Today, we’re excited to officially announce MirrorTalk.ai the mobile and web version of the Mirror, which we launched earlier this year. MirrorTalk has free and premium plans to cover everyone’s needs.

MirrorTalk is a tool for reflecting out loud that can be customized and focused for assessment, creative thinking, motivation, development, and more. Each reflection brings AI-powered insights on how you are thinking, and how to improve.

Modernity has made us less reflective than we’ve ever been. While engagement gets the overwhelming priority in education and life, we already know learning comes from reflection. Our aim is to restore the balance in our minds between engagement and reflection by leveraging AI to open up unique opportunities that aid how we reflect. 

Reflecting with MirrorTalk is as simple as talking about what you’re working on. Start by stating your learning objective, and you’ll immediately get a set of customized reflection prompts, which can be tailored to the language, length, or focus that fits your needs. From there, MirrorTalk helps you talk it out in the comfort of an objective and impartial listener. When you’re done, you get instant feedback, insights, and scores to help you understand and improve your thinking. You can use it yourself or assign reflections to students, teachers, leaders, and more. 

The reflective foundations

MirrorTalk automates reflection so you can talk it out with the frequency and personalization you’ve always wanted, but didn’t think you had the time for. And MirrorTalk’s Dashboard shows you insights about your thinking you may never have realized you needed, until now.

The lesson

Based on your reflection, we identify the Lesson – a learning gap or adaptive lesson that you may be struggling with. It’s like having developmental psychologists Jean Piaget or Robert Kegan consult you on any one of your reflections. 

Understanding

By reporting on how well you construct knowledge and derive meaning, Understanding identifies how you’re generating insights or coming to new realizations.

Zone

Based on Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), Zone identifies the optimal stress levels for your learning activities and helps you fine-tune the challenges you take on. 

Mindset

Expanding on Carol Dweck’s work, Mirror analyzes your thinking for evidence of a fixed or growth Mindset, then goes even deeper, analyzing the tone of your self-talk and the level of motivation represented in your thinking.

We even present data on developmental stages, cognitive and social skills, and cognitive biases. We also have more unique and powerful insights in the works.

MirrorTalk for everyone

MirrorTalk’s reflections can be customized for PK-12, higher education, and adults, and both the content and language of dashboard insights are developmentally appropriate for the participant.

• K12 classrooms: Set up reflections on any learning objective, for any grade, with the ability to focus on depth of knowledge, retrieval, creativity, problem solving, and more. Get feedback on how students are understanding what they need to learn and use our reflective foundations to guide curriculum, assessments, and PD.

• Professional Development: Most PD and coaching initiatives are slow and create dependence on institutions to make progress. MirrorTalk gets teachers thinking in motion automatically and prepares them to take on curriculum changes, formal coaching, certifications, and more. Also, we believe using MirrorTalk with students – to peer inside the minds of learners – is the next great leap forward beyond feedback from video coaching.

• Higher Ed: Help students across the whole university stay engaged in their academic growth, and help specific departments create better outcomes. Aid student teachers in their field work and even get them instant feedback on their lesson plans from reflection data of the students they are teaching.

New possibilities

We believe MirrorTalk opens up new possibilities in education and for humanity itself. Not only does it help restore balance in our minds with time spent over-engaging, it could help us reflect more. By helping people learn foundational life lessons with less difficulty and suffering, our vision is to help everyone learn and grow better than ever before. 

Get started

Ready to experience MirrorTalk? Sign up on the web or download the mobile app today and get a 90-day trial of our Pro plan, absolutely free. After that, you can continue using the free version, or invest in a plan that fits your needs. Plus, don’t miss the chance to demo the Mirror hardware device, and experience its power as a 3-in-1 reflection station, recording tool, and interactive small group guide. 

In a constantly accelerating world, the ability to adapt is more important than ever. Investing in building students’ and teachers’ reflective foundations will make it possible for everyone to thrive.

The post Introducing MirrorTalk.ai appeared first on Swivl.

In our latest Mirror release, we’ve listened to your feedback and are excited to bring you improved workflows, enhanced visibility for reflection feedback, and more. These updates make reflecting with Mirror more insightful and accessible for educators and students.

