Jolie Radunich

With my passion project, "Trading Up Texts" I'm researching how literacy edtech and AI can help high school students see motivating career pathways through any required ELA text. Would love the opportunity to share snackable insights about the role LLMs, UX, and sales will play in developing this product—for fellow builders, dreamers, and enthusiasts in this space.

I’ve worked in supplemental literacy edtech for a few years, and this gap in the market is driving me nuts. Maybe my frustration is a natural part of my job. As a product marketer, my mission is to uncover unmet customer needs, get products to market that address those needs, and keep those products there. But as much as we want to meet students where they are, I’m not sure how well we’re actively working to boost reading proficiency and turning our words into action.

Supplemental literacy edtech is teacher first. We optimize how the teacher will browse for content, enrich instruction, and keep their students busy. We seem to focus less on optimizing how to make students, especially older ones, truly care about what’s at the heart of the teacher’s world.

High school students simply don’t want to read. Do you remember loving Shakespeare? If you’re answer is yes, you’re in the minority. Just 14 percent of students reportedly read for fun almost every day. Imagine how much that stat would shrink if you’re measuring student effort reading something they don’t want to. Required reading was published up to hundreds of years ago, using older English structures with dull and dry language. 

That’s why schools and districts investing in supplemental literacy solutions that have a robust content library, teacher instructional guide, and reporting functionality should know that none of these features are helping increase their high school students’ motivation to read. These features are helping teachers meet students where they’re at, but the material they’re using isn’t meeting them there. 

High school students experience heightened emotional sensitivity and physical changes—including constant tiredness—as they rock on the brink of adulthood. An abundance of learning materials is only the first step to dialing them in. We need to empathize with their apathy and answer the looming question in the back of their minds: When am I ever going to use this? 

Adult readers feel energized by books, not burned out, because we have unfettered choice to pick books that apply to our personal and professional lives. We can flutter from How to Win Friends and Influence People to The 7 Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, knowing that we’ll finish the read with insights to make our personal and professional lives better, through literal advice or the imaginative connections of fiction. 

Students don’t feel the same sense of purpose when their teacher assigns F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. It’s not because the book doesn’t matter. But the student can’t see why it matters to their life. Leveraging AI to create career-connected pathways can change this. 

Every EdTech platform and its mother seem to be working on an AI agent.