Beanstack, the leading reading motivation platform, has recently announced the addition of Book Talks with Benny, an AI-powered teacher’s assistant that promotes reading integrity without needing quizzes or grading. Book Talks with Benny unlocks valuable insights for educators by engaging students in a fun, age-appropriate conversation about the book they’re reading when Beanstack detects potentially dishonest logging.
Conversations begin by informing students that their chat will be shared with an educator and then proceed with engaging questions and encouragement. Admins in Beanstack can access the view history for flagged log entries of their rostered students and analyze student answers. This information enables educators to examine the discussion and decide how to ensure the best reading accountability.
Speaking about the platform, Felix Lloyd, CEO of Beanstack, said:
Our engineers designed and trained Benny with extensive educator input and real-world testing to ensure Book Talks are meaningful, age-appropriate, and safe. We recognize the responsibility of introducing Artificial Intelligence into our platform. Before beginning any work with AI, we established ethical guidelines to ensure our use is human-centric and transparent.
Book Talks with Benny is part of Beanstack’s Reading Integrity Suite and is available now for all schools and districts with Premium Beanstack plans. Schools and districts must opt-in to use this feature.
The company’s co-founders started a book-of-the-month service focused on non-traditional genres and interests, and they quickly attracted many supportive and enthusiastic backers, including Mark Cuban, following a “Shark Tank” appearance. Shortly after, they recognized they needed to rethink their business approach to be truly successful and reach more readers. Their most trusted curators then were librarians who worked with children and schools. Working together, they used their new technology, Beanstack, to curate children’s books and provide tailored suggestions to community members. Later, a partner library used Beanstack to host an innovative summer reading challenge. With these new ideas, the goal became apparent again: to enable libraries and schools to foster a reading culture through reading challenges and motivational aids for readers of all ages. The platform helps educators and librarians encourage reading by making it easy to create and promote reading challenges for their communities. It motivates people to reach reading goals by tracking when, how much, and what they read.
