Oct 23

Regular Reflection with MirrorTalk AI

MirrorTalk AI, made by Swivl, has an amazing system built for consistent and regular reflection for both students and staff. When I first saw the app I was intrigued because it offered something no other EdTech tool or AI tool offered, a way for all kids to reflect and reflect quickly and easily on a regular basis. First, kids do not have to read or write! The MirrorTalk app speaks the reflection questions to kids and kids record their responses. The teacher can create general reflections or reflections specific to topics being studied in class. The questions the MirrorTalk asks can be preset questions or AI generated questions based on students’ response! Here’s a Mirror FAQ on the different kinds of reflections you can create. Then when all the questions are answered the MirrorTalk AI generates a report with insights about the responder’s reflection responses. The insights are indeed very insightful! Here’s a PDF detailing the insights MirrorTalk will give.

Image showing that I reflected every day for 30 days!

A complete reflection can take minutes making MirrorTalk a great exit ticket reflection practice. When I first tried it I was pleased with what I got from the AI. Then the team at Swivl and Ditch That Textbook came out with a 30-day reflection challenge and I tried it. I completed the entire 30-day challenge with 30 full reflections! I thoroughly enjoyed reflecting every day and started a habit. I’m not the type of person who needs to stick to a strict regimen, the mere mention of every-single-day and I will psych myself out and stress. I don’t put that stress on myself so if I don’t feel like doing it one day, I skip it and do it the next day! I find that I can stick with something and make it a real habit if I don’t stress or psych myself out.

Here are some highlights from the 30-day challenge that I shared on Twitter (X):

The above reflection was a fun reflection and something we need to remember every day as teachers – to celebrate small successes!

In the above reflection I continue reviewing my gamification ideas for this year, which are different than anything I’ve done before. I appreciate how the MirrorTalk AI, not being human, does not hold back! It suggested that I was overlooking my students’ voices in my celebrations to create a more inclusive classroom environment. This is something I can look into so that I can do better. One of my very first reflections from early August, when I was wrestling with how to continue gamifying my courses without the tool I had been using for the seven years prior, this insight shook me out of my rut:

Screenshot of the Cognitive Bias insight I got back on August 9.
A very powerful insight that helped me move forward!

Speaking of not holding back, MirrorTalk keeps it real! There is an insight called Cognitive Bias and Negative Bias and I have found those very powerful because the AI considers or generates ideas based on my responses that I have not or may not have thought of myself. I also think that because it’s not human it doesn’t seem to concern itself with sparing our feelings and I appreciate that!

The one above was the most controversial one for me because of my conflicting ideas about assessment! In the end I always end up striving for balance by offering my students multiple ways and opportunities to show, share, and showcase their learning. Here’s the negativity bias the AI gave me:

Screenshot of the negativity bias insight I got from the MirrorTalk AI assessment reflection.
It was not entirely wrong except that I do strive for balance by not ignoring or leaving out standardized assessments.

Final reflection of the challenge:

The final reflection of the challenge was bittersweet. Part of me was glad it was over because HAVING to do something every day, or even WANTING to do something every day, stressed me out. Especially on those days where life got busy and I tried to find a moment to talk to my phone for a while. What I appreciated most from the above reflection was the negativity bias insight I got when my reflection focused on how powerful the negativity biases were! LOL The AI thought that was I focusing so much on the negative that the positive might have been overshadowed! No, it wasn’t!!

Post Challenge

After the 30 Day Challenge ended I took the weekend off. Monday I switched over to my personal group on the MirrorTalk app and starting reflecting again! Below is my first post challenge reflection tweet! This kind of reflection is cool and valuable and I’m hooked.

I do feel like reflecting regularly this way and now I am going to focus on providing these opportunities to my students. I have been trying to use the MirrorTalk AI app with my students this year and in so doing we found a bug with computers running Windows 10 and using the Chrome browser. It seems that microphone permissions don’t work consistently if at all so many of my students could not record their reflection. We tried and tried and tried again with little success.

Since Chrome is not native to Windows and we are not due to upgrade to Windows 11 until this summer of 2025 I decided to have kids try using Microsoft Edge instead. So far kids are having a lot more success completing reflections when they use MirrorTalk AI on Edge! Even the Opera browser worked for a student for whom Chrome would not work.

Combining the MirrorTalk AI App with the Mirror Device:

I also borrowed a Swivl Mirror Device to try it out and it’s pretty cool! With a Mirror Device kids can use a whiteboard pre-reflection warm up directly on the device and what is way cool is that you can select multiple student accounts and have an entire small group of kids reflecting together! Here are a couple of short clips I recorded as different teams tried out the Mirror Device to reflect together:

This team is accessing a pre-reflection whiteboarding activity.

This team is reflecting together.

I’m really enjoying turning my blog posts into Notebook LM podcasts so I did it again for this one! Besides, like it or not many YouTube videos that I have been watching recently are Notebook LM generated podcasts videos! I shared one with students then shared one of my blog podcasts and they were like, “what?” It’s just too easy to pass up.

Now it’s just a matter of continuing my own personal reflections and setting up reflections for my students to help them process what we are learning in Math and Science this year. I’m also totally excited about hosting a 7-Day reflection challenge for my school district!

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Alfonso Gonzalez

I teach 5th and 6th grade STEM in the lovely Pacific Northwest in a small, rural town called Chimacum. My goal is to help students discover that all learning is life-long and that 21st century tools can be used for work as well as fun.

Permanent link to this article: https://educatoral.com/wordpress/2024/10/23/regular-reflection-with-mirrortalk-ai/