Teacher's Guide: Integrating AI in the Math Classroom

The integration of artificial intelligence into education is not a distant future scenario; it is happening now, in classrooms across Israel and around the world. For math teachers, AI tools present a unique opportunity: the ability to provide every student with personalized practice and feedback at a scale that is impossible for a single teacher to achieve alone, while freeing up valuable class time for the deep conceptual discussions and human connections that only a teacher can provide.

This guide is written for practicing math teachers who are curious about AI tools but want practical, honest guidance on how to integrate them effectively. We will cover the genuine benefits, the real limitations, the setup process, and concrete strategies that teachers in Israeli schools are already using successfully.

1. Why AI Belongs in Your Classroom

If you have been teaching math for any length of time, you know the fundamental challenge: a classroom of 30 or more students, each with different levels of prior knowledge, different learning speeds, different areas of strength and weakness, and different emotional relationships with mathematics. The traditional model of teaching to the middle leaves advanced students bored and struggling students further behind. Differentiation is the ideal, but creating and managing individualized materials for every student is practically impossible with the time and resources available to most teachers.

This is where AI genuinely helps. An AI-powered platform like Kedmathic can simultaneously provide each of your students with exercises at their appropriate difficulty level, adjust in real time based on their responses, offer graduated hints when they are stuck, and track their progress across every topic in the curriculum. It does the work of 30 individualized tutors, running silently in the background while you focus on what you do best: teaching, explaining, motivating, and connecting with your students as human beings.

The evidence supporting AI-assisted math learning is growing. Schools that have implemented adaptive learning platforms consistently report measurable improvements in student outcomes, particularly among students who were previously underperforming. The reason is straightforward: these students finally receive practice at the right level, with enough scaffolding to keep them progressing rather than spinning their wheels on material that is either too easy or too hard.

Equally important is what AI does for your professional life as a teacher. Grading routine practice exercises, tracking who completed homework, identifying which students need extra help on which topics: these are necessary tasks that consume enormous amounts of your time and energy. When AI handles them, you get that time back to invest in lesson planning, creative teaching activities, one-on-one conversations with struggling students, and your own professional development.

2. Setting Up the Teacher Dashboard

Getting started with Kedmathic's teacher dashboard is straightforward, and the initial setup investment pays dividends throughout the school year. Here is a step-by-step walkthrough of the process.

Step 1: Create your teacher account. Sign up at kedmathic.co.il with your school email address. Teacher accounts are free and include all dashboard features. You will be asked to verify your role as an educator, which typically takes less than 24 hours.

Step 2: Set up your classes. Create a class for each group you teach. You can name them however you prefer (for example, "10th Grade - 5 Units" or "8A Math"). For each class, specify the grade level and Bagrut track if applicable. This ensures the AI generates exercises aligned with the correct curriculum.

Step 3: Add your students. You can add students individually by entering their email addresses, or use a class code that students enter when they sign up. The class code method is usually fastest; simply share the code with your students (write it on the board, include it in a message to parents, or distribute it via your school's communication platform) and they join automatically.

Step 4: Configure class settings. The dashboard lets you customize several parameters for each class. You can set the curriculum scope (which topics are included or excluded), the difficulty range (useful for classes where you want to keep exercises within a specific level), and notification preferences (receive alerts when a student has been inactive for a set number of days, or when a student's performance on a topic drops below a threshold).

Step 5: Familiarize yourself with the overview. The main dashboard view shows a class-wide summary: average proficiency by topic, overall activity levels, and a ranked list of topics where students are struggling most. Spend fifteen minutes exploring this view with a few days of student data. You will quickly develop an intuition for how to read the dashboard and which metrics are most useful for your teaching decisions.

The entire setup process can be completed in under thirty minutes, and you only need to do it once per academic year. After that, the dashboard maintains itself automatically as students use the platform.

3. Creating Custom Exercises for Your Class

While Kedmathic's AI generates excellent adaptive exercises automatically, the teacher dashboard also gives you the power to create custom exercise sets that align precisely with your lesson plans, upcoming tests, or specific learning objectives.

