Chat with Chirpo the bird
Curious and upbeat, Chirpo has an open conversation about the topic and your materials. Good for warm-ups, enrichment and building interest.
AI that starts with the classroom.
InterThread Software is an education-first AI company. We build tools that are bounded, safe for young learners and easy for schools to defend, with teachers in charge of every step.
Meet our team of cute, friendly AI tutors, Chirpo, Hootsie and Waddles, who live inside Google Classroom.
Photosynthesis check-in
Assess activity, Grade 7 Science
What the teacher sees
- Explains what plants need for photosynthesisMeets
- Identifies where a plant's mass comes fromExceeds
- Describes the role of chlorophyllNot yet
Each rating links to the student's own words as evidence.
Meet the team
A conversation shows what a student understands in a way a worksheet can't. One teacher can't hold a five-minute conversation with thirty students about every topic. Our tutors can, and they report back in the terms teachers already use: learning goals and expectations, not a percentage score.
Each kind of activity has its own character, with its own look, voice and personality. They all follow the same safety rules.
How it works
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Create an activity
Add an activity to a normal Classroom assignment. Give it a topic, attach your own materials and choose the learning goals.
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Students talk it through
Each student has a one-on-one conversation with the activity's character, at their own pace, using the class login they already have.
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See where everyone stands
You get every transcript, any safety flags, and a rating for each goal. Adjust any rating, add feedback, and release results when you're ready.
Three kinds of activity, three characters
Teach with Hootsie the owl
Patient and gentle, Hootsie works through your goals in order, finds out what the student already knows and fixes the gaps. Ratings reflect where the student ended up.
Assess with Waddles the penguin
Calm and a good listener, Waddles asks questions without teaching, to find out what the student understands. Each rating is backed by quotes from the conversation.
Does not yet meet expectations
Meets expectations
Exceeds expectations
Where the team fits in a school week
The tutors work on your topic and your materials, so they fit into lessons you already teach.
Learning and guided practice
Use a Teach activity for homework or extra practice. Hootsie adjusts to what each student shows, explains things a different way when an idea doesn't land, and corrects misconceptions before they set in.
“Work through equivalent fractions with Hootsie before Thursday.”
Assessment you don't have to mark
Run a ten-minute Assess activity before a unit test and see, goal by goal, who is ready and who needs another pass. Every rating comes with the student's own words, so you can check Waddles' judgment against yours.
“Know who's ready before the test, without a stack of marking.”
Participation while absent
When a student misses class for illness, a family trip, an appointment or a tournament, they can still take part. They open the same activity from home, talk through the day's topic with the tutors, and you see where they stand when they come back.
“Missed Tuesday's lesson on the water cycle? Catch up with Hootsie.”
More ways teachers can use it
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Reading and discussion
Attach a story or article and replace “answer questions 1 to 5” with a conversation about it.
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Patient one-on-one support
Students learning English, and students who won't ask in front of their classmates, get unhurried time to think. It adds to, and never replaces, formal accommodations.
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Assignments that are hard to outsource
It's much harder to hand off a conversation than an essay. Students have to explain their own thinking.
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Differentiation without extra prep
One activity meets each student where they are. The tutors go deeper with students who are ready and slows down for those who aren't.
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Exit tickets and unit openers
A short Chat or Assess activity at the start of a unit shows what students already know, so you can plan the lessons.
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French and oral-language practice Exploring
Conversation practice for French immersion and core French. We're testing the tutors' French before offering this.
Built for everyone who has to say yes
Teachers
Uses your topic and your materials. No new logins or rosters. You decide when students see results, and you can override any rating.
Principals and school leaders
Bounded AI that teachers control, not an open chatbot. No student names stored. Student records kept in Canada.
IT and privacy officers
Opaque student IDs and a short list of OAuth scopes. Our privacy policy sets out what we collect and where it goes, and we'll walk through all of it with your team.
Parents
Our tutors won't do your child's homework for them. If a conversation suggests your child may be in distress, the tutor points them to a trusted adult and flags the conversation for their teacher.
Safety and privacy come first
Our tutors talk with students, and many are children. These rules apply to every character and come before anything else in how they're built.
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Every message is screened
A separate safety check reviews each student message. Concerns are flagged for the teacher, and the tutor always points students to a trusted adult.
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Teachers stay in control
Students see results only when the teacher releases them. Teachers can override any rating and add their own feedback.
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Minimal student data
No student names or emails are stored, only opaque IDs. We request only the Google permissions the add-on strictly needs.
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Stored in Canada
Our database and application servers run in Toronto. We'll give you a full, plain-language map of where every piece of data goes.
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Your materials stay data
Anything attached to an activity is treated as reading material, never as instructions, so a document can't change how the tutors behave.
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Native to Google Classroom
Each activity is an attachment on a normal assignment. Students and teachers use the accounts and classes they already have.
What's next
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Google Classroom
The team is built as a Classroom add-on, and we're preparing our first classroom pilots.
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Deeper Classroom features
Planned: grade passback, recurring activities such as weekly check-ins, and activities in students' calendars.
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More learning platforms
Planned: support for Brightspace, Canvas and Moodle through the LTI 1.3 standard.
Bring the team to your classroom
We're looking for Canadian K-12 teachers in grades 4 to 12, and the schools behind them, to try our tutors for free. Pilot teachers work directly with us and help decide what we build next.
About InterThread
Made in Ontario, Canada
InterThread Software is a Canadian company building AI for education. We start from how classrooms actually work: what teachers need to know, what schools need to approve, and what keeps young learners safe. We build the AI around those answers.
Our team of tutors is built to do one thing well: give teachers real evidence of understanding. It isn't a general-purpose assistant.
We're building for Canadian classrooms first. Our database and application servers run in Toronto, and when students speak instead of typing, their words are turned into text in Montréal. We write our privacy and safety promises with Canadian privacy law and school board reviews in mind, and we're working to bring AI processing into Canada too as the models become available here. Our pilot is open to Canadian teachers, who help decide what we build next.