Mirrortalk 2.0 is coming March 18th, it is the next evolution of Mirrortalk and we’re calling it M2. It brings together instructional support, feedback, reflection, and boosting participation into a simpler, more coherent experience across web, mobile, and the M2 device.

This release helps teachers make every tier of instruction great and participation visible, giving stronger support in the moments that matter most, both during and after class.

Real-time support

M2 will deliver immediate, actionable tips, on-demand. Throughout the class, teachers can click for immediately actionable tips based on best practices to support Tier 1 and Tier 2 instruction. Based on the context of the class, M2 can generate a guided high-impact learning activity for teachers to walk students through or opt in to have M2 guide the class through an audio experience.

Teachers can also have input on the types of tips or interactions they need at the moment to support all student needs. Now, teachers can request a check for understanding, a discussion question, or classroom management suggestion as tips with the tap of a button.

A dashboard that turns class into next steps

After every class, teachers need clarity–not just more data. 

The new M2 dashboard is organized around My Takeaways: a concise summary of what went well and what to improve next time. Feedback is broken down by chunks of the lesson (warm-up, instruction, group work, wrap-up), so teachers can connect insights to real moments they remember. Each activity is also given a participation score, teachers can use this as feedback for how Tier 1 and Tier 2 instruction is landing with students.

Teachers can:

• View feedback alongside the class transcript, in context
• See which instructional moves mattered most and where engagement was visible
• Receive auto-suggested Reflections, all tied directly to what just happened

Each visit to the Dashboard now becomes a momentum builder for the growth of the teacher and the entire class.

A simpler way to start and organize teaching

M2 simplifies how teachers move from planning to teaching.

Teachers now start activities from within Groups, such as “Period 3 Algebra”. All activities that are created within a group can be managed and revisited within the group.

Activities that aren’t tied to a specific group live in a single General group, which means there’s no more cluttered personal activities to manage.

Even though your teaching activities will now live in Groups, they are not visible to any students within the group. Students only ever see the work you assign to them, like Guides and Reflections.

Teaching with M2, now from your phone

Sometimes the easiest device to use is the one already in your pocket. M2 app helps support teachers, making tiered instruction easier with just a mobile device. 

With M2 app, teachers can now run M2 teacher activities from phones and tablets:

• Start an activity
• Receive immediate tips to improve tiered instruction and suggested Guides 
• All through a simple, mobile-friendly chat experience

During class, teachers can request a check for understanding, discussion questions or classroom management tips with a single tap. After class, they can continue the conversation with M2—reflecting, clarifying feedback, and revisiting important moments, all through a text-based chat. 

This mobile experience is intentionally simplified for use during instruction, with no audio output. This keeps the attention on student instruction and participation, not screens.

Reflection to bring clarity 

Reflection works best when it’s immediate and conversational.

After class, teachers reflect by talking with M2 via text—on web or mobile—while the lesson is still fresh. They can dig into specific moments, revisit feedback, and analyze strengths and weaknesses of participation.

It’s a reflection that brings clarity and helps teachers come prepared for deeper conversations about their instruction, either on their own or with a coach. 

What’s been removed?

To keep M2 focused, several features have been retired:

• Whiteboard
• Personal groups and personal verbal reflections for teachers
• Time-based tips
• Verbal Ask M2 inside chat

These changes reinforce a single goal: helping teachers create the conditions for meaningful engagement, every day.

Why M2 matters

M2 isn’t about adding more features. It’s about aligning everything around what actually improves instruction: tiered supports, actionable feedback, and visible engagement. 

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M2’s purpose has always been simple: to support great teachers in the work they do every day. Since then, we’ve seen the same pattern in classrooms across the country: teachers are resourceful, dedicated, and creative. What they’re often missing is time. With so much to do, understanding which instructional moves are aligned with the research is something that can quickly fall by the wayside.

Administrators see it too. They know strong instruction depends on consistent structure and rigor. But most teachers don’t have a coach in the room to encourage the use of the most effective strategies. Many are teaching new subjects or grade levels with less training than they’d like. This is where the M2’s latest feature can help.

Introducing Whole Group Guides

Whole Group Guides let teachers launch structured, interactive learning activities for the entire class without any student devices or setup time required.

With a few taps, and a chance to share the day’s objective, M2 gets to work. Whole Group Guides include clear verbal directions that lead students through a learning experience aligned with both the lesson of the day and sound pedagogy. As M2 shares directions out loud, the teacher stays in full control, advancing the activity with just a quick tap. 

Here’s how a Whole Group Guide might look in an elementary Math class: 

The teacher walks up to M2 and taps to request a Guide. She says, “I want my students to practice adding fractions with unlike denominators.” That’s the only prep required. 