Topic-specific assignments. After teaching a new concept in class, you can create a targeted practice assignment that focuses exclusively on that topic. For example, after a lesson on the quadratic formula, you might assign a set of 15 exercises that progress from straightforward applications (standard form equations with integer solutions) to more challenging variations (equations requiring simplification first, equations with irrational solutions, word problems that require setting up the equation). The AI generates the actual exercises, but you control the topic, difficulty range, and number of problems.

Mixed review sets. Before a unit test or the Bagrut exam, create review assignments that span multiple topics. You can specify the proportion of questions for each topic based on its weight on the test. For instance, a pre-Bagrut review might include 30% calculus, 25% trigonometry, 20% algebra, 15% geometry, and 10% probability, mirroring the actual exam distribution.

Differentiated assignments. For a single class, you can create different versions of the same assignment at different difficulty levels. Assign the easier version to students who need more scaffolding and the harder version to students who need more challenge. Both groups practice the same underlying concepts, but at a level appropriate to their current ability. The students do not need to know they received different versions; the experience is seamless from their perspective.

Timed practice tests. Create practice tests with time limits that simulate exam conditions. This is particularly valuable for Bagrut preparation, where time management is a critical skill. The dashboard shows you not only each student's accuracy but also their time per question, helping you identify students who know the material but work too slowly, a very different problem from not understanding the concepts.

Homework with hints. When assigning homework, you can choose whether to enable or disable the hint system. For formative practice, enable hints so students can work through challenges independently. For assessment purposes, disable hints to see what students can do on their own. You can also set a deadline and track who completed the assignment and when.

4. Monitoring Student Progress in Real-Time

The teacher dashboard transforms student progress from a periodic snapshot (test scores every few weeks) into a continuous, real-time stream of actionable information. Here is how to use this capability most effectively.

Class-wide heat map. The heat map view shows every student (rows) across every topic (columns), with cells color-coded by proficiency. At a glance, you can identify patterns: a column of red cells indicates a topic that the entire class is struggling with, suggesting you need to reteach or approach it differently. A row of red cells indicates an individual student who is falling behind across multiple topics and may need additional support.

Individual student profiles. Click on any student to see their detailed learning profile: which topics they have mastered, which they are working on, their daily practice patterns, their most common error types, and their progress trajectory over time. This information is invaluable for parent-teacher conferences, where you can share specific, data-driven observations rather than general impressions.

Early warning system. Configure alerts for students who stop practicing, whose accuracy drops suddenly, or who are spending an unusually long time on a particular topic. These early warning signals let you intervene before a small problem becomes a large one. A student who stops practicing for a week might just need a gentle reminder. A student whose accuracy drops sharply on a new topic might need five minutes of one-on-one explanation to clear up a misconception.

Comparative analytics. Compare your class's performance against anonymous, aggregated benchmarks from other classes at the same level across Israel. This contextualizes your results. If your class's geometry scores are lower than the national average but their algebra scores are higher, you have useful information about where to allocate additional teaching time.

Export and reporting. Generate reports for school administrators, parents, or your own records. The dashboard can produce summary reports by class, by student, or by topic, in formats suitable for printing or digital sharing. These reports save you the hours you would otherwise spend compiling data from multiple sources into a coherent picture of student progress.

5. Balancing AI with Traditional Teaching

The most effective math classrooms are not fully AI-driven or fully traditional. They are thoughtfully blended environments where technology handles what it does best and human teachers handle what they do best. Here is a practical framework for achieving this balance.

Use class time for what only a teacher can do. Conceptual explanations, Socratic questioning, collaborative problem-solving, mathematical discussions, and real-world applications are all areas where a skilled teacher vastly outperforms any AI. Use your precious face-to-face time for these high-value activities. When you explain why the quadratic formula works by completing the square, when you lead a class debate about different solution strategies for a complex problem, when you connect mathematical concepts to architecture or music or sports, you are doing something no algorithm can replicate.

