't a skillset.
You're not like, I need to learn electric to succeed in, you know, 1935. It places it as a sort of infrastructural medium in which everything else runs. And what's interesting about how you are talking here is like you're saying, AI will disrupt computer science and it already is. I mean, we already see big companies saying how much of their code is AI generated.
We already see coders talking about how these copilots are completely changing their work streams. There is, I think, a very plausible future where coding as this concept of having to know how to speak to computers in this particular language just starts to fade away as a concept. I know it's hard to get our head around that right now, but I mean, if you think about it, like some of the early computer folks had to literally program in like operated language.
They had to know how to do things at this unbelievably low level to be able to talk to a computer at all. And then of course we had all these coding programming languages, and then all these, you know, web 2.0 things where you can make your own blog and make your own, upload content to social media, upload videos without having to know anything at all about computer science.
I think we truly might be in a place where we're the beginning of. AI being able to translate into any language, including code. Including complex math. Including complex science. We might be at the beginning of a state where, and this is why this is relevant to your, I think, really important insight about the workforce.
Where, what jobs are, are really about being able to sort of make sense of a system that is in need of improvement or growth or productivity, and use AI in any context to make that work. And that might mean coding, it might mean research, it might mean productivity gains and sort of creating work streams that where everything, you know, automation and robotic automation.
It may mean robotics itself, but like I get a feeling the canary in the coal mine is young people. But I actually think as this technology speeds up even more, it's gonna be on the other side just like it was with computer science. You're gonna see actually. Older folks not be able to keep up because it's happening so fast.
To your point about, you know, people using Alexa, and I think there will be this whole other suite of jobs that suddenly appear that are basically AI first jobs. The same way that, you know, at the beginning of the internet there was no such thing as a, you know, social media marketer. Search engine optimization.
Nobody could even imagine what that was. There's a whole suite of jobs that I think are coming that will be dominated by these AI native young people. So the, I think the, the canary in the coal mine is the youth unemployment right now. But because it's the speed of ai, I think it's gonna quickly shift towards actually companies having to lay off.
And we saw Microsoft layoff 6,000 people this week. Companies having to lay off big numbers of older workers and instead replace their whole workforce with a much more agile AI native infrastructure. And in that will actually benefit young people. And then whether they will learn it in school or on their own, both, it's gotta be both, but probably for now on their own, unless education can keep up,
[00:33:43] Ben Kornell: that pretends to some pretty significant social disruption.
Definitely. I think it's kind of one way or the other. We're heading for some social disruption. It'd be hard to define this current state. As not socially disrupted already. So what are we gonna do when we start seeing these employment shifts?
[00:34:05] Alex Sarlin: What's gonna be interesting is I think you're gonna see a type of corporate leadership, and we've see some of this in tech now, but I think you're gonna see it even in some non-tech places where they start to create.
I don't know. It's a hard, even to describe like the same way in early internet world or even in early television world. Like when, when television first came out, people were trying to figure out how on earth do we use this new technology? And they didn't know, it wasn't structured yet. They literally, you know, just have to be like, let's think about what we could do with television.
And then they'd create television departments, or they'd create internet technology, information technology department in a company without entirely knowing what it was gonna do. It would have to figure out what computers could be used for and how many to buy, and how to train them and what it could do within a company.
I think you're gonna see more of that sort of open-ended, like an AI division of a lot of these companies that doesn't entirely know what it's doing yet because AI changes so fast, but it's gonna get bigger and bigger until it becomes a huge part of the company. Just like how Walmart, the digital division got bigger and bigger and bigger until it's a huge part of the company.
I, I think we're gonna start seeing that very soon.
[00:35:10] Ben Kornell: I think you've got, in some ways it's an optimistic view of what is going to play out. I think the challenge that I have is our current rate of education attainment in mass for the entire, you know, US education system does not portend well for a massive amount of employment of young people in AI careers.