Faster student and teacher workflows

Logging in and exiting group mode is now more seamless with email and pin code access. This provides a smoother and more secure log-in experience and takes another thing off a teacher’s plate.

After unlocking student mode, teachers are now brought directly to the Dashboard. This helps teachers gain insights about their students’ learning gaps even faster. 

Immediate feedback on the dashboard

Immediate feedback is now surfaced on the dashboard. This provides a better experience for both teachers and students, allowing them another opportunity to learn from feedback and improve their reflective skills faster.

Other improvements

In addition to these features, we’ve made several other improvements and updates:

• Reflections will continue uploading even after you logout or shutdown your Mirror before the upload has finished.
• The Coach role now allows instructional coaches to view all reflections within a Group.

Next steps

As always, your feedback drives our improvements, and we’re committed to making Mirror better for everyone.

What’s next? Set up your reflections with these new features and tag @Swivl on X to share your experiences.

Join the Mirror demo program

If you want to experience the power of Mirror for individual and group reflection, sign up for the Mirror demo program. This free trial is open to all educators based in the United States and Canada.

The post Mirror release: May 23, 2024 appeared first on Swivl.

¡Mirror ahora admite estudiantes de inglés que hablan español! (Mirror now supports Spanish speaking English language learners!) In our constant pursuit to make reflection a priority for every learner and every classroom activity, this week’s release expands our commitment toward transparency and inclusivity – and not just for students. In addition to Spanish support, we’ve created a more immediate path to notifying teachers when student reflections contain dangerous or harmful speech and also improved how adults reflect with Mirror.

Spanish support for reflections

Mirror helps build the reflective skills of every student, regardless of age, ability, and language barrier. This week’s focus on the language barrier supports native Spanish speakers (more languages will be coming soon!) delivering prompts generated in Spanish and encouraging feedback provided in Spanish as well, instantly surfacing feel-good advice for students on their thinking and ways to improve for next time.

We’ve heard from so many users in our demo program about the need to emphasize reflection with their ELLs. While many students struggle with expressing their thoughts about their learning, this is especially true for non-native speakers who struggle forming connections with teachers and classmates due to their language barrier. One Principal in Tennessee told us:

“ELL support is huge for us. We have 5th grade ELLs who are completely new to the country and our school. Getting them to reflect on their experiences with Mirror is an excellent opportunity to get them speaking in general and we’re able to gain lots of insights of where they need the most academic support.”

Promoting safety

We recently emphasized that reflection is the key to learning and that in order for students to be successful with it, they need to integrate learning and social-emotional development. Sometimes when students are asked about their feelings – and they aren’t limited by social pressure they might feel with another student or adult – it may open them up to discussing traumatic experiences. That’s why with our latest update, you’ll receive an email alert the moment a student has shared any dangerous or harmful information so you can take swift steps to support them when they need you most. 

Adults are reflective learners too

Reflection is not just a powerful tool for students and whether you’re in a higher-ed environment, professional learning community, or you’re just trying to find ways to improve classroom instruction, reflection can be the key to understanding your own blindspots and misconceptions about your approaches. And like last week when we made improvements to grade level appropriateness for assessing student reflections, with the new Adult group type, personal reflection and feedback will now be more age appropriate for people like you, too! Additionally, the changes bring more authentic participation to reflection communities you build with colleagues; you can reflect in the group while still maintaining autonomy to set up prompts that are unique to your reflective journey.

¿Listo para empezar?/Ready to get started?

Join the Mirror demo program

If you want to experience the power of automating reflections firsthand, sign up for the Mirror demo program. This free trial is open to all educators based in the United States and Canada.

The post Mirror release: April 29, 2024 appeared first on Swivl.

In this week’s release, we’re bringing more delight, more motivation, and more learning to the student experience. How are we doing that? Instant feedback on student reflections!

This update also includes: the new Summative Focus for end of year reflections, flexible response times for adults and older students, and better insights.