Delegate routine practice to AI. Drill and practice, while essential for building fluency, is the least efficient use of class time. It requires no teacher expertise, it is repetitive, and students work at vastly different speeds (leading to bored fast workers and stressed slow workers). Assign this work through Kedmathic as homework or independent practice time. The AI handles the differentiation, feedback, and tracking automatically.

The flipped classroom model. Many Israeli teachers are finding success with a flipped model: students watch a short video introduction to a new topic at home (or review the concept through AI-guided introductory exercises), then class time is devoted to discussion, clarification of misunderstandings, collaborative problem-solving, and advanced applications. This maximizes the value of your limited face-to-face hours.

Blended lesson structure. A typical 45-minute class period might look like this: 5 minutes reviewing the dashboard to identify common struggles from the previous night's homework; 15 minutes of direct teaching addressing those specific struggles; 10 minutes of guided practice where students work problems on their tablets with AI support while you circulate and help individuals; 10 minutes of whole-class discussion about strategies and insights; 5 minutes previewing the homework assignment. This structure gives you the best of both worlds.

Preserve the human elements. Never lose sight of the fact that your relationship with your students matters enormously. The student who feels that their teacher believes in them will work harder than the student with the best AI tutor but no human connection. Use the time AI saves you to build those relationships: learn your students' names quickly, ask about their lives, notice when someone seems upset, celebrate genuine effort and improvement. These human touches are your superpower, and no technology will ever replace them.

6. Success Stories from Israeli Classrooms

The best evidence that AI integration works comes from teachers who have already done it. Here are real examples from Israeli schools that have adopted Kedmathic in their math classrooms.

Closing the Gap in a Mixed-Ability Class

A 9th-grade math teacher in a central Israel high school faced a common challenge: her class included students ranging from those who could barely handle basic algebra to those who were ready for advanced material. Traditional teaching meant the middle group was reasonably served while both ends suffered.

After implementing Kedmathic, she assigned differentiated practice through the platform while using class time for concept introduction and group work. Within one semester, the bottom quartile of students showed a 23% improvement in their average test scores, while the top quartile maintained their performance and reported feeling less bored during class. The key insight from her experience: the AI did not replace her teaching; it extended her reach to students she physically could not get to during a 45-minute period.

Bagrut Preparation at Scale

A high school in the north of Israel used Kedmathic's teacher dashboard to coordinate Bagrut preparation across all 5-unit math classes. Three teachers shared access to the same dashboard, allowing them to see consistent data across all classes and collaborate on addressing common weak areas.

The teachers created a shared bank of custom practice tests modeled on past Bagrut exams, assigned them through the platform at regular intervals, and used the resulting data to adjust their teaching focus week by week. They found that by mid-year, they could predict each student's likely Bagrut score with remarkable accuracy based on the platform's analytics, which allowed them to provide targeted interventions to students who were on the borderline.

Engaging Reluctant Learners

A middle school teacher in southern Israel noticed that several of her 7th-grade students had essentially given up on math. They did not do homework, they were disengaged during lessons, and their scores were declining steadily. She introduced Kedmathic with a focus on the gamification features: daily streaks, achievement badges, and friendly competitions.

The results surprised her. Students who had not completed a single homework assignment in weeks began practicing daily to maintain their streaks. The competitive leaderboard, which she displayed anonymously on the classroom screen, sparked genuine motivation. One student who had been scoring in the 40s on tests improved to consistently scoring above 70 within three months. The teacher credits the shift to two factors: the AI's ability to start these students at a level where they could experience success (rather than the grade-level material that was too difficult), and the gamification elements that made practice feel less like punishment and more like a game.

Supporting New Immigrant Students

A teacher working with new immigrant students found Kedmathic particularly valuable because math is a universal language. Students who were still learning Hebrew could practice mathematical concepts through the app's visual interface and step-by-step problem presentation, which requires less language proficiency than reading a Hebrew textbook. The teacher used the dashboard to track these students separately and could see that their mathematical understanding was often far ahead of what their test scores (hampered by language barriers) suggested. This data helped her advocate for appropriate placement and support for these students within the school system.

Technology does not replace great teaching. It amplifies it, giving every teacher the tools to reach every student in ways that were simply not possible before.