Snorkl
Snorkl is a teaching and assessment tool that captures how students think, not just their answers. Students explain their reasoning by speaking, drawing, and writing on a digital whiteboard, and the AI returns an immediate 0–4 score with question-based feedback focused on how they arrived at the answer, not just the answer itself.
What it looks like in action
What the students do:
On a digital whiteboard on a dedicated device, students independently draw, type, highlight, and record audio or video explanations of their reasoning. Depending on how the teacher sets up the activity, students can respond through audio alone or in writing. After submitting, they get an immediate 0–4 score and question-based feedback; students typically re-record to improve, attempting activities an average of 2.1 times.
What the AI does:
The AI analyzes both the visual work on the whiteboard and the student's spoken explanation, then provides an immediate 0–4 score that celebrates correct reasoning along with targeted, question-based feedback. Feedback is available in 40+ languages, supporting multilingual learners.
What the teacher does:
Teachers assign activities—pulling from Snorkl's standards-aligned library, uploading their own materials, or setting up a custom answer key for AI calibration—and monitor a dashboard of automatically scored responses to identify class-wide trends and common misconceptions. From there, teachers can configure feedback to be auto-approved or teacher-approved before students see it, enable Snorkl Coach on individual activities for additional scaffolding, override or tune the scoring, and use top student responses as exemplars for whole-class or small-group discussion.
What the leaders do:
School or school system leaders can set the scope of Snorkl use across schools. They can narrow the library of activities available to teachers, use a leader-facing dashboard to monitor and support teacher use, access a school-wide activity library, and work with a Snorkl coach for implementation support. Instructional coaches can drive adoption alongside or ahead of teachers, using Snorkl to support PD around math instruction and student thinking.
Reach
–
Students
–
Teachers
10,000+
Schools
free and paid school subscriptions
~250+
School systems
paid schools/school systems
Use
Recommended use
10–15 minutes per session, as a supplement to lessons. No specific weekly cadence named.
Actual use
10–15 minutes per session
Other notes about usage:
- Students attempt activities an average of 2.1 times
- ~70% of submitted activities include audio recordings
Product dimensions
Subject
All subjects (primarily math)
Grade span
K–12
Curriculum alignment
Curriculum-embedded: Illustrative Mathematics, JUMP Math, Modern Classrooms Project, Great Minds (Eureka) pilot in development. (Teachers can also put in any of their own content or curriculum.)
Design scope
Specific instructional job
The way AI interacts with students
- The AI asks questions / presents prompts students respond to
- Rubric-scored or written feedback (beyond right/wrong)
- AI gives feedback directly to students
Teacher guidance
Offers a range of uses (i.e., no specific teacher nudges)
Social vs. solo use
Independent use only
Teacher override
Teacher can override the AI scoring
Product adoption
Both—teacher-adopted and system-adopted
Dashboard scope
Teacher and leader dashboards available
Dosage recommendations
Provides dosage recommendations
Users' take on wins and limitations
There are clear trends in what users (i.e., teachers, students, instructional leaders) see as the wins and limitations of each product. For each trend below, we've included one illustrative quote from our user interviews.
Wins
Snorkl captures and makes student thinking visible—voice + visual + text reveals reasoning and is especially powerful for newcomer/multilingual students who can demonstrate math thinking in their native language with translated feedback.
"I have five [students] that speak languages I don't speak—Mandarin, two simplified, one traditional; one Arabic; and one Portuguese. The direct translation was a game changer—just seeing their thinking—how much growth and progress I saw."
— Teacher, 6th Grade Math
The platform generates immediate feedback that drives revision and reteaching efficiency—students average 2.1 attempts per activity; teachers report feedback quality sometimes exceeds what they could provide individually.
"I have never felt that Snorkl has graded students easy. I appreciate that. When they [students] achieve that 4, their perceived self-efficacy is so high and they're motivated to build off of their responses."
— Teacher, 6th Grade Math
There is high student engagement and "productive anticipation"—the wait-for-feedback moment generates excitement and re-recording behavior; many students appreciate the feedback and feel they learn more from Snorkl than from other methods of instruction.
"If Snorkl is on the list, all 32 students will do it first. In the middle of the year kids are begging for Snorkl—'please, at least I can fix what I am doing if you give me Snorkl.'"