Seconds later, M2’s voice grabs student attention by introducing the activity. Today, we’ll practice adding fractions by finding the least common denominator. You’ll need a pencil and paper. Let’s get started! 

From there, M2 guides students through a few questions and problems aligned with the objective. Today, M2 notices that students can benefit from interleaving, or mixing several problem types together to build flexible thinking. 

After each step, students turn to a partner to discuss their thinking. The teacher is free to walk the room, checking in with students, coaching, answering questions, or pulling students aside who need some extra help.

When the Guide ends, the teacher smoothly transitions back to the front and decides to review one problem that sparked extra discussion.

What makes Whole Group Guides different?

• No participant setup. Every student is included without extra steps.
• Teacher-controlled pace. M2 provides the directions, but teachers shape the timing.
• Designed for real classrooms. Activities include individual work, turn-and-talks, and whole-class moments to keep everyone engaged.
• More access to the teacher. With M2 managing the flow, teachers can spend more time giving feedback instead of handling logistics.

For administrators seeking stronger instructional consistency across classrooms, Whole Group Guides model well-structured learning in real time. Teachers participate in the experience alongside their students, gaining a feel for the strategy as it unfolds.

Three forms of Whole Group Guides: Practice, projects, and something new

Practice Guides

Students work individually through repetitions of a skill, often pausing to check thinking with a partner or discuss as a class. Useful for reinforcing learning without relying on worksheets.

Project Guides

Collaborative activities where the entire class moves into small groups at once — helpful for hands-on work, labs, shared problem-solving, or building something together. And then there’s the newest option:

Instructional Strategies: research-backed teaching, available in the moment

We heard the same theme from teachers and administrators again and again: they value strategies like Retrieval Practice or Elaboration, but during a lesson, it can be hard to launch them with clear steps and language. Instructional Strategies help with that challenge. When teachers select Instructional Strategy, M2 looks at the lesson objective and materials, then generates a Whole Group Guide built around a proven learning approach. These strategies draw from the work of researchers like Robert Marzano, John Hattie, and decades of cognitive science:

• Retrieval Practice to strengthen memory
  
• Elaboration to deepen understanding
  
• Dual Coding to connect visuals and ideas
  
• Concrete → Abstract to build conceptual thinking
  
• Interleaving to support flexible problem solving

M2 provides the structure and directions. The teacher brings the expertise, judgment, and support that only a person can provide. For administrators, this means teachers at all levels of experience can model strong instructional practices throughout a lesson. For teachers, it feels like having a prepared partner who can help launch a strategy right when the moment calls for it.

A sustainable way to make every lesson great

Whole Group Guides give teachers more freedom to focus on students. By removing setup, simplifying structure, and offering research-backed steps in real time, M2 helps teachers stay present with their students: circulating, giving feedback, listening in on conversations, pulling small groups, and offering the kinds of support no device can replace. It’s a vision of the classroom where great teaching becomes achievable across the school day because the scaffolding is already built into the experience.

Talk with us: Let’s discuss how M2 can support your goals and explore options to demo, pilot, or purchase.

See it in action: Join one of our upcoming 15-minute webinars to experience M2 firsthand and hear stories from educators already co-teaching with it.

Share your story: We want your voice in the conversation. What makes differentiation sustainable in your school? How are you moving beyond screen dependence? Share your insights with us at community@swivl.com.

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We’re excited to announce the latest MirrorTalk update, specifically for M2 hardware. This release features improvements that expand the ways you can engage, reflect, and learn across M2, as well as web and mobile. 

Here’s what’s new:

Upgrade engagement with the Whiteboard

Add Multiple Pages to the Whiteboard

Whether you’re solving problems, correcting sentences, or sketching out designs, having more space to do your work helps. Now, you can create multiple Whiteboard pages on your device for multi-step teaching and learning. 

The new Whiteboard experience supports dynamic small group instruction by helping teachers work through multi-step problems or present multiple examples. Students can use multiple pages to sketch out scenes in a skit, iterate on a design, or draw up ideas for a storyboard.

Bonus: Whiteboard Back in Personal Workspace

The Whiteboard is back in the Personal Workspace, offering you a simple and flexible place to sketch out notes during a PD session, map ideas for an upcoming lesson, or organize thoughts before reflecting out loud.

Resume personal activity on any platform

Now, you can pause an activity on M2 and resume later on the MirrorTalk web or mobile app. This means teachers can record a segment of their instruction, then reflect on MirrorTalk later.  With this improved workflow, teachers always get the most out of observational recordings by reflecting on the experience.

