In April, Digital Promise launched its newest product certification, Responsibly Designed AI, which helps districts make more informed procurement decisions. At a time when many edtech solutions are rapidly integrating AI capabilities, it’s important for developers to think critically about how they are doing so responsibly. This blog is the first in a series of four posts exploring how edtech can be powered by AI in ways that best support educators’ and learners’ pedagogical needs, agency, and safety. Each blog post is written by an edtech developer whose product was among the first cohort to earn the Responsibly Designed AI certification.
As the founder of Journify Learning—and someone who’s spent the past year working closely with special educators—I kept coming back to a single question: What would it take to design AI that truly works for them? Not just to reduce their paperwork, but to help them drive meaningful student outcomes with research-based strategies, and stay compliant without losing their sanity.
That question has guided every step of our work. Supporting educators—including teachers, paraprofessionals and therapists—means creating tools that reduce administrative burden, align with IEP requirements, and deliver evidence-based, personalized support that actually moves the needle for students.
But building with AI in education comes with real responsibility. That’s why we were encouraged to see Digital Promise develop its Responsibly Designed AI product certification, a framework that brings much-needed clarity to what responsible, educator-centered AI should look like. Many of the principles Digital Promise promotes—empowerment, inclusivity, transparency, and trust—are the same values guiding how we build Journify.
One of Digital Promise’s core principles is that educators must remain in control of AI—not the other way around. Decisions must be grounded in relationships and context, not automation.
At Journify, every AI-generated output, whether a present levels of performance summary, assessment or intervention, is clearly labeled, editable, and never final until the educator approves it. A persistent banner throughout the platform reminds users: “✨AI✨ generated content must be reviewed and verified by educators.”
We’ve also designed gentle friction into the product to encourage thoughtful use. Teachers must review content before downloading or sharing it, input their own evaluations for student performance, and manually mark IEP goals as complete. AI never makes decisions on their behalf.
Educator feedback is built into every generation. Teachers rate each output on a 1–5 scale and can add comments. This input fuels ongoing product improvements and reinforces that AI is here to assist—not replace—their professional judgment.
“I LOVE Journify! My favorite features are the ability of your AI to read writing samples and provide detailed feedback. […] I also love that AI reads math tests and reports on students’ individual skills.”
Dina A, Issaquah School District
AI should serve all learners—not just the “average” student. But too often, AI systems are built on narrow datasets and overlook the full spectrum of learner variability—how differences in cognitive, social-emotional and environmental factors shape how students learn. In special education, this creates real risk: one-size-fits-all outputs can leave behind the very students who need support the most.
At Journify, we embed Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles and are in the process of integrating with Digital Promise’s Learner Variability Navigator API to ensure our instructional supports align with the latest research on how diverse learners thrive. This allows our AI to better personalize supports based on factors such as attention, language background, motivation, and executive function.
We also use grade-appropriate, culturally responsive language and support multilingual content to reflect the real classrooms our educators serve. To ensure instructional quality, we’ve interviewed more than 200 special educators across grades, settings, and student profiles. Their feedback shaped everything—from including scaffolded prompts for students, to adding visual supports for non-verbal learners, to reworking reading passages that defaulted to a narrow cultural lens.
Trust in AI doesn’t come from features; it comes from understanding. During early testing, many special educators told us they were curious about AI but unsure how it worked, when to rely on it, or how it handled sensitive student data. That insight became a turning point. If we wanted to build truly responsible AI, we needed to build AI literacy alongside it.
That’s why Journify includes built-in AI Literacy Modules designed specifically for educators. It offers a short, accessible introduction to generative AI—what it is, how it works and when to use it thoughtfully. We also provide clear, actionable privacy and security best practices that help educators handle student data responsibly within AI-supported workflows. As teachers review and rate AI outputs, they also grow more confident in using the tool responsibly.
Across the 1,500+ students and 7,500+ IEP goals supported on Journify so far, teachers reported saving up to 50% of their time while staying more connected to student progress. But when done well, responsible AI doesn’t just save time–it amplifies what educators already do best: making thoughtful, individualized decisions that support students with disabilities.