Now, students get personalized feedback read aloud to them just seconds after they complete a reflection. We’ve heard from many Mirror demo users that reflection feedback is the most powerful part of the experience. But until now, there was no easy, immediate way for students to access their feedback. With this update, we’re excited to see how students can become even more invested in building their reflective skills, as they instantly read and hear about the insights they’ve shared, and how they can reflect even more deeply next time.

There’s no better way to experience the new instant feedback feature than with the new Summative focus. This reflection focus works perfectly for end-of-year student reflections, and can help you simplify your summer planning, amplify your productivity, and even deepen connectivity with students one last time before they advance grade levels. Use this focus with Workspace to automate and add reflection to end-of-year group projects. 

To make reflecting with Mirror more flexible across ages and grade levels, we’ve updated the way response times work. Users now have 15 seconds to reflect on each question as a default. For younger students, 15 seconds is the limit. However, older students and adult users have unlimited time to respond, with the option to move on to the next question when they’re ready.

In addition to these updates, we’ve also improved insights across all reflections, making them more grade-level appropriate.

Don’t have Mirror yet? See below.

The Mirror demo program

If you want to experience the power of automating reflections firsthand, sign up for the Mirror demo program. This free trial is open to all educators based in the United States and Canada.

The post Mirror release: April 18, 2024 appeared first on Swivl.

End of year reflections are often used by teachers after the testing season winds down and everyone needs a little time to decompress. But it still takes class time to implement it with pen and paper (or digital form!) and the results are often treated like an exit ticket, rather than a thoughtful and insightful measure of learning that took place throughout a year. And more often than not, this data ends up living in a gradebook or a folder, but rarely is it used to help shape a student’s future.

We think end of year reflections with Mirror can motivate students to set better goals, improve their empathy for each other, and more strongly measure a teacher’s impact than other assessment tools. In about one minute per student using Mirror’s AI, teachers are able to identify gaps and opportunities in their student’s abilities and are shown insights into their sentiment, objective understanding, and mental transformations. 

So if you think you don’t have time before the year ends to collect this kind of data from reflection alone –  think, think, and THINK again, because Mirror makes it possible.

1. Set goals and improve resilience

Reflection is a surefire way to get students thinking realistically about their goals for next year and set their own plans into motion to tackle challenges they faced this year. And as their teacher who is sending them off to face those challenges, what if you could pay these insights forward? Imagine sharing with their future teacher a holistic view of every student – not just their test scores – wrapped up in an easy-to-read reflection card in the time it took you to type their email address? With Mirror, you can.

With Mirror’s newest Summative Focus we help students consider their yearlong achievements and their setbacks, and we offer encouraging feedback to keep them feeling motivated and improve their resilience throughout the process. Some example prompts include:

• What did you discover about your learning style or strategies that helped you overcome challenges during projects this year? 

• What new strategies or approaches would you like to try in future projects? 

• Describe a moment this year when you felt really proud of something you accomplished.

2. Build empathy during project-based learning

The end of the school year is the perfect time to have students dive into creative self-led projects in groups. Mirror’s Workspaces guides students through the project, keeps them engaged, and has them reflect in small groups. 

When students work in small groups they are exposed to each other’s communication and learning styles and must learn to cooperate. This often means developing a vocabulary that is appropriate to the classroom, and it’s not uncommon for conflict to ensue as a result. However, these group experiences give students invaluable insight into their relationships with other students and sharpens their understanding of the role they play in conflicts. 

With Mirror, students can reflect on collaborative projects they participated in, and start considering their classmates’ feelings and perspectives in ways that didn’t seem obvious to them while working together. As a result, reflection can increase empathy in students leading to a stronger, more positive classroom community. Now that’s how you end your school year strong, don’t you think?

3. Student insights = your impact

Reflecting with Mirror gives you tailored insights to support your students before they leave your class, and it also helps you realize the enormous impact you made on them throughout the year. Everything your students learned in your class was because of you and the environment you created for them to learn in. And when students reflect on what they learned, you’ll also be able to identify trends in your teaching that you’d like to improve for next year. Through Mirror’s data dashboard, you’ll be able to uncover teaching blind spots and identify where the learning gaps occurred so you can clearly identify areas in your curriculum that you can improve.