Like more likely leads to, is a very small subset of, uh, young people who have disproportionate impact, but the overall numbers look bad. And then you also have the confounding factor of the, like current skilled employees becoming out of skill much faster. And so your shelf life for your skillset goes down dramatically.
So if you're not in that small group of people, that's accelerating dynamically. It's gonna be a really rocky road.
[00:36:09] Alex Sarlin: It depends on what you mean though, by the AI skills. Like I, I think it's so easy to conflate, you know, I always keep going back to this computer internet metaphor, just 'cause it's like I, the only one that I think is of the right scale.
But like, yes, not very many people became Google employees. Not very many people became. Full-time coders, Python coders in the US compared to how many we should have had. But many, many people, and I would say most young people work with the internet. They work in a job that is facilitated and created almost entirely by the internet.
They use email every day. They use slack every day. And to me, that's the schism we have to get our head around is that you're right, a hundred percent the number of people who can work in ai, meaning like creating AI systems, creating AI models, working at Anthropic and Uber and open AI like form and perplexity and DeepMind and all of these things is gonna be relatively small, but the number of people using AI on a daily basis to do almost everything they do, I think it's gonna be almost everybody.
And I think that level of skill is that type of skill could be taught. In fact, it might be a lot easier to teach than coding because it's natural language.
[00:37:18] Ben Kornell: But here's some notes from Alex Cotran reached responding to that article. So The Atlantic says. We can include this graph. It's a 6% unemployment gap growing for recent grads, and it says it's exactly what one would expect to see if firms replace young workers with machines.
As law firms leaned on AI for more paralegal work and consulting firms realized that 5 22 year olds with chat GBT could do the work of 20 recent grads and tech firms handed over their software programming to a handful of superstars working with AI co-pilots. The entry level of America's white collar economy would contract Intuit laying off 10% of its workforce, 1800 employees to free up cash flow for an AI pivot.
Cisco laying off 7% of its workforce, 5,900 employees as part of, and they previously had a reduction in force of 4,000 IBM laying off, you know, 20 to 30% of their team over the next five years. I mean, these are huge, uh, numbers. And by the way, culturally, we kind of came out of zero interest rate where companies found that they could do successive layoffs and didn't take a big cultural hit.
So we've got a combined cultural complicity with layoffs. So anyways, back to our point, which is that like this is a massive need for EdTech. This is a massive need for education. And we're going to be far more in the public consciousness in the,
[00:38:57] Alex Sarlin: we're a huge part of what society is gonna look like. The only thing I'd say though is that when you say they're cutting workforce to create, to do an AI pivot, that's exactly what I'm talking about.
Right. And it might be that right now some of the things, they're cutting our young people, but I bet those layoffs are not limited to your early stage employees. I think what they're probably doing is saying. Something has just changed that is gonna change our entire business and what the future looks like.
We need to make room to create an entire new, you know, sector, division, set of processes, set of jobs that are related to ai. And nobody knows what those are yet. And that's what they're doing. They're making room and they're making, I, I think you're right. They're making room both at the low level and the high level.
They're probably hiring fewer people outta college or, or out young people. And also, you know, doing layoffs of folks within the company. But what hasn't happened yet, and this is where I think education comes in, is what is that AI capability? What does that division look like? What is the equivalent of, you know, SEO in the future?
They talk about AI optimization, like how do you create content so that an AI can find your content and surface it? We just saw search go down for the first time in 20 years. The search safari has said that the Google searches are going down. So like AI search is about to become a huge thing. There'll be a ton of jobs in it.
AI automation is about to become a thing. Robotics, as you mentioned, is about to become a thing. There are all of these things coming, and I'm not trying to be a blind optimist, don't get me wrong. I'm just saying that I think we're in this in-between period where people realize things are gonna change.
So they're shrinking, they're doing layoffs like you're saying, but they don't know what's coming, so they can't create the new jobs yet. And as they do, we have to keep up as an ed tech sector.
