How Flint and ChatGPT Edu compare in safety, pricing, access, implementation, design, and more.
TOP SCHOOLS USE FLINT TO OFFER SAFE AI ACCESS TO STUDENTS, TEACHERS, AND ADMINISTRATORS
Introduction
While Flint and ChatGPT both offer access to the most advanced AI for school-wide use, ChatGPT is held back by serious limitations such as a lack of teacher and administrator visibility as well as poor accessibility.
Flint is the only platform that offers AI access to students with the guardrails necessary to ensure academic integrity. And, every aspect of Flint’s offering (training, integrations, pricing, etc.) is designed for schools.
Key differences between Flint and ChatGPT
Teacher visibility into student messages
When students interact with ChatGPT (including with Custom GPTs), their teachers have no way of viewing their messages. Teachers will often resort to walking around a room to check each student’s screen manually, or ask students to submit screenshots or links to their messages with the AI. These methods don’t guarantee full visibility for teachers, and present a barrier to use that makes consistent use of ChatGPT in the classroom near-impossible for most teachers.
With Flint, teachers can see every message that students send back and forth with the AI. Additionally, teachers can save time thanks to auto-generated summaries of each student’s session, which highlight each student’s demonstrated strengths and areas of improvement. Teachers can also view class-wide summaries, and can manually leave comments for students to view.
Guardrails to ensure academic honesty
The use of ChatGPT by students raises serious concerns for academic integrity, and rightfully so. When students ask ChatGPT to do their work for them (e.g. writing a paper), ChatGPT is happy to comply. This shortcuts the learning process, and has led to a sharp rise in cheating.
As promising as the potential of AI is, when introducing a platform to your school, it’s important to ensure that concerns of academic honesty due to student use of AI aren’t ignored. That’s exactly where Flint can help.
In Flint, the AI is pre-loaded with guardrails to ensure that it will act as a responsible tutor, not as an answer-giver. In Flint, the AI never writes student essays, and challenges students to think critically at every step of the way. And, by using the built in “helpfulness level” selector, teachers can easily customize how much assistance the AI should give students, with no prompt engineering required.
Pricing designed for K-12 schools, not enterprises
While ChatGPT Edu offers educational institutions a discounted version of ChatGPT Enterprise, the pricing structure and minimum commitments are not designed with K-12 schools in mind.
The price of ChatGPT Edu is $12/user/month, with a minimum site license of 350 seats. That works out to over $50,000 a year. Additionally, there’s no trial version of ChatGPT Edu.
Flint’s pricing is designed for K-12 schools, not enterprises. Flint is entirely free for up to 80 users at your school. See more details on our pricing tiers, here.
All licenses to Flint include unlimited AI access for users. The AI model powering Flint is Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet, which is the current state-of-the-art AI model. Claude 3.5 Sonnet has significantly stronger reasoning capabilities than any AI model currently available via ChatGPT.
Additionally, Flint licenses have no minimum requirement on the number of seats. This means that you have the option to start with a small pilot group of students and teachers, and scale up over time as you see best fit.
Access for students under the age of 13
ChatGPT can not be used by students under the age of 13. Additionally, students ages 13 to 18 are required to obtain parental consent before using ChatGPT.
Flint, on the other hand, can be used by students of any age — even if they are under 13.
In order to ensure a safe environment for AI access, Flint automatically flags inappropriate messages sent by students (language related to violence, harassment, threats, self-harm, sexual content, etc.) for teacher and administrator review.
Additionally, Flint can ensure COPPA compliance if your school has a technology waiver in place that parents sign to give administrators the right to choose which tools students can use.
Professional development and ease of implementation
No trial version of ChatGPT Edu
Requires prompt engineering skills
No provided PD
Third party PD providers
GPT store not specific to education
Free trial for up to 80 users
No prompt engineering required
Public PD materials
Unlimited virtual PD sessions offered
Community-powered template library
Unlike with ChatGPT Enterprise or ChatGPT Edu, there’s no lead time to get started with Flint. Schools can request a free trial to get started with teacher and administrator access immediately, or book a demo with our team here.
Additionally, rolling out ChatGPT at your school would likely require dedicated professional development for faculty in order to teach the basics of how AI works and the ins and outs of prompt engineering. While third party PD services for AI exist, they can cost upwards of thousands of dollars.
With Flint, unlimited virtual PD sessions are included at no extra cost with any license. These PD sessions can be done school-wide, or for a subset of teachers (e.g. a group of pilot teachers, or for teachers in a specific department or grade level). Additionally, all PD materials for Flint are publicly available here.
And, because Flint is exclusively used by schools, there’s a robust community of top schools and educators to learn alongside. References to schools can be provided upon request (feel free to contact us at sales@flintk12.com), and there is a template library available of AI tutors designed and shared by teachers across the world.
Product evolution based on the needs of schools
Content upload
Upload PDFs, Word documents, PowerPoint slides, CSV files, and website links for the AI to pull from.
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Math accuracy
Flint runs calculations in the background to ensure accuracy on even the most complex math problems, similar to a human tutor verifying work with a calculator.
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Web search
Flint can search the web to find accurate and up-to-date info (e.g. current events from news articles).
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Whiteboard
Students can interact with Flint via a whiteboard to show their work to the AI.
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In-line citations
Flint can cite its sources — whether it be from teacher-provided content or web sources the AI found via search — and show the exact excerpt used.
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Image processing
Flint can process images to explain diagrams, transcribe written notes, or help students stuck on showing their work on a problem.
