Earlier today, I had the opportunity to visit with School AI’s Mike Powell, Senior Partnership Manager (mike@schoolai.com; 816-288-7958). You can listen to our conversation or view the transcript below.

Listen to School AI’s Mike Powell

Transcript of Conversation

Note: The audio was transcribed using Whisper Desktop on Windows, with Google Gemini Pro 2.5 Pro processing the transcript to organize it.

Miguel Guhlin: I was speaking with a colleague from a school in the San Antonio area, and she mentioned that a significant issue is that most of her students are under 18. She says that ChatGPT’s privacy policy restricts its use to those 18 and older, so she has concerns about her middle to high school students working with AI tools. Is that an issue for School AI? Also, could you tell us a little about yourself?

Mike Powell: My name is Mike, and I’ve been a Senior Partnership Manager with School AI for a little over a year. I started when we were just employee 15, so it’s been a fun year of growth.

Age Requirements and Student Data Privacy

Mike Powell: Regarding age requirements on our platform, we don’t have any for student use. The restriction you mentioned with ChatGPT applies to the creation side of things, so your teachers will be fine to use it. However, for students using what teachers create, there are no age requirements at all. We have students using it from kindergarten all the way up through their senior year of high school.

Data security is our number one concern, even more so than how our platform performs, because protecting student data is what’s most important to schools, communities, and parents. All of our data is heavily encrypted—coming in, going out, and while it’s stored on our platform. We also have measures to protect personal identifying information.

We are FERPA and COPPA certified, have a NIME type 2 certification, and are also 1EdTech certified. Anyone can visit our trust website to see what we’re monitoring, our policies, and where our sub-processors and data warehouses are located. Everything is kept in the United States. Your data is protected, and we have no access to it. If you ask us to wipe your data clean, we will.

Miguel Guhlin: Can you alleviate any concerns about data privacy?

Fostering Critical Thinking Over Providing Answers

Miguel Guhlin: Many teachers worry that AI might undercut the process of developing students’ writing and thinking skills, and I’m sure you’ve seen recent studies on this. What makes School AI different?

Mike Powell: The biggest thing with School AI is that we’re here to help shift students’ mindsets. Instead of being like ChatGPT and giving answers right away, our platform is built to develop critical thinking skills. Students can ask our AI to “just write this for me” or “tell me what to do,” but it won’t. The AI’s main function is to provide small “nuggets” to keep students working through their writing process without ever doing the writing for them.

We’ve seen a complete 180 in how students think about AI. At first, they get frustrated because they expect answers, like with ChatGPT. But as they use it more, they become hungry for it because it pushes their thought process beyond where it was before. Ultimately, we’re here to enhance what students are doing, not undercut what teachers are doing in the classroom.

School AI’s Tools and Features

Miguel Guhlin: Could you describe the tools School AI offers?

Mike Powell: School AI has two types of tools. We have teacher productivity tools to help with their daily workload. But where we really shine is with our student-use platform, which we call “spaces.”

These spaces are completely controlled by the teacher. They set the parameters and guardrails for how the AI interacts with students, and students can’t go outside of that. You can take the worksheets you use constantly and bring them into an AI chatbot, making them more relevant and engaging for your students. The AI can scaffold the activity based on where each student is in their learning journey.

This allows for personalized learning at scale, essentially multiplying the teacher to be able to focus on the students who truly need their help. It helps advanced students to continue pushing their limits while allowing students who are further behind to work at their own pace without feeling out of place.

Miguel Guhlin: Are these spaces text-based, or do they include images?

Mike Powell: Currently, it is all text-based. However, we are coming out with an updated version of our platform this fall that will have a more engaging and interactive experience for students, including things like simulators.

Subject-Specific Applications

Miguel Guhlin: Can you give me an example of how School AI spaces are used for writing, science, and math?

Mike Powell:

• Writing: North Crowley High School in the Dallas-Fort Worth area focused on improving their students’ Extended Constructed Response (ECR) scores for the STAAR test. They found that students weren’t getting feedback quickly enough. So, they set up a space with the state rubric, scoring guide, and the reading excerpt. Students immediately received feedback that used to take weeks to get. The teachers enjoyed this because it allowed them to be a source of positive reinforcement. We did a study and found that the AI’s grading was at or one point below a teacher’s grade 86% of the time, which is what we want because it encourages the AI to be more critical.
• Science: An environmental science teacher, who was an environmental scientist herself, couldn’t take her students into the field. So, she created spaces that gave them real-life scenarios and choices as if they were actual environmental scientists, exploring landfills and different habitats. Another teacher brought a complex medical case into School AI, allowing students to act as doctors diagnosing a patient, a process that used to take two weeks and hundreds of pages of paper.
• Math: While a specific math example wasn’t detailed in this conversation, the platform’s ability to create customized, interactive problem-solving environments can be applied to mathematics.

Monitoring Student Progress

Miguel Guhlin: Does School AI have a dashboard for teachers or administrators to monitor student progress?

Mike Powell: Yes, when a teacher creates a space, a dashboard is generated where they can see everything a student is doing, including the verbatim conversation. This allows teachers to see a student’s thought process. Administrators can also view these dashboards to see where students are struggling and gain insights. We are working on expanding this to provide administrators with longitudinal data to track student progress over their entire school career.

Getting Started with School AI

Miguel Guhlin: Is there one link you could share for our listeners to learn more?

Mike Powell: I would definitely recommend our newly revamped website. There are tons of videos and testimonials from teachers about the impact on their students. I also encourage you to set up an account and start playing around with it. That’s the best way to learn.

Miguel Guhlin: We’ve been chatting with Mike Powell, Senior Partnership Manager at School AI. His email is mike@schoolai.com.