[00:40:34] Ben Kornell: Yeah. Well, speaking of staying atop to EdTech sector, we need to jump to our interview with Sam Ery from ClassDojo.
Hopefully we can pick this conversation back up. I will say for our listeners, we're gonna share in the show notes a lot of the stories that we covered. Really worth listening to the Ezra Klein podcast really worth clicking into some of these articles this week because I think it gives you the granularity that you need to connect the dots on what's happening, big picture and small picture across EdTech and ai.
[00:41:08] Alex Sarlin: Great point, Ben. All right. Let's go to our interview with Sam Chow from Tojo.
[00:41:13] Ben Kornell: Hello, EdTech Insider listeners, I am so excited to introduce a longtime friend and a friend of EdTech Insider Pod, Sam Chattery, CEO co-founder of Class Dojo. Welcome to the pod.
[00:41:27] Sam Chauhdary: Thanks so much for having me guys.
[00:41:29] Ben Kornell: So many of our audience will know.
Class Jojo. You were founded in 2011. There's been a incredible history of the company in schools across the country, in Homes for Kids. Can you tell us a little bit about the evolution from when you started it to where you are today?
[00:41:47] Sam Chauhdary: Yeah, it's been quite the ride. So my co-founder, Liam and I, started the company together years ago now.
I think it was 2012 or so. We came out to the Bay Area. We'd both done things in education before I'd gone to this weird school, which insisted on kids teaching as well as learning. So I actually taught through my teens. I thought I was gonna be an academic and then instead of academia, I went to teach again after college, and Liam had actually been a PhD.
In computer science focused on helping kids learn and grow. And so we got talking about working together and you know, there's just this, I mean, I don't have to lecture the audience here. To me, one of the most fundamental problems in the world and one of the biggest opportunities is just helping people make the most of their talents and capacities.
I think if you can do that, that's how you help people flourish in their own lives. And if we can all do that, that's how collectively, I think humanity flourishes. And so that's my life's purpose. I feel very aligned in that with many of the teachers that we work with and, and school leaders and so on.
And so that's kind of why we started ClassDojo. The big mission for Dojo is to give every kid on earth. Education they love. Now this is, you know, when we were starting the company, this is kind of a very highfaluting statement to make, right? What becomes very important then is what is the right first step?
Like what should we actually do to take the first step here? And I think this is where I feel fortunate that we moved to America because we were completely naive. You know, we were two guys in our twenties, we moved here, we had never worked or lived here before. And we had to learn very quickly about the education system and, and what was going on.
And you know, at the time there was so many companies doing things for school leaders and districts and so on, big sales forces. And we were just like two guys. So we didn't have any of that.
[00:43:25] Ben Kornell: We've often said like starting an EdTech company is fundamentally an irrational act in the first world, so might as well really go for it.
In some ways, naivete is probably a super strength. In a way, yeah. I mean, no one told us at the time,
[00:43:39] Sam Chauhdary: you know, but, but got some weird looks. But, you know, we, we took this very, I think, honestly straightforward approach. We're like, look, let's just work with the people doing the work. I'd been a teacher, we'd worked with teachers and, and kids and families before, so let's go and talk to lots of teachers and kids and families and figure out how we can help them.
I mean, after all, they're, they're kind of doing the work in the classrooms, and that's in the first month of the company. It's rich to call a company. It was just the two of us. We were interviewing hundreds of teachers, and one of the core things that came up for them was, Hey, I'm doing this impossible job.
I'm trying to give 30 kids an amazing experience. I would love some support from families. And then on the other hand. We heard from families that they're like, look, I really wanna be involved in my kids' education. You know, I have one parent-teacher conference this semester doesn't really cut it. And so we were like, well, maybe we can just help you all communicate.
