Classroom Engagement Tools

Moving AI From Your Desk to the Students' Desks

So far this track has focused on AI as a teacher prep tool — something you use before and after class to save time. This lesson is about the other half: AI as a classroom tool that students interact with directly, either as a tutor, an engagement platform, or a writing assistant.

Putting AI in students' hands requires more setup than using it yourself. You need to choose the right tool for the age group, establish clear expectations, and decide what role AI is playing in the learning experience. Done well, it creates genuinely differentiated support that would be impossible to provide manually.

Khanmigo: The AI Tutor That Asks Instead of Tells

Khanmigo is Khan Academy's AI tutor, and it works differently from any chatbot your students have used before. When a student asks Khanmigo "What is the answer to this problem?" Khanmigo does not give the answer. It asks a question back — "What do you think the first step might be?" — and guides the student through their own reasoning.

This Socratic approach is what makes Khanmigo valuable in an academic integrity context: it is structurally resistant to shortcutting. A student who wants the answer cannot get it from Khanmigo. They have to do the thinking.

Khanmigo is free for teachers through Khan Academy (khanacademy.org/khan-labs). Teachers get a dashboard showing which students have used it and what topics they worked on. It is currently strongest for math, reading comprehension, and writing support, with ongoing expansion to other subjects.

To set it up for your class: create a Khan Academy teacher account, create a class, and share the join code with students. Students do not need a paid account. The AI tutor is accessible from any device with a browser.

Curipod and ClassPoint: Live Interactivity in Minutes

You met Curipod briefly in Lesson 2. In the classroom, it shines as a formative assessment and engagement tool. The teacher projects the Curipod slides, students join on their own devices via a code, and they respond to questions, polls, and drawing prompts in real time. Responses appear live on screen.

What makes Curipod different from a simple poll tool: it generates the interactive slides from a topic in under two minutes. You do not build the activity from scratch — you describe what you are teaching and Curipod builds a complete interactive deck. You can edit any slide before presenting.

ClassPoint (classpoint.io) takes a different approach: it adds live interaction directly to your existing PowerPoint presentations. If you already teach from PowerPoint, ClassPoint embeds polling, quiz, and response features into slides you have already built. No new platform to learn for the presentation itself — just an add-in that makes your slides interactive.

Brisk Teaching: AI Inside Google Classroom

Most K-12 teachers live in Google Classroom. Brisk Teaching (briskteaching.com) is a free Chrome extension that adds AI capabilities directly inside Google Docs and Google Classroom — no separate platform, no new login, no context switching.

With Brisk Teaching installed, a teacher reviewing a student Google Doc can click a button to:

• Give AI-drafted feedback on the student's writing in the right margin
• Level-adjust the document to a different reading level on the fly
• Generate a quiz from the document's content
• Check the document against a rubric and see a draft assessment

For teachers who do not want to adopt a new platform, Brisk Teaching is the path of least resistance. You are already in Google Docs grading student work — Brisk adds AI assistance to exactly where you already are.

Setting Clear Expectations Before Students Use AI

Any time you introduce an AI tool for student use, the expectation conversation needs to happen first. Students need to know:

• What the tool is and what it is designed to do
• What they are expected to do with it versus what the AI does
• Whether using the tool is optional or required for this activity
• What to do if the AI says something confusing, unhelpful, or wrong

A five-minute conversation before the first session saves significant confusion and prevents students from using the tool in ways you did not intend. The most important thing to establish: AI tools can be wrong, and students should always apply their own judgment to what the AI produces.