Try these updates today

Log in to your M2 to explore these new features and see how they can enhance your reflective practice. Your feedback continues to inspire us, and we’re excited to bring you tools that help you level up your thinking through reflection.

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We’re excited to share the latest updates to MirrorTalk, designed to make reflection more purposeful and personal than ever. Our newest features focus on bringing greater clarity, privacy, and flexibility to your reflective practices—whether you’re an educator, a student, or a professional looking to grow.

Uncover the why behind your work

Inspired by Simon Sinek’s famous “Start with Why”, The One Why Focus is a quick, actionable way to better understand your thinking about your work.

By asking yourself one fundamental question—”Why am I doing this?”—you can uncover the motivations and assumptions behind your efforts, making sure they align with your goals. Whether you’re reflecting on last period’s lesson or the next steps in your professional learning, taking a moment to consider the “why” can help you:

• Clarify your motivations
• Spot priorities that might be misaligned
• Gain insights into the assumptions behind your work

With MirrorTalk, reflection takes just seconds, but the clarity it brings can have a lasting impact on the direction of your learning and thinking.

Privacy controls for adult teams

Professional growth thrives on trust and privacy. To support this, users in Adult Team Groups can now choose when to share their reflections with the Group Owner. This privacy option is perfect for settings like coaching and professional development, allowing educators to:

• Reflect deeply with the comfort of privacy
• Share insights they deem most valuable for collaboration

Share insights in a few clicks

You can now generate a shareable link for your reflections or evidence cards, which is perfect for collaborating with colleagues or presenting evidence of growth to coaches, administrators, or supervisors–no login or account creation required. 

Other updates in this release

• Higher Ed Professor User Type: Create Higher Ed groups and ensure your Higher Ed students’ reflection prompts and feedback are tailored to their level and learning context.
  
• Multi-Channel Video Playback: Support for multi-channel video playback for more dynamic reflection and coaching opportunities.
  

Try the latest features today

Log in to your MirrorTalk dashboard to explore these new features and see how they can transform your reflective practice. 

The post Product update: December 6, 2024 appeared first on Swivl.

The Group Lesson isn’t just about spotting trends, it’s about finding opportunities to adjust your instruction based on your groups’ latest thinking about their work. MirrorTalk generates your Group Lesson after the first few participants complete your activity. Then, we update the Lesson as more individuals participate. This up-to-the minute, actionable advice formed from your participants’ thinking may never have been practical, until now.

What is the Group Lesson? 

Unlike traditional assessments or surveys that merely summarize learning, the Group Lesson uncovers new discoveries about your participants’ thinking that lead to clear action. The Group Lesson analyzes all of your participants’ reflections to help you:

• Identify common themes and understanding patterns
• Surface paradoxes students are grappling with
• Devise the game plan that moves the needle for your learning outcomes 

Two tailored views

Group Owners

Get a comprehensive view of group-wide thinking patterns plus specific recommendations for improving understanding.

Participants

Access a summary about group-wide learning patterns that help contextualize their individual growth journey.

Try it today

Ready to unlock the why and how behind your group’s learning potential? Start assigning activities today and make thinking actionable!

->Head to MirrorTalk

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We’re thrilled to unveil the latest MirrorTalk update, packed with features to boost your curriculum and collaborative capabilities! Here’s what’s new:

Assessment questions

Authentic assessment is when participants construct their understanding by reflecting on their experience and then demonstrate their understanding by answering Assessment questions. Understanding then becomes not just a participant’s perception of their experience, but an accurate depiction of the participant’s experience.

Invite participants to demonstrate understanding more authentically. Group owners may add multiple assessment questions (max: 8) as a follow-up to the reflection prompts and evaluate based on your provided answers or learning standards.

Step 1:

Group Owner adds Assessment question(s) and answer(s) while customizing the reflection

Step 2:

Participant answers Assessment question(s) and answer(s) after reflecting on their learning experience

Step 3:

Review the participant’s answer to the Assessment question(s) in the Understanding section of the dashboard card

Other changes

Group Collaboration: Invite unlimited “Group Managers” (co-teachers, coaches, admin, mentors, etc.) to view your dashboard and collaborate on participant data. Share insights effortlessly with a unique invite link, fostering a more collaborative approach to building success based on reflection

Revamped Personal Workspace: Our redesigned UI offers clearer access to essential teacher tools:

• Recharge: Take mental and physical breaks between classes or during planning
• Recording: Capture observations for coaching and self-reflection
• Timer: Manage whole-group activities and focus time effectively
• Zoom Integration: Enable telepresence for seamless remote teaching

Assess everyone – even yourself – and change the game! Try MirrorTalk + M2.

