Introduction
As we celebrate Sophia’s first birthday, we’ve been intentional in taking time to reflect on the incredible journey we’ve had so far. From the first iteration of Sophia to the significant strides we’ve made, this year has been filled with feedback, innovation, and growth.
And because we’re school psychologists and love a good timeline, we wanted to share some of the key milestones from Sophia’s first year.
September 2023: The Birth of an Idea
It all started with a bold vision to simplify and streamline the day-to-day tasks of school psychologists with data protection in mind. I’ve been lucky enough to travel coast to coast and hear from school psychologists working directly in schools. While I have big aspirations for the field, many school psychology practitioners are limited in their roles for many reasons. I saw using AI as a way to disrupt those barriers that stand in the way of us being great and flourishing in our work. I wanted to help and knew there was a better way. I saw, and still see, AI as a tool that can significantly reduce the administrative burden on school psychologists, allowing us to focus more on our students. The image below is the first iteration of the School Psych AI platform, where the original three features were Sophia Assists, Sophia Insights, and Sophia Goals. Back when the School Psych AI team was just me, Dr. McClure!
October 2023: #SchoolPsychFam Community
At just 3 weeks old, the #SchoolPsychFam grew to over 5,000 school psychologists and reached every state in the US! Your feedback, engagement, and enthusiasm were the driving force behind the resounding launch and we began to collectively build our community! Many of you provided feedback and began sharing testimonials. Check out this picture that captures one of the first testimonials we received.
November 2023: Sophia Celebrates National School Psych Week
Sophia celebrated National School Psychology Week with our community of 7,500 school psychologists! That week, I had the opportunity to travel to Fairfax, Virginia, Kansas City, Missouri, and Lafayette, Louisiana, and speak to school psychologists about our critical work.
We also celebrated with our School Psych AI Facebook Group, new unified interface with clipboard functionality (remember when this was a big deal?), and the SPAI YouTube channel.
December 2023: First Town Hall & Prompt Playbook
Our #SchoolPsychFam was approaching 10,000 and to celebrate, we hosted the first Town Hall (who remembers me joining from Panera?). We invited everyone to join to hear updates, share my mission, answer your questions, and Rachele debuted our Prompt Playbook! As you can see in the picture, I was so excited to see members of our growing community!
January 2024: New Year, New Offerings
We introduced School Psych AI Premium and our first tool - Sophia Summarizer! We also announced Sophia Report Writer! Our team was diligently working to enhance your experience with School Psych AI and we were excited to have new features like unlimited threads, the ability to add and delete threads, personalized prompts, an interactive prompt library, and the option of an annual or monthly plan. And we did all of this work based on your feedback!
February 2024: Sophia Goes to NASP
Sophia traveled to New Orleans for the NASP 2024 Annual Convention. It was AMAZING to see our #SchoolPsychFam in person! My first time as an exhibitor was incredible! The best part was meeting so many people and hearing your stories. Shout out to my team, Rachele and Tiffany, for helping to hold down the booth, and shout out to everyone who was able to stop by and show some love. Another NASP highlight was introducing the School Psych AI Ethics Council Guidance Document: Six Guiding Principles for the Ethical Usage of AI Within School Psychology. The biggest question I receive about AI is related to data, security, and privacy. I am proud to have convened the very first School Psych AI Ethics Council. These leaders worked to create the very first guiding principles for how school psychologists should approach responsible and ethical usage of AI within our field. We also launched our SPAI Enterprise Pilot Program (shout out to our first Enterprise Partners!)
March 2024: Feedback & Innovation
You all loved the new report writer feature and requested even more assessment templates to be added...and we listened! Our development team incorporated accessibility standards within the platform to ensure effective navigation. In this picture, Rachele and I walked through the current available assessment templates and how to access them.
April 2024: Free Webinar & Practical Uses of AI
Our School Psych AI team hosted our first free webinar and had the opportunity to collaborate on our Practical Uses of AI article and an advocacy handout to help improve our practice across levels. Shout out to Dr. Liz Angoff for her thoughtful contributions to our field and for being willing to partner on these resources! In this picture, we invited Dr. Liz to join our Feedback Friday session to discuss the next generation of school psychology and how to integrate AI for students, families, as psychologists, and as districts/institutions.
May 2024: Goodbye to OpenAI
In a major move to improve security and protect PII, we migrated away from OpenAI to our own in-house model! What did this mean? This move towards our own cloud solution enabled us to provide a safe and secure way to interact with LLMs! This was a massive step for the field of school psychology! In May, our School Psych AI Ethics Council reconvened and answered “Should School Psychologists Disclose the Use of AI?” Good question, right? Our guiding principles of transparency, accountability, and fairness and equity helped to ground the conversation and served as the major considerations of the discussion.
June 2024: Even More AI Tools
We created even more AI Tools for School Psychologists including the email generator, readability assistant, strength-based language generator, and translator! If you could think of something to outsource, we wanted Sophia to have a tool for it! In this image, you’ll see what the first version of the text summarizer looked like.
July 2024: My Caseload Tracker & AI Workshop
We announced the launch of My Caseload Tracker (first iteration pictured here). My Caseload Tracker was designed to streamline and simplify your caseload management, keeping track of where you are in the assessment process from start to finish for all of your cases!
In July we also hosted the biggest AI Workshop of the summer which resulted in 99% confidence in leveraging AI! We had a blast learning with you all!
August 2024: Back to School Special
As the new school year was approaching, we knew we wanted our #SchoolPsychFam to have access to the right tools for the job and offered our first Back to School Special of 10% our annual premium membership. In this picture, you can see the variety of tools available. We’ve definitely come a long way from the first iteration of the platform!
Today: Sophia’s First Birthday
We are honored and humbled to be part of this amazing community where we are creating the future of school psychology! We couldn’t do this without all of you and we are looking forward to seeing what we can do together in year two!
For a snapshot of Sophia's first year, check out our infographic here.
Contributors: Dr. Byron McClure, NCSP, Founder, School Psych AI & Rachele Teson, EdS, NCSP
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