Instant Feedback For Your Writers!

Kia ora, ko Andy toku ingoa - I was a Y5-8 kaiako in Wellington for over a decade, until I burned out and quit. Since then, I've worked to build online tools that reduce kaiako workload and hopefully make the profession a bit more sustainable.

One of my most time-consuming tasks as a kaiako was giving feedback on ākonga draft writing, which was largely done using Google Classroom and Docs. This usually got done over 2-3 hours at weekends, taking time that I'd rather spend with my partner and our three children, who are young but growing at an absolutely terrifying speed, and were never happy to hear ‘I can’t, I’ve got too much to do’ when they asked me to join them for football, or Minecraft, or Lego.

And so a year ago, I launched Aiako.nz, an AI-powered teaching assistant that can connect to Google Classroom, read your students’ draft texts, write feedback for them (related to your learning intentions) and post it as a comment back to the student's doc, helping them to redraft and refine their text. Since then, kaiako from nearly 200 schools around Aotearoa NZ have signed up for Aiako, saving them between 15 minutes and three hours each week while still supporting their learners to develop their writing skills with instant, actionable, formative feedback.

Martin from Learning First's recent keynote showed us that for feedback to be genuinely useful to ākonga, it must be fast, fair, and actioned. However, it's near-impossible for kaiako to give comprehensive feedback on each piece of writing from a class of 30 ākonga, as soon as each child finishes. But with Aiako - you can. It's no problem now to give comprehensive, actionable feedback focused on specific skills or success criteria to a single student in seconds, or to your entire class in just a minute or two.

Sample of feedback written by Aiako on Finn’s use of Narrative Structure. 

After writing feedback, you can edit, simplify, copy, and/or post it as a comment.

In addition to being timely, feedback must also be actioned. One thing that many kaiako love about Aiako is that it is great at supporting ākonga with next steps, making helpful suggestions about how they might edit their work to have greater clarity or impact, or reach the next stage on a supplied rubric.

Many of Aiako's recent improvements were built in collaboration with kaiako around the motu. A kaiako from Mt Maunganui pointed out that the predefined feedback categories were a bit rigid and didn't quite work for her class; days later, Aiako launched customisable feedback categories. A kaiako from Palmerston North requested support for Google Classroom rubrics - and now Aiako can refer to your own rubrics, so the feedback it writes is 100% focused on the same skills that you are teaching in class.

So if you are a kaiako who uses Google Classroom, feel like you are working too many hours in a week (I’m joking, of course - this is all kaiako), and think you might benefit from automating this one important but hugely time-consuming task, give Aiako a go! If you click this link then sign in with your school Google account, then you'll get Aiako free and unlimited for a month. Join the hundreds of kaiako across Aotearoa who are using Aiako to make their lives easier, and their ākonga better writers.

If you try Aiako and you have any ideas to further improve it, please let me know - I'm motivated to help keep our amazing kaiako from burning out, and I genuinely think I've built something here that can improve your quality of life while still helping your learners to succeed.

Andy Little was a primary kaiako in New Zealand before burning out and switching careers to become a software engineer, which is far less interesting than teaching, but also a million times less stressful. He knows first-hand the immense amount of work expected from modern kaiakos, and is passionate about supporting great educators to stay in the profession by making their workload more manageable.