Time and energy will always compete for attention in your classroom, but particularly at the end of year when everyone is running short on steam. With Mirror, it’s truly possible to make reflection a part of every learning activity, for every student, every day.

The Mirror demo program

If you’re interested in using Mirror for end of year reflections, you can still try Mirror for 30 days free.

The post Think you don’t have time to reflect before EOY? Think, think, and THINK, again. appeared first on Swivl.

In this week’s release, we’re heavily focused on bringing reflection to groups, increasing a teacher’s autonomy, and making reflection even more inclusive. Our updates include: enhancing Workspace, easier entry points to get started with reflection, and expansion of grade level support. 

In our recent post, Get more out of groups with reflection, we shared how Mirror makes small group reflection possible, so you can work more autonomously 1:1 with other students, improve collaboration and project-based learning, and still reap tremendous insights about the learning that occurred in the groups you did not directly work with. To recap, Workspace offers:

• Step by step recorded instructions to aid autonomous group learning
• Visual and collaborative tools that support projects such as Whiteboard and Recordings
• Built-in brain breaks
• And customized reflective prompts so you can uncover every learner’s needs every time the group reflects 

Speaking of our customization, we’ve made it even faster to get started with reflection by offering a default two-question experience. Reflections are customizable by grade level, adding more Dimensions (Facts, Feelings, Findings, and Future), applying a Focus (Depth of Knowledge, Retrieval, Improving Relationships), etc., and aligning to your Goal (by recording your lesson objective). 

To support reflection for any age, we just added Pre-K support and improved our question handling and AI analysis across the grade levels. For every student to succeed with the skill of reflection, they must be able to answer questions that are appropriate to their level. And for teachers to succeed in coaching their students with improving those reflective skills, AI scoring and feedback must be leveled appropriately, too. 

We’re also helping students become more comfortable with Mirror by enabling audio-only reflection as the default. When students acclimate more to the process of opening up, you can easily toggle the video on again when you customize your reflections.

Our users’ feedback continues to forge Mirror’s path, so here are some other changes on Mirror that will make reflection more effective and impactful in your class:

• Ability to save the Whiteboard activity with each reflection
• Download reflection videos on mirrortalk.ai
• Questions remain visible on the screen throughout the reflection, so learners are better able to focus on their response, rather than trying to remember the question

When we improve the customization of a reflection and the tools that support reflection, the data you derive from reflection improves too. We’re turning reflection from an art into a scientific skill that can be measured, automatically by AI, to help everyone in your classroom strive toward better outcomes.

Don’t have Mirror yet? See below.

The Mirror demo program

If you want to experience the power of automating reflections firsthand, sign up for the Mirror demo program. This free trial is open to all educators based in the United States and Canada.

The post Mirror release: March 27, 2024 appeared first on Swivl.

It’s no surprise that companies and sports teams build reflection into their work. Leaders know that group reflection, like watching and discussing game tape, leads to deeper learning. We get better when we reflect together.

While group work is a staple in classrooms, group reflections are rare. The logistics of planning activities for and assessing group reflection have made it impractical. Until now.

With our next major Mirror release (Estimated March 25th), we’ll make group reflection more convenient, powerful and automated than ever. When we do, we’ll also – without irony – be making group work itself more convenient, powerful and automated than ever.  

This article will explain what’s coming and how you can expect to use it soon.

Just start a reflection

Set up the reflection as you normally would for individual students by adding a goal, a focus, dimensions, and more. Once it is set up, multiple students at once can pick their name/profile and get started. That’s it! Mirror is set up for group reflection out of the box. You don’t need to do anything. It even customizes the greeting for groups to help build camaraderie before they begin answering the reflective questions. Once complete, the reflective insights can start to give you a sense about how the whole group is thinking about their learning.

Pro tip: You can encourage more voices and avoid the same student speaking every time by adjusting the response length to longer intervals. 

It’s quick, easy and effective. But that’s just the beginning. During reflection setup, you also have the ability to add what we call the Workspace. This is where group work itself can be transformed. 

The Workspace has tools for you to build group activities that enhance learning and directly lead students toward reflection. All you need to do is add your first Step to get started with Workspace. These Steps are progressive instructions that include recorded and transcribed directions and incorporate various learning tools.