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Image generation
Flint uses DALL·E 3 to generate AI images to help students visualize scenarios, get inspiration, or create designs.
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Evidence-based feedback
When providing feedback after a session, clickable inline citations let students (and teachers) easily identify identify areas of improvement.
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Text-to-speech and speech-to-text
Flint can speak in over 50 languages and dialects, and can transcribe speech with 98.5% accuracy.
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50+ world languages
World language teachers can select a primary and secondary language for the AI to communicate with students in, as well as a ACTFL or CEFR level.
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Code editor
Flint can write and display code in-line in 50+ languages, and includes a built-in code editor with automatic syntax highlighting.
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Math formula editor
Flint displays equations in LaTeX formatting and includes a formula editor to let users enter their own equations, in an interface similar to MathType.
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Graphing support
Flint can graph equations on 2D or 3D planes to visualize math problems, or help in visualizing simple datasets.
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Essay writing feedback
Provide students with inline writing feedback from AI that follows a rubric and guardrails set by the teacher.
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Automatic prompt engineering
Describe what you want in natural language, and let AI do the prompt engineering for you. No prompt engineering skills required.
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School-wide AI chatbot
Students, teachers, and administrators have 24/7 access to a school-wide AI chatbot that can be used for any purpose, such as extra homework help or for generating classroom materials.
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Custom rubrics
Upload rubrics (AP, IB, etc.) for the AI to follow when providing feedback to students, or edit the generated rubric to your liking.
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Automated previews
Watch the AI mock up an example student interaction, to see exactly how it would help a struggling student or push an excelling student to go further.
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Custom AI guardrails
By default, Flint refuses to provide answers directly or do work on behalf of students. Teachers can customize guardrails the AI follows to make it more or less flexible.
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Class-wide summaries
The AI summarizes strengths and areas of improvement for your whole class.
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Assignment deadlines
Set a deadline for students to interact with an AI activity, in order to use Flint as an assignment tool.
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Timed assignments
Set a time limit for a session with an AI activity.
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Follow-up AI activities
Based on areas of improvement of an individual student or an entire class, create an AI activity to give personalized extra help.
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YouTube video support
Paste a YouTube video link, and Flint can incorporate the transcript as part of its knowledge base.
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Print sessions
Print student conversations with the AI, or export as a PDF.
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LMS and SIS integrations
Flint supports rostering import via integrations with every major LMS (Canvas, Schoology, Google Classroom, etc.) and SIS (Veracross, Blackbaud, PowerSchool, etc.)
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Automatic flagging
Inappropriate messages sent to the AI (language related to violence, harassment, threats, self-harm, sexual content, etc.) are automatically flagged for administrator review.
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Usage analytics
See how often teachers and students are using Flint, and who the most active users are.
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Google and Microsoft SSO
One click sign up via Google or Microsoft, including for students under the age of 13.
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Full admin visibility
School admins can see every message that any users (students, teachers, etc.) send back and forth with AI activities on Flint.
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State-of-the-art LLMs
Flint uses Claude 3.5 Sonnet in combination with translation, code-based math calculations, and web search for the highest possible accuracy.
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ChatGPT is a powerful tool, but it aims to be a one-size-fits-all solution. This comes with some benefits. For example, ChatGPT has a stellar mobile app (which Flint currently lacks). However, the lack of focus from OpenAI on addressing needs of schools makes ChatGPT a difficult tool to embrace for academic support.
Every aspect of Flint has been designed based on feedback from educators and their students. While Flint started out similar to ChatGPT, this constant evolution has led to the introduction of features specific to teaching and learning that aren’t available in more generic tools like ChatGPT. Here are just a few examples:
Automatic prompt engineering for teachers. Teachers can describe a learning objective, and Flint will automatically turn that content into a set of prompts and rules for the AI to follow. Customizing the behavior of the AI requires 0 prompt engineering skills on behalf of the user.
Whiteboard. Students can interact with Flint via a whiteboard to show their work to the AI.
Math equation editor. To make Flint easy to use in for math coaching and extra practice, Flint displays equations in LaTeX formatting and includes a formula editor to let users enter their own equations, in an interface similar to MathType.
Code editor. Flint can write and display code in-line in 50+ languages and includes a built-in code editor with automatic syntax highlighting, making it seamless to use for any computer science class.
Language level selector (including for world languages). With no prompt engineering required, teachers can select a language level for the AI to communicate with students in. For a world language course, for example, setting an ACTFL level ensures that the AI will speak with students at the appropriate level.
Automatic flagging of inappropriate messages. Inappropriate messages sent to the AI by students (language related to violence, harassment, threats, self-harm, sexual content, etc.) are automatically flagged for teacher and admin review.
Assignment deadlines and timers. To make Flint easy to use as an assignment tool (e.g. for formative assignments such as in-class exit quizzes or at-home review activities), teachers can set a deadline for when students have to interact with an AI tutor on Flint by, as well as a timer for the length of a session.
To view a history of Flint’s product updates, check out this page. Classroom and educator-specific features that are a part of Flint’s future product roadmap include LMS integration and richer analytics for teachers to better understand student growth and performance (similar to EdTech tools like IXL Learning).
By partnering with Flint, you’ll contribute to shaping the future trajectory of the platform. Our CEO, Sohan, welcomes any feedback or feature requests at sohan@flintk12.com.
Frequently asked questions about Flint and ChatGPT
What AI model does Flint use?
Flint is powered by Claude 3.5 Sonnet. Additionally, Flint has custom tooling under the hood — namely text-to-speech, speech-to-text, and a calculator similar to Wolfram Alpha.
