Kami Coach: When a Platform You Already Love Gets "Smarter"

There is a particular kind of excitement that happens when a tool you already trust announces something new.

It is different from the excitement of discovering something unknown. It is more like watching a favorite restaurant add a dish to their menu that you did not know you needed until you saw it, and then immediately understanding that it has always belonged there.

I am a Kami user. Have been for a while. If you are not familiar, Kami is the platform trusted by over 40 million educators and students worldwide that turns any document into an interactive, collaborative, accessible learning experience. Annotation tools, real-time class view, AI-powered assessment creation, auto-grading, accessibility features for ELL students and learners with special needs, LMS integration — it is one of those tools that quietly does more than most people realize until they sit down and actually explore it.

At ISTE 2026, Kami announced something new. And it was the kind of announcement that excited me, not only because it was shiny and new, but because it was specific.

Introducing Kami Coach

Kami Coach is an AI-powered coaching tool that guides students through math problems with hints and check-ins — and simultaneously gives teachers real-time insight into student understanding, misconceptions, and progress.

The student-facing half is what you might expect from an AI math coach: a tool that does not just give students answers, but walks alongside them through a problem, offering hints when they are stuck, checking in when something goes sideways, keeping them in productive struggle rather than letting them give up or cheat their way to a solution. It is the Socratic model applied to mathematics, the same philosophy underlying other apps I've written about, like DeskPad for writing and Code AI for programming. The AI keeps handing the thinking back.

The teacher-facing half is what makes Kami Coach genuinely interesting. Real-time insight into understanding, misconceptions, and progress means that while students are working with Coach, their teacher is watching not just whether they got the answer right, but where exactly the thinking went wrong. Which step. Which concept. Which misconception is showing up repeatedly across multiple students at the same moment. That is the kind of formative data that changes what a teacher does next — not after the test, not after the homework is graded, but right now, while there is still time to intervene.

This is Kami doing what Kami has always done well: giving teachers visibility into learning as it happens rather than after the fact.

Holy Beta Batman!!!

Kami Coach launched at ISTE 2026 in beta, and focuses exclusively on math.

Math is the subject where the misconception problem is most acute and most consequential. A student who misunderstands a foundational concept in writing can often still communicate their ideas. A student who misunderstands a foundational concept in mathematics gets compounding errors: each wrong turn building on the last, until the gap between where they are and where they need to be becomes genuinely difficult to close. Early, specific, real-time insight into where the mathematical thinking is breaking down is not a nice-to-have. It is the difference between a student who catches up and a student who does not.

The Teacher Who Needed This Last Year

Last year, I was an academic interventionist. My background is in Social Sciences...not math. And yet I spent a significant portion of my year sitting next to students who were struggling with math, trying to support them through problems in a subject where my own content knowledge has real limits.

I knew when a student was stuck. I could see the frustration, recognize the shutdown, identify the moment the productive struggle tipped into unproductive paralysis. What I could not always do was identify precisely where the mathematical thinking had broken down — which concept, which step, which specific misconception was compounding into everything that came after it.

Kami Coach would have changed that year for me. Not because it would have replaced my relationship with those students. Because real-time insight into exactly where a student's mathematical thinking is going wrong is not just useful for math teachers. It is useful for every educator who has ever been asked to support a student in a subject outside their expertise.

Interventionists. Special education teachers. Paraprofessionals. Reading coaches pulled into math support. Administrators covering a class. Every one of them has sat next to a student with a math problem and wished they had more than their instincts to work with.

Coach gives them something to work with.

Sign up for the Kami Coach beta here:🔗 https://hubs.la/Q04m_vzk0

Learn more about Kami:🔗 https://www.kamiapp.com