And so Dojo started life helping teachers and kids and families communicate with one another. So it's the communication app that I think a lot of people wrote today. Sharing pictures, videos, moments, messages through the school day. I think what we didn't know. Was how that would grow. If I'm being honest, one classroom in a school would start to use it and then suddenly it would just start to spread through the whole school.
And that's now happened at some scale now where we're honestly constantly amazed by it. Something like one in five families in America use do every week now even more than that internationally. So it's more of the largest communities now on the planet for this demographic, and it's all been this word of mouth growth.
So that was kind of where we started. I can tell you a bit about where we're going now, but I don't want to keep talking forever.
[00:45:09] Ben Kornell: Well,
[00:45:09] Sam Chauhdary: that's
[00:45:09] Ben Kornell: the point of the interview, so yeah, I would love to hear that. I would love, yeah. Where are you headed now? And also like how have you had to evolve? Your role as CEO to meet the new opportunity amidst this incredibly large community?
[00:45:24] Sam Chauhdary: Yeah. Well, you know, I think in the early days we were kind of just so focused on making something that people wanted because if you don't do that, you don't have the right to do anything else. Right. And so, but we got. After some years we kind of saw this communication up growing and growing and reaching some scale.
And that was always, in my mind, supposed to be step one. You know, it's very useful in its own and like lots of people love it and use it. But we started to think of that as kinda like the first step to the next phase of the company, which is now starting to give kids better learning experiences than what they would otherwise get.
Right? So this is kind of, if you think of the mission to give every kid an education they love, this is like the part that's about giving kids an education they love. And so in recent years we've started to get into that more and more with different products. So I'll give you a couple of examples. We can come back to this, but a couple of years ago we built a service called Dojo Tutor.
So we'd seen from families that they really wanted more attention for their kids than just what they were able to get in the classroom. And it turns out it's actually relatively hard to find a high trust tutor or someone who's really qualified, who cares about your kid. It's been like, I know, picking a doctor or something, you know, this is a, there's an imp important part of your life.
We realized, we're like, well, hold on. We've got millions of teachers fully qualified, like amazing teachers on Dojo, and then we've got tens of millions of families who, who really want help for their kids. Maybe we can just match these two groups and let them meet each other and do some kind of one-on-one tutoring.
And so we built it on, honestly as an experiment in 2023, but it just exploded. We went from zero to over a hundred thousand tutoring sessions in year one. And what's amazing is most of the people who are using Dojo Tutor have never had a tutor before. And so it's really, it's been quite amazing to see people that thought tutoring was out of reach for them now starting to get away to get more help and attention for their kid.
So that's one example. There are a bunch of other products that we've been working on, but what we can come back to some of them.
[00:47:15] Alex Sarlin: It feels like a really interesting theme of what you've made with ClassDojo is sort of creating really solid, very inspiring and exciting and and visually appealing sort of connective tissue between all the parts of education that are not usually connected.
And that's relevant to the tutoring, it's relevant to the communication platforms between parents and teachers to the events, to, you know, sort of all of the pieces that can be siloed and sort of happen in isolation and ClassDojo brings it all together. So I'm curious now that has become something, I think you were way ahead on that now I think other people are starting to say, Hey, this is really a missing piece of the education ecosystem.
I'd love to hear what you're doing with Dojo Islands. I think that is another step in that direction, but also just love to hear you talk about how that's evolved over these 10 years. This sort of understanding that everything should be connected.
[00:48:03] Sam Chauhdary: Yeah. Well, let's talk a bit about s and then we'll come back to this latter point.
I think this was in 2021 or so. I think a lot of these products are basically an artifact of us being very close. To kids and families and teachers all over the country, all over the world. So our team continued kind of the tradition of just talking to lots of kids and families and teachers every week and every month.
And so we were, we were speaking with families in this case, and you remember the pandemic had just hit and everyone was spending a lot of time online and families were getting really worried about where their kids are spending time online. The truth is they're kind of right to be worried. There aren't like really great places for especially younger kids.