— Teacher, 9th Grade Pre-Algebra
Limitations
It takes time to set up and get all students on tech. Teachers report figuring out the tool on their own, including the part where students need to talk through their reasoning out loud. Students also need a few tries to learn how the tool works—first attempts often come back as low scores because students didn't realize they were supposed to speak.
"I had to figure out the speaking component myself after a rollout that produced first-attempt scores of 1s and 2s. The product is robust enough that students recover, but better structured onboarding would help."
— Teacher, 6th Grade Math
Though the bank of pre-built activities continues to grow, it doesn't always match what teachers are teaching—some activities include content students haven't learned yet in their state's curriculum; other times, the bank is missing the activities teachers need. Teachers end up uploading their own materials.
"In some cases the bar was higher than my bar. One of the Snorkl library [items] included negative numbers, and in other states those are introduced earlier."
— Teacher, 6th Grade Math
Snorkl takes time to process each submission. Each submission requires the AI to process voice and visual input before returning feedback—up to one minute per submission. Students who use Snorkl repeatedly notice the wait.
"With Snorkl, we have to wait for our feedback."
— Student, 9th Grade Math
Our instructional take
Instructional wins
- Snorkl feedback is content-specific, digestible, and points students toward steps they can take to try again.
- Snorkl requires students to explain how they got their answer; this forces students to engage in metacognitive reasoning, which has been shown to support stronger student learning.
- Snorkl is designed to support integrated use with several curriculum partnerships. This design allows teachers to use it in the context of their existing lessons rather than pulling teachers out of their materials and planned learning.
- The teacher dashboard surfaces some class-wide trends, common mistakes, and student examples, and it groups students by similar next steps—helping teachers identify what to reteach to whom.
Instructional limitations
- The lag time in giving students feedback can lead to disengagement.
- Though there are some curriculum partnerships, there are many ways Snorkl can be used to pull out of the core curriculum and become another disconnected instructional element.
- Because it is designed for flexible use, there is not a clear vision for what the teacher will be doing while students use Snorkl (i.e., there are no embedded features in the dashboard that prompt particular teacher actions). The flexibility in teacher moves it allows for will likely lead to a broad range of outcomes.
Implementation considerations
- Snorkl shares the standard school-based implementation considerations: scheduling (within the class schedule and the scope and sequence for instruction), teacher and leader training, tech set up, and expectations for use.
- Leaders need to think through guidance for how and when teachers should override Snorkl’s automatic scoring.
- Leaders need to think through their expectations for what teachers should be doing while students use Snorkl and how to support other leaders to understand their vision for Snorkl implementation.
- Leaders should consider how Snorkl data can be used during PLC and planning time.
- Leaders need to think through guidance about when Snorkl should be used in groups or pairs and when it should be used solo.
Evidence of Impact
Available evidence
Study underway
There is no independent, causal evidence of impact on student learning yet. An independent quasi-experimental study is set to begin in August 2026, and Snorkl is engaging a research partner to conduct secondary analysis in support of its ratings.
Founder report. Study not yet publicly registered.
From the developer
From
Snorkl
The following was written by the team at Snorkl and has been edited for clarity and tone by Instruction Partners.
We’re excited to report a few highlights of what’s currently in our pipeline:
- Multi-activity assignments that enable teachers to link multiple curriculum-aligned activities together into a single assignment
- More insights for teachers and administrators, enabling teachers to ask their own instructional questions and do their own analysis powered by AI
- A public-facing model context protocol (MCP) for school systems with enterprise AI accounts to have conversations with their Snorkl data within the context of their larger academic toolkit
- AI-guided, teacher-led standards tagging (i.e., when a teacher creates or selects an activity, the AI maps it to relevant standards), so student responses can roll up into standards-level mastery reporting instead of activity-by-activity results, providing more nuanced insight into mastery of standards across K–12
- More options added to the content library
- Improved AI feedback quality and speed
Product website: https://snorkl.app
Hear from the developer
Instruction Partners' CEO Emily Freitag spoke with Jon Laven from Snorkl to understand what problems they're trying to solve, how the tool works, and what they're still figuring out.