These directions and tools are presented automatically to any group of students that are using Mirror. All it takes is a couple minutes to set up, either on Mirror itself at Mirror on the web. You can add as few or as many steps as you like! 

Here we’ll outline some scaffolded examples of how to include Steps in your Workspaces. 

Recharge

Learning is stressful. Part of adapting to transitions in the classroom is figuring out how to quickly calm down and refocus from task to task. And reflection’s role in learning makes it worth making sure the transition was effective. To aid that, Mirror has a wide selection of tools for Recharging exercises – all of which take less than 2 minutes to minimize disruption. Exercises can be selected for their calming or energizing effects, or for whatever you think is appropriate for the classroom at that time. When done, students are automatically progressed into their reflection – refreshed with a new perspective – and for you to get those all important reflective insights on how they are thinking. 

Guided activity

Each step includes the option of voice recording and transcribed directions (which can also be typed). When activated for the student, the voice recording is automatically played. They can see the transcription throughout the activity and replay the directions as needed. You can guide students through any activity you desire! Want them to work with manipulatives? Perhaps they should practice their drawing skills? Want them to read a poem? All of that is now possible in a “learning center” that is fully automated. Once the activity is done, students are once again automatically prompted to reflect on that activity, accelerating the learning that just occurred, and furthering the insights you gain from how they are processing the experience. 

Pro tip: Want to add some constructive pressure to that activity? You can even set a countdown timer. 

Make it visual

The Workspace’s learning tools aren’t just for group directions and management, they are also for making learning visual. Just follow the same setup steps as before and select Whiteboard. Students will be presented with the same directions and a visual thinking canvas.  

They can work on math problems, mind maps, sketching skills and more! They can do it with Mirror standing upright or on its back for a real canvas experience.

Another tool to make thinking and skills visual is a Recording (which can also be used for capturing teaching skills). Have students practice delivery presentations or oral arguments. Both students and teachers will be able to “see” their skills in action. Once again, this activity is followed by a reflection on what they observed, what they realized, and insights about their thinking gets passed along to you. 

Multi-step activities

You can add as many steps as you like. As you add more steps, the more extended student work you can set up. For example, you could set up a Design Thinking exercise – build a spaghetti cantilever. Step 1 could be to watch a YouTube video to get some background knowledge or inspiration to start the project. Step 2 could be to use the whiteboard tool to sketch out their initial ideas. Step 3 could be to start prototyping and building at their desk with a time limit. Step 4 could be to record a presentation of their work so far, and then have them transition to a spoken reflection on what they learned from the experience. At the end, you will see a summary of the activity with reflective insights on what the students learned. 

At the end, you will see a summary of the activity with reflective insights on what the students learned. 

Multiple Mirrors

Long term, you can even imagine a classroom as having multiple Mirrors. This makes daily individual reflection even more accessible to every student. It also makes it possible for teachers to set up many autonomous small groups for project-based learning instead of just one. This would allow educators to circulate between groups and facilitate as they see fit instead of being anchored to one. And each group would be generating reflective insights for the teacher to gain a clearer picture of their work from day to day. This is one vision of a classroom of the future where teachers can truly teach at a higher order. 

More group work is better

We built Mirror to support group work and reflection for a reason. We believe more group work and more group reflection promotes better learning. 

Like teaching has gone from sage to guide, we also think technology – and more specifically personal devices – also needs to get out of the way to support learning. It’s proven that students learn better when they are engaged physically in what they are doing. Small group work also accelerates the development of their social emotional skills – they can observe each other, make eye contact and have to figure out how to work together. These are skills that are incredibly important toward retaining competitive advantage over AI. And prioritizing group work automatically promotes the kind of learning activities we want to see more of in classrooms – project based learning, design thinking, inquiry, and more. 

Time and logistics often limit what can be done in classrooms with groups. This is why technology CAN still help and why we made Mirror. It now makes it possible to do radically more small group work than ever. 

Stay tuned as our reflective insights for groups also make major leaps in the coming months ahead!