We deal with kids under 13 for younger kids to be online, right? You kind of have a lot of these apps, which you know, you look at 'em, they're kinda like wasting your kids' time. You get that kind of slack jaw kind of scrolling happening. You know, parents don't feel great about that. Or there's some places that actually can have some pretty shady, scary people on and we don't want any of that for kids.
And so we kind of were reflecting on this and we realized that there aren't places that have been built to be really great for kids in the best interest of kids on the internet. And then we had a second realization that Dojo has now got this community of kids with their parents connected. So it's very safe with verified teachers.
And so we thought, oh, we might be able to make a place where kids can be with just their friends. So there's no random strangers in there. There's no people you don't know. And if you are with your friends, then it could be really fun because you know all these people. So you could actually do meaningful things together.
It's like any game becomes way more fun, or any project becomes way more fun when you're doing it with people you care about. And so Dojo Islands was basically the beginning of that. So the, the idea was that every classroom of kids gets an island and they can kind of build this island together. So it's inherently a co-creative kinda collaborative project that you're doing.
Initially, if that was it, you could just build island together. Now what's starting to happen is kids can start to discover interesting games and activities spread across the island, some made by other kids, which is very exciting. Some we make and some will start to work with other people to make, you know, real professionals and kind of people who can bring interesting concepts into this world.
And so I think the cool thing about it's, it's a closed environment. So as a parent, you know, it's just your kids with their friends. You have a theoretically infinite breadth and depth of games and activities that can be made here. Very interesting creative ones. We've got teachers doing things with math and science in the classroom on Dojo Islands.
We've got kids building little projects outside of it. And so I think in the end, my hope is that this becomes the best place on the internet for kids. So think of it a bit like. If tutor was to help get personal attention for your kid islands is to help your kids play and create with their friends. So that's that goal.
So on your other point about all of this being connected, I think we use this mental model in the company we call the barbell. So it's very important to have a good long-term vision and then it's very important to have like a clear next step and, and you don't need to necessarily know every single step in between.
Once you take that first step, more of kind of the terrain becomes visible to you and you start to understand what other options you might have. And so I think, you know, we'd always hoped that in the end we could build a company that lives up to this big mission of giving every kid an education they love.
But we took it one step at a time. So the first step really was the communication app. And because that had some success and has grown, that now gives us the option to do many other things. One other more interesting recent thing is that for a long time, dojo was just working with teachers, kids, families, maybe a few school leaders in there for about five or six years ago.
We started to get so much inbound interest from district leaders, uh, from from schools, districts, some whole states, even some small federal governments. We basically were too small as a company. We were like 30 people five years ago. We stayed very small to do anything about it, you know, we were like, well, we, we don't really know what to do with this.
Like, this is not where we've been used to playing. Then we started to get some pretty major calls. You know, I won't name names, but some of the largest school districts in the country basically started to get in touch and they would say things like. Look, half of our schools are using this Dojo thing. I don't really know what it is.
I've never heard of it. No one's ever pitched me on anything, but can I buy it for like the rest of the schools and can we just have, you know, something that everyone can use? And we didn't even have anything for them to buy. So we'd be like, oh, just send people to the website. You know, and not a very sufficient answer I think when you're, when you're dealing with, um, school districts.
But very quickly we started to change that. So a few years ago we built a product called Donor for Districts, and it basically gives districts all the enterprise level kind of controls oversight that they were after. And we said, look. You can just use Doja for districts for free. You can give it to everyone in your district and it's gonna give you everything that you want.
It's been a more recent kind of evolution the last two or three years, but honestly it's been really incredible to see. It's like hundreds and hundreds of, of the largest, some of the largest districts in the country. Adopting that and discovering that, you know, they can give their people more of what they're already doing rather than searching for things that, that they hope work.
They can just encourage what's already working.
[00:52:57] Ben Kornell: Yeah. I'm finding it really interesting that a lot of the work that you've done actually parallels how schools work. You create this vibrant community by building connection, and then on top of it, you create these learning experiences and then on top of that, you connect them to resources.