MirrorTalk + M2 is the unique classroom assistant that captures the best data for observation and daily feedback for teachers, turns small group station dreams into a reality, and prioritizes reflection for everyone in class.

Schedule a live demo to learn more!

The post Product update: October 15, 2024 appeared first on Swivl.

We’re excited to announce our latest MirrorTalk release, featuring improvements that make reflection more accessible and personalized for learners across all educational levels.

Expanded Lesson

A new, expanded Lesson is waiting on the dashboard for every new reflection completed by you and your group participants. The Lesson will feel more detailed, personalized, and actionable, revealing key insights you may be overlooking that are crucial to your growth.

Streamlined Dashboard

 A new compressed view of reflection cards offers a quick overview of how your group is thinking, with one-click access to each participant’s detailed feedback and scores.

Customizable Participant View

You can now choose between a full or limited dashboard experience for group participants. Show the full set of scores and insights, or opt for a more focused view with only understanding scores and the lesson.

Copy Insights to Share

Easily copy feedback and scores from any reflection card to share via email or documents. Perfect for sharing reflection insights with parents, coaches, and colleagues.

Simplified Reflection Setup

We’ve reduced the choices required to setup a new reflection without compromising on any functionality. Plus, you can now manually enter prompts from scratch when the situation calls for it.

Next Steps

The updates are now live for all users! Visit your dashboard to try them today.

Your feedback continues to drive our improvements, and we’re committed to making MirrorTalk an essential tool for building reflective thinking foundations.

Share what how your thinking has improved since you started reflecting with MirrorTalk by tagging MirrorTalk on Bluesky.

Expand the lesson even further with MirrorTalk + M2

MirrorTalk + M2 is the unique classroom assistant that captures the best data for observation and daily feedback for teachers, turns small group station dreams into a reality, and prioritizes reflection for everyone in class.

Schedule a live demo to learn more!

The post Product update: October 4, 2024 appeared first on Swivl.

We’re excited to announce our latest MirrorTalk release, featuring improvements that make reflection more accessible and personalized for learners across all educational levels. 

Personalized Questions Guided by Teachers’ Objectives

We’ve enhanced our AI-generated questions process to create more accurate and relevant prompts for students during reflection. By basing subsequent questions on the first Recall question we ask students, we’re ensuring that the unique reflection experience for each student closely with a teacher’s entered objectives. This personalized approach creates a more tailored and effective reflection process, bridging the gap between teacher intent and student engagement.

Session and Open Login

We’ve introduced a new Session login feature for participants on mobile and web platforms. This update removes barriers to reflection by allowing anyone to complete reflection assignments without creating a MirrorTalk account and streamlines the reflection process, encouraging more frequent practice. For special education or events when you want the simplest setup possible, you can create “Open Groups”, which do not require participants to identify themselves by name. When they start reflecting, MirrorTalk will snap a quick photo of each participant for the Dashboard so teachers can still clearly delineate the data among their participants.

Motivation Assessment and Development

Inspired by Carol Dweck’s research on motivation, we’ve integrated a motivation-focused question during each reflection to further direct the Dashboard insight we provide you on how motivation drives or inhibits learners from challenging themselves. This addition helps both students and educators understand the role that motivation plays in their learning and helps them foster a growth mindset in every learning activity. 

Other Improvements

We’ve introduced new grade bands: Early Childhood, K-2, 3-5, 6-8, 9-12, Adult, Team, and Higher Ed. These bands ensure grade-level appropriate question prompts for learners above and below grade level and open up more opportunities to reflect in public spaces like libraries where grade levels might be mixed. 

We also made the Greetings step (i.e. “Wave!”) optional, reducing potential awkwardness for adult learners or students who shy away from the performative aspect of greeting themselves when they reflect.

Next Steps

Your feedback continues to drive our improvements, and we’re committed to making MirrorTalk an essential tool for building reflective thinking foundations.

We’d love to hear what student learning gaps you’re uncovering with MirrorTalk. Share your experiences with us on social media by tagging MirrorTalk on Bluesky.

Personalization on the fly (even for you, teach!) with MirrorTalk + M2

MirrorTalk + M2 is the unique classroom assistant that captures the best data for observation and daily feedback for teachers, turns small group station dreams into a reality, and prioritizes reflection for everyone in class.

The post Product update: August 8, 2024 appeared first on Swivl.

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 60-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 MirrorTalk 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 MirrorTalk 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 MirrorTalk 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 MirrorTalk better for everyone.

Learn more about your AI classroom companion

MirrorTalk + M2 is the unique classroom assistant that captures the best data for observation and daily feedback for teachers, turns small group station dreams into a reality, and prioritizes reflection for everyone in class.

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