Don’t have Mirror yet? See below.

The Mirror demo program

If you want to experience the power of automating reflections firsthand, sign up for the Mirror demo program. This free trial is open to all educators based in the United States and Canada.

The post Get more out of groups with reflection appeared first on Swivl.

What if every reflection experience in your class perfectly fit the learner, the activity, and your objective?

How much more could you learn about student progress? Most importantly, how much more could students learn about themselves?

Today, we’re introducing new capabilities that make Mirror reflections perfect for any learning scenario or need. This is a massive leap towards fully-customized reflections for you and your students.

These updates include automatic alignment between reflection prompts and goals, an easier way to share feedback, and custom response time for reflections.

Customizing reflection with goals

With this release, we’re building on customization of the reflective prompts through our Goal feature. When you set up a reflection, you can apply a focus like depth of thinking, motivation, mindfulness and more – these options contextualize the questions to the selected framework and randomize the questions so the reflection always feels fresh for the student. 

Now, every time you record a goal, Mirror’s AI will further tailor the prompts to that stated goal. And for the most precision, the questions can still be edited by you, so you can always ensure your students are getting the best possible context that helps them align their thinking to your lesson.

By customizing students’ reflections with focus, goals, and workspaces, Mirror enables autonomous small group learning thereby granting you invaluable time to work with students who need more support.

And coming soon, you’ll gain further autonomy for small groups when we roll out guided steps for lessons in our workspace. 

Sharing feedback with students

We’ve heard from our earliest Mirror users that the reflection feedback loop Mirror’s AI is creating should be readily available to share with students and stakeholders to keep everyone on the same page about how students are reflecting and how well they understand your stated learning objectives. That’s why we’ve made it easier for you to share reflection feedback with students, admins, or parents directly from the Dashboard. 

Feedback generated by Mirror’s AI is always subjective to your judgment and you’re always in the driver’s seat when it comes to deciding what and how much to share. Each feedback card contains an overall reflection quality summary, insights from the key metrics in the Reflection Dashboard such as Goal ability, Sentiment, Evidence of Thinking, and Growth Mindset, and a link to watch the student’s reflection recording.

Customizing response time

Want to apply some pressure to elicit higher-order responses during reflection? Or maybe you’re trying to teach your students to express themselves more succinctly, without getting too lost in the weeds? Now you can customize student response time as you’re setting up a reflection, our new default is 15 seconds – down from 30 seconds, which our current demo users told us was just too long.

As we continue to develop Mirror, its conversational abilities will seem more natural and we don’t think a time limit will be necessary; in the meantime, we hope this small improvement helps you and students complete reflections more productively.

Next for Mirror

Until now, customizing the reflection experience for every learning scenario and need was simply too time-consuming. That’s why we’re so excited to see how you unlock reflection’s potential in your classroom with these new updates. 

What’s next? Use your Mirror’s customization features to set up student reflections for success. 

Then, tag @ Swivl on X to tell us how it went.

Don’t have Mirror yet? See below.

The Mirror demo program

If you want to experience the power of automating reflections firsthand, sign up for the Mirror demo program. This free trial is open to all educators based in the United States and Canada.

The post Mirror release: February 28, 2024 appeared first on Swivl.

A New Way Forward

April 26, 2024

Facts: What’s been going on?

• On Wednesday, we released an update to Mirror software that improved audio recording and uploading, and added an “Adult” group type, useful for higher-ed, PD groups and any situation where adults are reflecting. Be sure to update your Mirror next time you turn it on.

• What if there was a new way forward through the divide over SEL? One that integrates social and emotional development as part of academic learning. One that softens the lines and finds common ground between sides. We explain how Mirror makes this possible in our latest blog, a partnership with Illinois Digital Educators Alliance.

Feedback: What are we hearing?

This week, a Mirror user leading a teacher preparation program in the Midwest said:

“As I give feedback, I see related changes in Mirror quickly. Sometimes, with other programs, it can feel like the feedback’s going nowhere. I appreciate that feedback to the Mirror team is considered and implemented where appropriate.”

He’s right! We love hearing your feedback, and consider it carefully as we plan the Mirror roadmap. Have your own feedback to share? Reply to this email and let us know.

