Khanmigo for Hong Kong Teachers: The Teacher Tools Are Free Here, the Student Tutor Cannot Be Bought

The most important sentence first, because most write-ups blur it: Hong Kong teachers can use Khanmigo's teacher tools free of charge. Khan Academy opened the free teacher tools to more than 180 countries and territories in December 2025 and Hong Kong is not on the excluded list. Hong Kong students, however, cannot get the Khanmigo tutor. Khan Academy states in writing that paid subscriptions are "only available in the United States", that the subscriber must live there with a US billing address, and that teachers cannot grant students access — classroom student use exists only through a school or district partnership. So in Hong Kong, Khanmigo is an excellent teacher planning toolkit, not a student tutoring solution.

What this tool actually is

Khanmigo is the AI product of the non-profit Khan Academy, and it splits in two:

1. Khanmigo for Teachers, the free teacher tools — 25-plus tools covering lesson plans, learning objectives, rubrics, exit tickets, multiple choice quizzes, an IEP assistant, report card comments, letters of recommendation, knowledge refreshers, and Class Snapshot, which analyses pupils' last seven days of work on Khan Academy. It runs on Azure OpenAI Service, supported by Microsoft's donation of Azure infrastructure.
2. The Khanmigo student tutor — an AI tutor that refuses to hand over answers and instead questions the learner towards their own solution, embedded in every Khan Academy video and exercise. It is the famous part, and it is the part Hong Kong cannot buy.

Who is it really built for? United States K-12 districts. The data model, the roster sync through Clever and ClassLink, the state-level data protection agreements and the curriculum alignment are all designed around American schools. Teachers elsewhere get the same teacher tools, but the student layer and the curriculum alignment do not travel.

By school phase, concept practice in mathematics and science benefits most, from upper primary to senior secondary. But Khan Academy's content is built on United States standards, so it does not line up with the Hong Kong curriculum guides, textbook units or public examination formats, and the teacher has to judge what is usable.

Key features

As officially described:

• A teacher tools hub — 25-plus teacher-focused Khanmigo activities in five categories: Create, Differentiate, Plan, Support and Learn, with a favourites list.
• Lesson plans and learning objectives — structured plans linked to Khan Academy videos, articles and exercises.
• Assessment tools — exit tickets, multiple choice quizzes, rubric generation, and question generation from a specified piece of content.
• Differentiation and support — an IEP assistant, clear directions generation and informational text generation.
• Administrative writing — report card comments, letters of recommendation and class newsletters.
• Recommend Assignments — suggests what pupils should work on next based on recent performance, assignable on the spot.
• Class Snapshot — a high-level analysis of the last seven days of learning time, assignment completion and course mastery progress.
• A Documents area — everything generated with Khanmigo, kept for re-editing or export.
• The student tutor, US subscription or district partnership only — Socratic questioning, writing coach, live code feedback, speech-to-text and read-aloud.

Full tutorial

The scenario: you teach Secondary 1 mathematics and the next unit is linear equations in one unknown. You want a guided tutoring flow where a stuck pupil gets a hint rather than an answer, and you want to see afterwards who actually got stuck. Here is the version a Hong Kong teacher can genuinely run.

Step 1 — register and set the teacher role. Sign up at khanacademy.org and set the account role to teacher. Khan Academy lists three conditions: the teacher role, an interface set to a supported language (Traditional Chinese qualifies), and a location outside the excluded regions. Hong Kong qualifies.

Step 2 — create the class and assign practice. Create "1A Mathematics" in the Teacher Dashboard and hand out the class code. Note the boundary: pupils logging in to do Khan Academy practice is free worldwide and fully available in Hong Kong; only the Khanmigo tutor conversation is not. Pick the algebra foundation exercise sets that overlap with the Secondary 1 scheme of work and assign those.

Step 3 — build a hint ladder with the teacher tools. In Teacher Tools, open Lesson Plan or Clear Directions and paste the block below. Its value is that it is portable: the same ladder can go into any AI tutor, including the tutor module of your own school platform.

Subject: Secondary 1 Mathematics. Unit: linear equations in one unknown, transposition and checking.
Purpose: a three-level hint ladder for teachers to use when a pupil is stuck, and as a rule set for an AI tutor.

Rule: under no circumstances give the answer or a complete worked solution.

Level 1 hints (point at the strategy, not at the numbers):
- "Which side of the equals sign is the unknown on? What do you want to move first?"
- "If you do the same thing to both sides, the equation still holds. What do you want to do to both sides?"

Level 2 hints (narrow the field):
- "Try moving the constant to the right. What happens to its sign when you move it?"
- "If there is a coefficient in front of x, what is usually the final operation?"

Level 3 hints (model a parallel example with different numbers):
- "Look at this one: 2x + 5 = 13. Subtract 5 from both sides to get 2x = 8, then divide both sides by 2. Now apply the same order to yours."

Checking step (always required):
- "Substitute your answer back into the original equation. Does the left side equal the right side?"

Common errors for the teacher to watch:
- forgetting the sign change when transposing
- operating on only one side
- assuming a fractional answer must be wrong

Step 4 — generate the matching assessment. Use Multiple Choice Quiz for six questions and Exit Ticket for two end-of-lesson checks. Khan Academy's questions lean on American contexts and units, so swap dollars and yards for local settings and check the terminology.

Step 5 — review what pupils have been doing, and face the Hong Kong limit. Class Snapshot shows the class's last seven days of learning time, completion and mastery progress, and that layer is free and available here. But you cannot review Khanmigo conversations, because Hong Kong pupils do not have the Khanmigo tutor in the first place. Khan Academy states that within a district partnership, school and district administrators can see progress, usage and Khanmigo chat summaries with automatic flagging of concerning interactions — but those are partnership features. With only the free teacher tools subscription, you can access only those tools regardless of which roles your account has enabled.