And there's a way in which like, it's distributed obviously in a very different way than a school might work, but the kind of elements of the value proposition, this is safe. This is a place of trust. This is a place of quality, like these are all value propositions that a school itself would have. And I think a lot of people want to skip to the step where they like drop in the kind of resource or the learning app or whatever it may be.
But I find it really fascinating that you've kind of built that authenticity of community at the base layer and then as a foundation it really allows you to build all sorts of things on top from a business perspective that is also called channel. And there's a way in which now your reach far surpasses the reach of almost every other educational platform out there.
How has that changed your mindset around what you're building, how you're interacting with the community? It must be such a far cry from your early days as a founder when it's like, let's get one classroom to now you have these millions of people. What would you say is totally different and what's actually oddly similar?
[00:54:30] Sam Chauhdary: So, you know, I, I think companies go through this kind of midway kind of meme. You've probably seen it, right? I think in the early days you're like, just make something people want. Kinds of weird. Practices. You're like, oh, we really should be doing one-on-ones a certain way. We should be doing this, that, or the other.
And of course, it's important to build a good company, but I think hopefully you get to the other side of it where you start to realize that actually the job is really as simple as in, in some ways as just making things that people really want. Now there's strategy and there's like picking good markets and all the rest of it to be in.
But I think one of the things I'm proudest of with Dojo is that it's such a customer obsessed. Culture, like everybody in the company speaks to our teachers, to our kids, to our families. There's, you want to really minimize the distance or the effort it takes, uh, to get in front of our community and, and speak with them.
So, you know, most of our team is in a huge Facebook group with a bunch of our kind of teachers. Every week we kind of publish which interviews or customer interviews are happening this week, and you can join them or drop in on them. We have a huge archive of all the conversations we've ever done. We're doing some fun stuff with AI around that as well now.
So I, I think you really want to stay very close to like the needs here. And I think, you know, to your analogy with school, I think it's, it's actually, I hadn't really thought of it that way, but I think it's a really good one. You know, every school is trying their best. To do amazing things for the, you know, all the kids and families in that school.
And it turns out it's just like a really hard job. 'cause every kid has different set of hopes and dreams. Every family has different set of needs. Everyone's got different capacities and interests. And so to meet every single one of those needs is actually rather difficult. And I've empathy for this and I, I've been a classroom teacher and so our view is like, well maybe we can just help.
Maybe we can just fill in some of the spots where things are really difficult, maybe for a particular group or a particular set of kids. And that's kind of where I think the orientation for me is like, can we help you give kids education?
[00:56:20] Alex Sarlin: You've done such interesting work, and I think that idea of staying close to your customers, to your, to your students, to your teachers, to now to your districts, and, and making sure that you are just being responsive to what they really, really need and, and want, it feels like, you know, an amazing North Star.
One thing we talk about a lot on the podcast is how in this emerging age of ai, this sort of a tension between, you know, personalization and differentiation, which is suddenly possible at amazing levels. I know you, you have like 35 languages in your communication app, and I imagine that may be AI enhanced, but then there's also this need for orchestration and bringing people together, and some of the more sophisticated uses of AI are actually ones that bring students and teachers together, rather than giving them all their, each individual totally personalized experience.
I'd love to hear how you've been thinking about, you know, this AI era through the lens of keeping everybody connected, giving them what they actually want and not, you know, bringing AI as a hammer to solve any problem.
[00:57:19] Sam Chauhdary: Yeah, well look, first I think this is just like, to me it's the most exciting time in the industry since, since we started really, I think when we started we had like the tailwind of smartphone adoption, so suddenly you could get in front of large numbers of people.
I mean, I suppose prior to that you had the, you know, just internet adoption, which, which helped. But smartphones really made things very accessible to me. I mean, as all of us know, I think we're kind of glimping that, oh, well, you know, we've had this two sigma observation forever and for the first time we actually have like a realistic way of scaling personal attention for every kid.
