Khan Academy's Writing Coach

In today’s episode, we'll explore the features and functionality of Writing Coach, Khan Academy's new collaboration with Google Gemini. Visit AVID Open Access to learn more.

Transcript

Paul Beckermann 0:00
Welcome to Tech Talk for Teachers. I'm your host, Paul Beckermann.

Transition Music with Rena's Children 0:05
Check it out. Check it out. Check it out. What's in the toolkit? Check it out.

Paul Beckermann 0:15
The topic of today's episode is Khan Academy Writing Coach. On January 21, 2026, Google announced a partnership with the nonprofit organization Khan Academy to build a new educational tool powered by Gemini AI. Sal Khan, the founder and CEO of Khan Academy, had this to say about the partnership: "School district leaders are telling us that one of the biggest challenges they face right now is helping middle and high school students who are behind academically, especially in reading and language arts. We're proud to partner with Google to provide AI tools designed to improve reading and writing, enabling teachers to spend more time directly supporting the students who need their help the most."

Paul Beckermann 0:59
The product I'm going to focus on in today's episode is called the Writing Coach tool. It's free for teachers and students and has been designed for students in grades seven through twelve. If your school does not subscribe to Khanmigo, the paid product, you can still have students set up their own free accounts. If you do this, of course, be sure to check with local leadership to ensure that you're abiding by all local, state, and federal guidelines for setting up student accounts.

So what is the Khan Academy Writing Coach? Well, in simple terms, it's an engaging, interactive online learning experience where students are guided through the writing process by a series of prompts. The process follows steps that you'd expect in a traditional writing process: understanding, outlining, drafting, and revising. The writing task is assigned by the teacher, who can choose from one of the available assignments or they can design one of their own from scratch. Teachers share that assignment with students using either a join code or a URL.

Once students have accepted the invite, they will appear in the teacher dashboard, where teachers can follow student progress and review their interactions with the program. The program itself is powered by Google's Gemini AI, and it's designed to guide the student without doing the writing for them. As its name implies, it coaches them through the writing process. As a former writing teacher myself, this is really important. Teachers don't want the AI to do the writing for the students.

Paul Beckermann 2:27
With that big picture in mind, I'm going to walk you through the process of setting up an assignment step by step so I can share some of the more nuanced details of the program.

Step one: Sign up. Before you can do anything, you and your students will need to create your free accounts. You'll do this at khanmigo.ai. If your school subscribes to a paid version of Khanmigo, your students will already have accounts. If not, then students will need to go set up a free account to access the Writing Coach. Again, be sure to adhere to all local, state, and national guidelines for having students set up these accounts.

With your teacher account, Khanmigo offers much more than just the Writing Coach tool. In fact, there's a big palette of free teacher resources that includes things like a booklet generator, class newsletter, discussion prompts, exit tickets, IEP assistant, lesson plan, question generator, real-world context generator, rubric generator, and a whole bunch of other ones. The paid tier of Khanmigo opens up additional student-centered experiences as well, but the teacher resources are free, even with the free account.

Paul Beckermann 3:31
Step two: Access the Writing Coach. To access the Writing Coach, click the Khanmigo menu at the top and choose the Writing Coach option. This will take you to a screen where you'll create, access, and manage your assignments. There are three main menu options to choose from. The first is the Explore and Assign option, where you'll either choose from a prompt library or develop an assignment of your own. Then there's an Assignments option where you'll be able to see all of your assignments as well as review student progress. Finally, there's a handy Student Preview option.

Step three: Create an assignment. To do this, we're going to click on the Explore and Design menu option that I mentioned. We'll then see a screen where we can explore essay prompts or create our own. Currently, there are premade assignments for English Language Arts and Social Studies. Under ELA, you can choose from three types of essays: persuasive, explanatory, and literary analysis. Some of the premade examples include a school dress code debate, an essay about Romeo and Juliet where students explain who they think is responsible for the tragedy, a compare and contrast essay, and more.

Under Social Studies, the topics are broken down a little differently. On that screen, you can choose by U.S. History, AP World History, World History, Government and Civics, and OER Project, which stands for Open Educational Resources. Examples of topics here include civil society during World War One and World War Two, "What if the Bill of Rights didn't exist?", globalization and the digital revolution, security and freedom after 9/11, and many more.

