The AI Who Taught Me

#11: Eduaide's New Integrated AI Workspace

Many of the best education tools are built by teachers. Thomas Thompson was teaching middle school social studies when he and a colleague started building Eduaide during the COVID-19 pandemic. Three years later, their small team (including a co-founder who still teaches full-time) has built a tool used by over 800,000 educators. Most education AI tools today are just a directory of prompts, which have created tab-overload. Teachers generate content in a chat, copy it to Google Docs, edit it, go back to the AI, generate more, copy again. The copy-paste loop. Eduaide has built a document workspace that unifies all the context about a given lesson. The AI reads your document, understands context, and lets you revise in place. It's the same shift we're seeing in developer tools, from ChatGPT to Claude Code to OpenClaw, applied to education. I talked with Thomas about his approach to product development, how they use evaluations to ensure that the tools do what they should, and how to apply pedagogy with myriad choices in AI tools. He gives us a sneak peek into where the future of AI education tools is going. For more, check out Eduaide Videos of the Document Editor [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlU2wC-IYK4&list=PLL6oCITznu4WAH2A4zJATsIG1oa5OhbO8] Also, subscribe to my newsletter baseclasses.com [http://baseclasses.com]!

#10: Lit with Lyns: A Veteran Teacher’s Journey into the AI Frontier

This first teacher interview, we chat with the creator of "Lit with Lins" about her evolution from teacher to curriculum developer to AI advocate. She shared her use of Magic School, Spark Space, and We Will Write, as well as some pitfalls such as her experience with AI tools that are blocked in her school. Check out Lyndsey's site and her teacher resources: https://litwithlyns.com/ [https://litwithlyns.com/] Reference to the CDT study and intro to my new substack - subscribe here! https://baseclasses.com/p/welcome-to-base-classes [https://baseclasses.com/p/welcome-to-base-classes]

#9: The Story of Amira, Ello and the AI Reading Tutors that Actually Listen To You

Calling all teachers! I would love to interview you about your experience using AI in the classroom - please visit https://www.theaiwhotaughtme.com/stories [https://www.theaiwhotaughtme.com/stories] to sign up! -- Have you ever sat with a child who is learning to read? It's fun to listen to them sound out the words and offer gentle pointers to help them along their way. But up until recently, most edtech software couldn't do that: they just guide kids without being able to tell what they are actually saying out loud. But that is changing. In this episode, we cover the ground-breaking science behind Amira Learning. It started out of CMU's Project LISTEN [https://cacm.acm.org/blogcacm/a-pioneer-in-using-ai-to-teach-reading] and they have earned an impressive body of research [https://amiralearning.com/research] (including a recent study in Louisiana [https://oneida-nsn.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Amira-Learning-Evidence-Base_2022_FINAL.pdf]) showing large learning gains in students who use an AI tutor that can listen and offer specific corrections. Future work out of Digital Promise [https://digitalpromise.org/2025/06/10/u-gain-reading-supporting-a-tech-enabled-vision-for-the-science-of-reading/]will continue to study these effects. But the latest LLMs have impressive speech capabilities out of the box, and it has enabled a new generation of reading apps that can listen to kids. Ello [https://www.ello.com/] has surged in usage among home schoolers, while Project Read [https://www.projectread.ai/], Buddy Books [https://objectiveed.wistia.com/medias/lqnq5oxh83] and eSpark Reading Lab [https://www.esparklearning.com/product/reading-lab/] all offer great programs to enable phonics instruction that actually listens to kids. In the future, perhaps we'll even have built in support within the major models, or the ability to bring-your-own-book and have an AI tutor read with you. In any case, this is one of the most interesting and widespread uses of serious AI in schools today

#8: Learning Modes from ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude

We dive into the recently announced learning modes from the big three LLM vendors:  * ChatGPT released Study Mode, [https://openai.com/index/chatgpt-study-mode/] but seems to have killed it since * Gemini now has Guided Learning [https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/education/guided-learning/] as well as a paper [https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/LearnLM/learnLM_may25.pdf] showing its effectiveness compared to others * Claude has two learning styles - Explanatory and Learning - which offer two ways to learn about a topic. But the interface is quite confusing. We also discuss the implications of a recent report on how people are using ChatGPT [https://openai.com/index/how-people-are-using-chatgpt/], including that more than 10% of conversations are classified as Tutoring or Teaching modes. Nearly half of ChatGPT usage comes from 18-25 year olds, which helps show why the university market is so important in this space. And check out this TikTok [https://www.tiktok.com/@jerard.b/video/7515587200071912747] from Jerard.b showing how ChatGPT is a little ... too ... helpful.

#7: Alpha School Claims 2X Learning- Is It Real?

We look into the results from Alpha School, a private school in Texas that claims to use AI to help students gain 2x in only 2 hours a day. When I dug in, I saw that their main "whitepaper" is reporting results based on using the wrong column from the NWEA MAP data! They haven't had any independent verification of their claims, which calls into question their validity. I'm still quite intrigued by the school and I look forward to more robust reporting on their results from external researchers in the future. Watch the accompanying YouTube video to see the charts and sources in more detail! https://youtu.be/UPFCkbc3O3A [https://youtu.be/UPFCkbc3O3A]   Sources: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-alpha-school [https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-alpha-school] https://austinscholar.substack.com/p/austin-scholar-173-the-science-behind [https://austinscholar.substack.com/p/austin-scholar-173-the-science-behind] https://2hourlearning.com/results/ [https://2hourlearning.com/results/] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qhov2Av7-5c [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qhov2Av7-5c]