Future: What’s up next?

• Much-anticipated Spanish-language support is coming in the next 1-2 weeks, along with other heavily-requested updates, including a new pin-based login option, downloadable reflection transcripts, and more customization options for reflections.

• There’s still time to register for the Week of AI! Swivl is proud to be sponsoring this timely, super-practical event, filled with speakers like Holly Clark sharing their experiences with and tips for using AI for teaching and learning. Register today.

Findings: What are we thinking about?

This week, we’re thinking about paradoxes, and the role they play in hidden intelligence. So often, the limiting factor in learning something new is a paradox that we struggle to resolve.

These can be simple, like understanding that a fraction is both a part of a whole and its own entity. Or they can be complex, like a teacher trying to balance their own creativity with the bureaucracy of a large organization.

How does this relate to reflection? Reflective skills help us see what’s holding us back and set goals to move past those blockers. Feedback powered by reflective technology can even identify the paradoxes we may be facing, and by presenting them, reveal a path towards resolving them.

The importance of learning together

March 7, 2024

Facts: What’s been going on?

We’re hitting as many events as possible in 2024, and our travels continued this week with a stop at the Michigan Science Teachers Association Conference.

Swivl CEO Brian Lamb and Account Manager Julieann Derra were there to spread the word about reflection’s potential and share Mirror with as many educators as possible. They were joined by Mirror user, Science teacher, and Swivl community member Keith Piccard (@KeithPiccard), who helped attendees see Mirror’s potential for their work. One takeaway is that Science teachers see Mirror as a support for group work like labs and experiments.

Findings: What are we thinking about?

A study came out this week that demonstrated again the importance of writing and physical interaction towards learning. This has us thinking even deeper about how we support small group work with Mirror.

Our original vision was based on realizing there was no technology dedicated to supporting small group work, and nothing built for AI interaction through cameras and voice. We were inspired by the idea of technology moving to the side, so students can engage with each other in physical space.

We are starting to wonder if this is why so many of our demo users and teachers we’ve met at conferences are asking for small group support tools. Perhaps they see the need to make learning physical and social again. Perhaps they see Mirror’s potential in making that happen.

We’ve been prioritizing individual reflections in our development work, but now we’re pushing extra hard to get our small group support tools out.

Feedback: What are we hearing?

(1)  Illinois-based history and government teacher Chris Johnson recently shared how he is using Mirror to have students reflect on final projects.

(2) Teachers are telling us that they wish all of their students could reflect during one class period. We know that class time is scarce, and we’re working on a few solutions to make this a reality. Read more about those below.

Future: What’s up next?

• Shorter question sets are coming soon. When needed, shorter questions help more students to reflect in the same amount of time. Mirror experiences for phone, tablet, and web are coming soon. This means teachers and students can reflect with more flexibility, both in school and at home.

• In about a week or two, demo users will have a chance to try new, more powerful group work features. Our design and development teams are putting the finishing touches on a new experience that allows teachers to create plans with guided steps, paired tools, audio instructions–and a reflection at the end, of course.

A step forward in customization

February 29, 2024

Findings: What are we thinking about?

What if every reflection experience in your class perfectly fit the learner, the activity, and your objective?

How much more could you learn about student progress? Most importantly, how much more could students learn about themselves?

Until now, customizing the reflection experience for every learning scenario and need was simply too time-consuming. 

That experience is now possible with Mirror.

Facts: What’s been going on?

Mirror 3.1

Mirror 3.1, released February 28, 2024, allows you to customize reflections and unlock new potential for reflection’s place in the classroom. 

You can customize reflections by choosing a focus like Mindfulness, Gratitude or Depth of Knowledge. You can also customize reflections based on the teacher’s stated learning goal.

Combining a focus like Depth of Knowledge with a stated learning goal unlocks new potential for reflection, turning the experience into a classic assessment of student learning. When you consider all the ways Mirror’s focus options can be customized by teacher goals, the options are endless.

Current users: Update your Mirror today to take advantage of these exciting new customization features!