And so I, I think we should be just tremendously excited and optimistic about that. I think maybe a, a subtle point around it is that beyond just the technology, I think we're getting to the point where the experiences are actually starting to feel like very human. We probably all had this experience with kids when the iPad came out and you know, there was a generation of kids that kind of learned what the iPad was.
And I remember seeing my nephew. Come up to my laptop and just start tapping the screen. And it was kinda like, why is this thing not working? You know? And I think we start to have that honestly with AI as well, where I think increasingly the expectation is just gonna be that every software around us is smart and has intelligence.
And if it doesn't, like what? What are we doing here? You know? And so it's so I think like it's starting to feel more human and more natural, which I think is like very exciting. 'cause I think that helps unlock more of the capabilities. Now, I'll give you a couple of specific examples. One I think is there's a way that AI can bring us close together by removing what is in the way.
And so we're seeing this a lot with teachers and we've seen some examples with, with kids as well. So last year, you know, we'd known for a long time, there's so much drudgery in teaching, there's so much rote work, and we start to glimpse at this idea that, hold on, we can take a lot of this rot work away.
You know, a lot of like figuring out what to teach and how to teach it, and so on and so on. You know, these are some of the examples that we will heard of. But we built a product called Sidekick. Now Sidekick is a cent, is what it sounds like. It's supposed to be an AI teaching assistant for every teacher on the Dojo network.
And so we built it quickly, launched it iterated, and it's just exploded. You know, like teachers are using this every day, every week. It's designed to help. And so if you can take away all of the rote drudgery, imagine what you can free up energetically and in terms of time for teachers to actually be connected with kids in the classroom.
So I think that's like very exciting on the other side for kids. I think we've got something very exciting coming. So you've probably seen all the stories about Alpha School and what they're doing with the, you know, the, the, the tutor for the two hours of tutoring that kids do a day. So we were very inspired by and excited.
Uh, by, by this towards the end of last year we started to work and we, we actually shipped in kind of better mode the beginnings of an AI tutor that is specifically for reading. So we started a narrow slice, which is reading, and so this is called Sparks. It's tremendously exciting. We're seeing that we can take kids from not knowing how to read.
To having early reading in three or four months, which is very, and it looks and feels like a, like a game, like a refund deal, ando kind of game. But it's adaptive to the kid that talks to you, listens to you and understands the way you're getting things right, wrong, and it's, it's patient and encouraging and warm and all the things that you want.
And so, you know, you start to think like, well, if we can handle some of the basics, if we can get some reading and some maths and some other things outta the way, imagine what you can free up for people to do together for the time that you are in the classroom together. Imagine changing the model of the classroom from one where you know, you're, you're, you're going at the, the mixed pace or teaching to some average, it doesn't exist to actually just being able to do interesting, productive stuff together.
So I, I think this is really exciting. I think on the one hand we can get rid drudgery. I also think, and we can cover the basics. I think there are also going to be great collaborative experiences that we can build. But these are great first steps.
[01:00:57] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, we can have both, right? We can have personalization, and we can have collaboration with ai.
It's very flexible. I, I love hearing that.
[01:01:03] Ben Kornell: This has been an awesome conversation. I feel like we could go for hours here, but Sam, thank you so much for sharing everything about the Class Dojo journey. I'd say a big congratulations. On everything you've accomplished, but this conversation make me far more excited about the next 10 years.
So we're gonna have to have you on in subsequent years to tell us how it's going. Thanks so much for joining at Tech Insiders.
[01:01:27] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, and just a quick pitch. We just talked to Mackenzie Price from Alpha School. That interview is coming out next week, so listen to that one. 'cause I think it's very relevant to some of this vision that he just put out.
Thank you so much for being here. This was fascinating. Thanks so much for having me. 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.
