Welcome back to the Beanstack Blog's Product Spotlight series! In this space, we provide the latest updates on new features and offer insights into how our tools can support your reading goals. Whether you are already using Beanstack or looking to create a reading culture in your community, this series is for you.
Keep reading to learn more about our newest feature, Book Talks with Benny! This exciting new tool builds on our existing Reading Integrity Suite, which takes a unique approach to accountability that doesn’t require demotivating quizzes or extensive grading.
Reading Integrity Just Got a Lot More Engaging
Benny, our AI-powered teacher’s assistant, unlocks valuable insights for educators by engaging students in a fun, age-appropriate conversation about the book they’re reading when we detect potentially dishonest logging. Students interact with an insightful and friendly partner while educators gain information to determine whether a student has read their book—it’s a win-win!
Benny Starts the Conversation, You Make the Final Call
Book Talks with Benny acts as a tool to assess the veracity of students’ reading logs without replacing any critical work performed by educators. Benny initiates a friendly conversation and maintains transparency by letting students know that the conversation will be shared with educators.
Within Beanstack, admins can view the chat history for flagged log entries of their rostered students, including an analysis of student responses. This information allows educators to evaluate the conversation and make the final decision about how to take action.
Based on findings from our proprietary data, the analysis flags indicators of potential fraudulent logging, including:
- Student responses that are unintelligible, lack detail, or include inappropriate language.
- Student behaviors, such as switching tabs or windows, remaining inactive for over 1 minute, and pasting text into the chat window.
Beanstack’s Commitment to Using AI Safely and Responsibly
Our engineers designed and trained Benny with extensive educator input and real-world testing to ensure Book Talks are meaningful, age-appropriate, and safe. Rest assured that this feature will never collect Personal Identifiable Information (PII) or pass it on to a third party.
We recognize the responsibility of introducing Artificial Intelligence (AI) into our platform, and before beginning any work with AI we established ethical guidelines to ensure that our use of AI is human-centric, transparent, and safe. For more, read our AI Ethics Statement.
Get Started
Book Talks with Benny is available now for all schools and districts with Premium Beanstack plans. Schools and districts must opt in to use this feature. We'll be in touch with Beanstack admins about the opt in process. If you’re not a Beanstack client, contact our team for a custom demo.
💡 Join our upcoming webinar with School Library Journal on Tuesday, Jan. 22 at 2 PM ET to see Benny in action!