AACTE

In other news, our colleagues Mike and Edward recently attended the higher education conference AACTE. There, they explored use cases for Mirror with higher ed professionals, and discussed the growing demand for using Mirror with student  teachers to create a multi-layered reflection program. 

#IDEACon

A few states over, our colleagues Adam, Julieann, Rachel, and Sara attended #IDEACon this past weekend. Dozens of educators had a chance to try Mirror, and heard Rachel speak about the Potential of Reflection. Here’s conference attendees and speakers Tisha Richmond (@tishrich), and Andrew Easton (@EastonA1) with Sara and Adam (right). 

Feedback: What are we hearing?

Elementary and early childhood education (ECE) teachers tell us they are happy that Mirror is “AI lite.” 

In other words, we bring the power of AI to automate reflection, without the data and privacy concerns that come with other AI tools. Students don’t have direct interaction with AI through Mirror, and we don’t share any student data with AI.

Even though we’re using AI, we’re doing it in a way where teachers have full control. It’s a teacher AI tool, not a student AI tool.

You can generate questions, but then preview them and edit them, before students ever see them. And that’s something that nearly everyone can get on board with.

Future: What’s up next?

• Speaking of elementary and ECE, we’re hard at work to make Mirror a better reflection experience for our youngest learners. We’re putting the finishing touches on several features that make Mirror more accessible and effective for Pre-K and early elementary students.

• Swivl CEO Brian Lamb will join our colleague Julieann at the Michigan Science Teachers Association conference this week with user and community member Keith Piccard (@KeithPiccard). If you plan to attend, come hear them speak about the Potential of Reflection with Mirror.

The post Swivl’s reflections appeared first on Swivl.

Today, we’re announcing the first major software release for Mirror, designed to help educators launch automated student reflections in thirty seconds or less.

Powered by feedback from early users, we’re introducing new capabilities that make Mirror reflections perfect for any learning scenario or need.

Customization

We know from our earliest Mirror users and demo program participants that reflection is important, but to make it a routine, it must be meaningful for every reflector.

An experience where, in 30 seconds or less, a teacher can create prompts for students to reflect. In this release, you can record a goal, objective, or intention for students – important for setting them up for success, but also a great way to hold them accountable for their learning. Additionally, we’ve improved the ways questions can be delivered, allowing you to choose a focus area that either augments the rigor of reflections or teaches students other approaches to thinking about their work, such as focusing on gratitude, motivation, or mindfulness. Finally, we’re continuing to deliver time-saving tools by offering templates that save you time and help make reflection a repeatable routine. 

And soon, Mirror’s AI will generate questions based on your provided goal so you can begin aligning student reflections to your instructional standards and build a tighter feedback loop with them using insights from your Reflection dashboard.

A more interactive and engaging reflection

We know that reflection doesn’t just become a priority in class because teachers love how it saves them time uncovering pain points in their student learning, students have to love it too. To help you make reflection a successful, repeatable routine, we built in a simple, but powerful greeting to get students just as excited about it as you are. Inspired by the viral handshake at the classroom door movement, students will greet Mirror like they might greet themselves or a friend with a high-five or fist bump at the beginning of every reflection. Our hope is that by greeting Mirror each day, it becomes a fun, friendly signal to let students know that they’re going to dive into work now and yes – it’s about to get real, but don’t worry – “you got this!”  We also built in a new cheerful AI voice to guide reflections, we hope you like it!

Improvements to Insights

We debuted our new AI Reflection Dashboard at both TCEA’24 earlier this month and it made a huge splash! We’ve improved scoring and separated each metric and companion summary so it’s cleaner and easier to understand where immediate next steps need to take place to support students.

Next for Mirror

We’re excited to see how educators will use these updates to automate reflection in their schools. Driven by your feedback, we’re working hard to make reflections even more customized, engaging, and insightful for students and teachers. 

What’s next? Use your Mirror to create a custom reflection for your students. Then, tag @Swivl on X to tell us how it went. 

Don’t have Mirror yet? See below.

The Mirror demo program

If you want to experience the power of automating reflections firsthand, sign up for the Mirror demo program. This free trial is open to all educators based in the United States and Canada.

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