Even if you choose one of these premade options, you can still edit the details as needed to meet your unique needs and curricular objectives. If you're looking to create your own assignment, you can do that too. Simply click the "Use my own prompt" link at the top right corner of the screen and complete the necessary fields. Here you can choose to have students engage in the full essay writing process or just get help with feedback and revision of an essay they've already written. There's a checkbox for each of these options. Simply pick the one you want, fill in the assignment title, grade level, essay type, instructions, and either choose a class or create a new one to assign the work.

When you click the button to create the assignment, you will be presented with both the join code and a URL link. Students can access the assignment either way. The URL is especially handy for posting it into your learning management system as a way to quickly share with your students.

Step number four: Students complete the assignment. This is the important part, the point where students get to engage in the experience and improve their writing skills. I'll share what this experience looks like by using the Romeo and Juliet essay example, where students need to make a claim and defend their answer in the essay.

Their work begins with the Understanding step. This is basically where the assignment is presented to the students. The added functionality here is that students can use the embedded AI chatbot to ask questions and get clarifications about the assignment. If the AI doesn't answer the question, the students can still ask you, but this is helpful when you have a whole class of students needing help all at once. Students must click "I understand" to advance to the next step. Once they do that, they click "Next: Start outlining."

In the Outlining phase, students are prompted to write a thesis or a claim, create topic sentences for their paragraphs, and plan out support by providing evidence and examples. They must also explain how this evidence supports the claim. They do this by filling in prompt boxes that are organized in an outline. If they're not sure what to do, they can click the "I'm stuck" button above the chatbot. They can ask the chatbot questions, and they can have the AI check their outline up to that point and provide feedback on their work. The Writing Coach is designed to prompt the student for ideas and not complete the work for them.

The next step is the Drafting stage. Here, students see their outline as they draft their writing in the on-screen editor. They have the option of copy-pasting ideas from their outline into the drafting area. Again, they can ask a chatbot for help or tell it that they're stuck. They can also review the original assignment to make sure that they're still on the right track.

Paul Beckermann 7:50
Next, students advance to the Revising stage. Here, the AI scans and analyzes their essay. Based on its analysis, it offers suggestions in several categories. In my example, I received one suggestion on the thesis and focus area, four regarding evidence and reasoning, three for structure and organization, and three for language usage.

When I click on one of the categories, it gives me positive feedback on what I've done well and then offers its suggestion with an explanation. Based on the feedback received, the student then revises the writing or clicks on one of the available prompts. In the case of the thesis statement, feedback prompts included "Give me an example," "Check my revision," "Explain suggestion," and "Ask a question." Of course, they can always type their own question into the chatbot. When the student is satisfied with the revision, they click "Mark as resolved." Again, the AI is coaching the student through the process and providing examples and explanations, much a human coach would do.

Paul Beckermann 8:54
Finally, the student marks their essay as complete and exports it into one of three formats: Microsoft Word, a PDF, or Save to Google Drive. This finished work can then be submitted to the teacher using the classroom's own learning management system or digital submission process.

Step number five: Teacher review. At any point in the process, teachers can access the assignment dashboard and review student progress. Here they can see how many of the writing process steps have been completed, the date last modified, how much time was spent on the assignment as well as a breakdown by each of the four stages, a current word count, and how many writing suggestions have been offered by the AI and also resolved by the student.

There is even an option to view originality concerns. If the dashboard flags originality as critical, the teacher can click the link and see what has flagged that critical alert. Typically, this means that a student has pasted in a large section of content without further revision. If you receive a notification like this, it's a good time to have a conversation with the student to better understand the situation and see if the student is struggling. Additionally, teachers can zoom in and see a transcript of all the student interactions and chats with the AI Writing Coach.

Paul Beckermann 10:12
Now, while the Khan Academy Writing Coach is not a replacement for a good writing teacher, it can be a helpful assistant in the process. It can help to provide personalized guidance throughout the writing process and generate timely feedback. This can free the teacher up to engage one-on-one with students who need that extra assistance. It can also be a great tool for helping guide students to better quality writing in core content areas, social studies, where the writing is important but the subject matter content is the area of most importance and most focus.

Paul Beckermann 10:46
To learn more about today's topic and explore other free resources, visit AvidOpenAccess.org. Specifically, I encourage you to check out the article collection "AI and the K–12 Classroom." And of course, be sure to join Rena Winston and me every Wednesday for our full-length podcast, Unpacking Education, where we're joined by exceptional guests and explore education topics that are important to you.

Thanks for listening. Take care, and thanks for all you do. You make a difference.