#398 – SchoolAI, with Kevin Morrill

In this episode of Unpacking Education, we sit down with Kevin Morrill, cofounder of SchoolAI, to explore how artificial intelligence can serve as a powerful ally in today’s classrooms. Kevin shares some of the inspiration behind SchoolAI, grounded in both his professional experience and personal story as a parent navigating education with his own children.

Together with the Unpacking Education podcast team, Kevin discusses how SchoolAI empowers teachers to reach their students. SchoolAI helps to amplify teacher effectiveness while supporting student engagement, agency, and belonging. From reducing administrative burden to creating meaningful and student-centered learning experiences, this conversation offers insights and tools for any educator curious about the promise of AI in education.

Reach every student, every day.

SchoolAI, on their home page

Resources

The following resources are available from AVID and on AVID Open Access to explore related topics in more depth:

• AI in the K–12 Classroom (article collection)
• The AI Infused Classroom, with Holly Clark (podcast episode)
• TeachAI, with Dr. Kristen DiCerbo (podcast episode)
• Free AI Courses (podcast episode)
• The Promises and Perils of AI in Education, with Ken Shelton (podcast episode)
• Learning Evolution: The New Era of AI in the Classroom, with Carl Hooker (podcast episode)
• The A.I. Roadmap: Human Learning in the Age of Smart Machines, with Dr. John Spencer (podcast episode)
• SchoolAI (podcast episode)
• AI Prompt Engineering (ed tip)

Empowering Students and Teachers

Kevin’s vision for SchoolAI isn’t about replacing teachers—it’s about amplifying them. With AI-powered tools like Translator Mode, Spaces, and Assistants, SchoolAI helps educators create personalized, emotionally safe learning environments where students feel seen, heard, and engaged.

The powerful Spaces feature of SchoolAI supports both teachers and students by providing students with a safe, responsive environment to engage with learning content, while offering teachers real-time insights that foster deeper connections and timely support. Kevin underscores the impact of this with a compelling observation from a teacher: “She didn’t realize there was so much going on with each student. . . . There was so much going on that was completely off of her radar until starting to receive some of these insights.” SchoolAI goes well beyond streamlining tasks, creating more opportunities for students to feel recognized, supported, and actively involved in their learning. The following are a few highlights from this episode:

• About Our Guest: Kevin Morrill is a cofounder of SchoolAI alongside Caleb Hicks.
• Seeing a Need: As a teacher, Caleb was overwhelmed with the reality of classrooms filled with students and all of those students having different needs. Kevin explains that it was “just so daunting to be able to support the students on the level that you actually want to, doing the things that you know work. But you can’t; there’s just not enough time in the day.” SchoolAI became a potential solution to that problem.
• Making School More Human: Kevin explains that when ChatGPT was released, “We felt like there was the biggest opportunity ever to actually reach more students, to be able to find a way to make school more human, [to] really help students be seen and heard, and for students to feel more in their own skin in school.”
• A Personal Story: Another part of Kevin’s motivation came from experiences with his own children. Specifically, he recounts the story of his eldest son who was a great typer but lacked confidence at school. Kevin says, “He would feel the pressure of the entire class around him and the teacher looking over his shoulder, even though she had great intentions, and he felt as if he was falling behind and wasn’t a fast typer.” This was the first time he was hearing about insecurities at school, and it was due to typing. As a solution, he found that by creating a custom GPT that acted as a popular TV cartoon character, he could motivate his son and break down those barriers. Kevin recalls, “He spent a couple of hours just sitting there typing and having the time of his life, answering these questions and practicing.”
• Learning From Educators: The work of SchoolAI has been driven by feedback from educators. Kevin says, “Caleb and I, we really wanted to see what the perspective was from teachers and administrators. We have this question that we asked hundreds of teachers over a period of time: ‘If you had a magic wand and you could just wave it and make something come true that would meaningfully impact your life as a teacher, what would it be? And don’t think about the constraints of AI. Don’t think about anything else. Just tell us. What is it?’” That returned consistent answers, such as the challenges of grading and the desire to give feedback to all students in a way that was meaningful and timely, reduce the administrative burden of teaching, and spend more time doing the things they intended to do when becoming a teacher.
• SchoolAI: Kevin describes SchoolAI as “an AI-powered system built by teachers for teachers to help educators reach every student, every day.” Perhaps the most popular feature of the program is Spaces, which allows teachers to create custom chatbots for students to use. Spaces also aggregates feedback for teachers. In addition to the student-facing Spaces, there are many teacher tools in SchoolAI, including a teacher dashboard that summarizes student insights based on their interactions with the chatbots.
• Assistants: Within SchoolAI, there are features called Assistants that are designed to help teachers complete daily tasks. Kevin explains, “Assistants are kind of purpose-built agents that will help the teacher with things like modernizing or adapting their instruction and content to make it more relevant for their audience of students. There are time-saving things, like Co-Teacher, that can help you with writing, email, productivity-type stuff, but it can also give you really good ideas and even help you prompt a Space to set it up to carry out something for you.” Additionally, there are tools that can be used to build instructional content, produce images, and more.
• New Releases: While full details are forthcoming, SchoolAI will be announcing a major new release at the ISTE conference later this month. Kevin says, “Come visit us at the booth. We’re gonna have amazing swag, and we’re gonna be doing this grand unveiling.”
• Student Agency: Part of Kevin’s motivation for providing students with agency in their learning stems from his personal experience as a student. He says, “Unfortunately, my childhood was filled with a lot of circumstances that were pretty challenging at the time. I was raised by my grandparents, and a lot of times when I went into class, when I started my day, I was carrying something . . . too heavy for the subject area I was going into, and I would be grappling with the joys of learning algebra but contending with something that happened last night or morning. Regardless of how good the instruction was and how prepared the teacher was, I myself, my brain was in a different place and was struggling.” Later, when learning medical terminology, he had a teacher who gave him more agency in how he would learn, and it flipped a switch for him. He says, “It felt like the first real time that I had agency and choice in how I was going about learning.”
• Overcoming Barriers: Kevin shares, “I look now at school, and when I think about engaging students, I think about all of the things that are going on that prevent a student from being engaged like myself—home life being a barrier. But for most students, it’s anything from lack of relevance to them, a low sense of agency, fears of failure . . . you don’t have the relationships you wish you had in school, health challenges, language barriers, cultural differences, static and passive environment—the list goes on. All these different things get in the way of a student showing up and giving themself to the moment. And so with SchoolAI, a lot of that is baked into the functionality and the features that are there that help meet a student that maybe did go through something hard that morning or that weekend that feels alone in middle school and allows them to not be afraid to interact and put themselves out there a little bit, and [to] feel heard, feel seen.”
• Helping Teachers: Kevin says, “The best part of my job is being able to spend time with teachers that use SchoolAI.” A recent conversation stands out, where a teacher shared that after starting to use Spaces, she was now considering teaching for a couple more years, when previously, she had felt burnt out and was planning to quit. She previously felt that she couldn’t show up the way she wanted to for all her students. SchoolAI changed that and has allowed her to meet her students’ needs in a way that has been more fulfilling.
• Student Perspectives: Kevin has been pleased with student feedback about SchoolAI. Many are using it as a language translator, which Kevin says is “a lifeline for them.” He adds that as many as 70–80% of the students he talks to express discomfort with using a tool not sanctioned by their teacher. They want to work within the rules and are relieved and feel empowered when teachers allow an AI tool like SchoolAI to be used. They say, “It feels good to use this when my teacher shares it. It’s really, really helpful. I don’t feel like my hand is raised all class anymore. I can ask a question in the moment.” Kevin says, “Wherever you’re at in policy development, and working with your community, and how you’re going about AI, the quicker you can get to some version of proactive, sanctioned use, the quicker you’re going to be reaching the majority of those students that are having a lot of discomfort right now with what they are supposed to be doing and not doing.”
• Bilingual Mode: Kevin reiterates that one of his favorite features is bilingual mode within the Sidekick application. Sidekick acts like a personal tutor for each student. He explains, “If you just put in the instructions, ‘Send every message in English and [insert language],’ it actually will add a nice little line break, and it will send the message in English and the language. And you can even have it send it in multiple languages at once.” There are well over 100 languages available in SchoolAI.
• Hope for the Future: Kevin has lots of ideas for what he’d like to see in the future. One that comes to mind immediately is the wish for “a learning companion that goes along with a student’s progression, that understands what they’re going through—what helps them the most when they are diving into a new subject, the type of help they like to receive, and all of that adds up to a student feeling very high agency in the learning process. That they feel like they have choice; that if there’s a thread, they can pull on it. The curiosity is satiated, that they’re able to actually figure something out and keep going.” He says, “My optimism is that learning gets incredibly personalized in a way that creates this continuity and builds upon itself year after year for a student all the way into whatever it is they choose to go into.”
• Security and Privacy: Kevin says that this is “an area we take incredibly seriously at SchoolAI.” They have worked with many states and organizations “to really understand what needs need to be met there.” They strive to go above and beyond what is required, so schools don’t need to worry about safety and security and can focus on functionality of the product.
• Kevin’s Toolkit: He says, “Build the habit.” Choose one area of need, use AI to meet that need, and do it every day to develop your AI skills.
• Kevin’s One Thing: “My hope and dream is that more teachers are spending more time in the classroom doing what led to them getting into teaching in the first place—what actually was behind that decision. And there are just so many other things on a teacher’s plate. . . . I hope that teachers can be ruthless in getting back to that pure intent that led to that profession in the first place, and they can focus on being that teacher for that student.”