Step 6 — put the hint ladder somewhere pupils can reach it. This is the real Hong Kong choice: either the teacher runs the hint ladder by hand in class, which works but does not scale, or the same rule set goes into a platform pupils can log into and where teachers can read the conversations. Our article on the scaffolded AI tutor sets out that design in detail.

Pros and cons

Pros

• The teacher tools are entirely free and available in Hong Kong — no card, no trial countdown, which is rare generosity even for a non-profit.
• 25-plus tools that map onto real work: lesson plans, rubrics, exit tickets, report card comments, letters of recommendation. Hong Kong teachers write all of these.
• The Socratic principle is the right one. Refusing to give answers and questioning with unlimited patience is the most defensible use of AI in learning.
• Traditional Chinese interface and responses are supported, which is not common among education AI tools.
• A clear privacy stance: no selling personal information, no third-party advertising, model providers contractually barred from training on student data, and student names and personal information not shared with those providers.
• Students see an on-screen notice that chats are visible to parents and teachers, and problematic interactions are flagged — a good example of safety design.

Cons

• Hong Kong students cannot get the tutor. Paid subscriptions are US-only, teachers cannot enable pupil access, and classroom use requires a district partnership whose availability in Hong Kong is unstated.
• The content does not match the Hong Kong curriculum. Built on United States standards, so curriculum guides, textbook units and examination formats all need manual conversion.
• Class Snapshot only sees Khan Academy activity — school tests, homework and classroom observation are invisible to it.
• No Cantonese, which limits its usefulness for explaining primary maths and science in the pupils' spoken language.
• Model version opacity: Azure OpenAI is confirmed, the learner page footnote still says GPT-4, and the 2026 model version is not published.
• District partnerships depend on Clever or ClassLink roster sync, which Hong Kong schools generally do not run.
• Data processing is primarily in the United States, so a school with data location requirements must review the contract itself.

Pricing and fee breakdown

The costs that are not money. The teacher tools are nominally free, but a Hong Kong school pays in three other currencies. First, curriculum conversion time: every generated plan and question has to be translated from American standards into Hong Kong curriculum language and context, so of the 20 minutes a worksheet saves, perhaps 10 go back into localisation. Second, the expectation gap on the student side: you demonstrate guided learning in class and then tell pupils they cannot use it at home, which has its own pedagogical cost. Third, if you pursue a district partnership, the roster sync, the data protection agreement and the review of US data processing are real work for the IT coordinator and the school's legal adviser — and since the price is unpublished, none of it can be budgeted in advance.

There is no "free tier running out" here, since no usage cap is published for the teacher tools. Equally, there is no upgrade path: a Hong Kong school cannot pay to give pupils the tutor.

Compared with the alternatives

Worth noting: on the specific discipline of refusing to give answers, Khanmigo is far stricter than a general chatbot, and that is its real pedagogical contribution.

Side by side with Edor.ai

Where Khanmigo genuinely wins: the teacher tools are the most solid set of free AI education tools available, with the IEP assistant and rubric generator particularly useful, and the product discipline of never handing over an answer is stricter than many tools that claim an education purpose. That a non-profit gives all of this away to teachers worldwide, Hong Kong included, deserves respect — and deserves an account from every Hong Kong teacher.

Why a school still needs a school-based platform

What Khanmigo leaves open in Hong Kong is not a quality problem. It is a geography and curriculum problem.

The student side is absent here. However good a tutor is, if pupils cannot log in it does not exist. A school needs a tutor Hong Kong pupils can actually use and where teachers can see the conversations.

Curriculum alignment. Secondary 1 mathematics sequencing, textbook units and examination question styles differ from United States standards. Once the scheme of work and materials sit in a school knowledge base, the tutor and the question generator speak in the language of your unit.

Teacher monitoring and hint levels. Khanmigo's chat summaries are a partnership feature, whereas a Hong Kong panel head needs to set "hints up to level two only for this lesson" themselves and read afterwards what pupils actually asked.

A cross-module student view. Class Snapshot sees platform activity only; student data analysis has to place school tests, homework completion and AI interaction side by side to support a PIE review.

Pricing structure and grant reporting. A free tool creates no procurement line to report, and the district pricing is unpublished; a per-school annual fee with AI usage included and usage reports attached is the clearest structure for an EDB funding application and its acquittal.

Edor.ai is built for Hong Kong schools, teachers and students, it is the only thing we do, and we serve them with our best effort: nine modules covering lesson planning, AI tutoring, marking, differentiation, oral practice, student data analysis, administrative workload, the PIE planning cycle and a school knowledge base, with a tutor that gives hints rather than answers at teacher-set levels, cloud or on-premises deployment, and one-click full export at any time. None of this is meant to displace Khanmigo's pedagogy. We agree with it. We just want Hong Kong pupils to be able to reach it.

Takeaway

Hong Kong teachers should register for the free Khanmigo teacher tools today: 25-plus tools, Traditional Chinese support, zero cost. But state the boundaries plainly at the staff meeting — the student tutor cannot be bought here, the content is built on United States standards, and conversation monitoring is a district partnership feature. If your school is seriously considering a partnership, get written confirmation from the Khan Academy Districts team on Hong Kong eligibility, price and data processing location, because none of the three appears on any official page. To compare tools, read the 2026 overview of AI tools for teachers and 12 questions to ask before buying a school AI platform.