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Welcome back to the Titcher's AI Cafe. I'm Kane, a teacher and a parent who wants AI to give us back our time.
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I share practical classroom-tested AI strategies to cut down your workload
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and prove your feedback and reduce stress so you can get your evenings back
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and be more presently a friend of family. No jargon, just actual steps, grab your mug,
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now let's get going.
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Today I thought I'd talk about Gemini. It's been getting a lot of publicity lately.
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lately he's been getting some updates and this is separate from the notebook LM which is obviously
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part of the Gemini Google Suite of AI. So today I thought we'll go back and have a look at
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specifically Gemini and the things that it can do and some of the ways you can use it because
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we've had a lot of different episodes around where we haven't actually gone through some
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actual practical tasks which is one of the points of my podcast. So getting a little bit back
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on track today. So I'm going to look through 10 surprising useful features Gemini can have
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that you can actually use it within the classroom. So what are we going to start with?
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Let's start with the big picture. Why Gemini feels different and the school workflow compared to
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other environments. The simplest way to describe Gemini is this. It's increasingly designed to
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sit alongside Google Work space for education. Rather than feeling like a separate tool you must
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constantly feel to manage and say like open AI's. Google positions Gemini for education
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as supporting teacher time-saving, personalized learning experiences and so on. I did
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generation. Privacy and security context is important for institutions and it's within the educational
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space it's working towards that. And this matters because many teachers are actually in Google
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schools and that's the tool they're going to use and I was told we know that a friend's 50th
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on the weekend that we went rocks off schools are going to use co-poll and so forth.
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And that's where the challenges things like Claude and a chat GPT will have challenges
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getting into that ecosystem and being embedded within that. So what's 10 things you can do with Gemini
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with classroom examples? So let's start with upload and reference files including drive.
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One of the most immediately useful habits in treating Gemini is like a reading partner for
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your existing materials because we all have a lot of materials online. So upload a PDF chapter
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and ask for discussion prompts at three levels of difficulty. Point out a slide deck and ask for
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a short quiz, longer quiz or a travel practice exit ticket. If you're already keeping your resources
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in your Google Drive the workflow becomes it really is just a direct reference there.
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So less steps for you to go having to copy paste move material around. Fewer formatting problems
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because they're within one ecosystem and more consistency between I guess because you're drawing
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the resources that you've got to what you actually want to achieve in the classroom. Example
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problem would be using the slide deck drive 10 question quiz with an answer key. Sure five questions
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test core knowledge three tests cause an effect and two require evidence from a specific slide.
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Number two we can connect Google with other apps using chat references. So Gemini can connect
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into parts of the Google ecosystem which can be especially useful for planning coordination.
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Provide your school settings allow it obviously check with your IT department and practice this is
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a difference between AI that I guess writes an idea in AI that helps you schedule the idea.
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So if it works within yours you can bring in calendar constraints, locations,
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related resources when you're organising excursions say assessment timetables and parent
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information sessions sessions. So classroom use would be planning revision sequence that aligns
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with your actual remaining lessons including interruptions people three days public holidays or
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bank holidays wherever you are on the world and event days that often we don't realize or put
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into our planning when we're actually scheduling out tasks and assessment sequences.
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Number three you can use your phones camera to actually start a prompt this sounds small but
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it's actually really powerful and especially in messing teaching. So snap a photo of a book cover
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a worksheet or even a photo plaque when you're on excursion and then ask Gemini Generator
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Summary Kivo cab and discussion questions it's quick triage of the most when you need support
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on the spot rather than after school when the moment has passed. An example prompt would be
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summarise this text for a year or nine student and generate five comprehensive questions into
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extension questions. Number four guided learning mode and what matters for your students because
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we do want our students to use it. So freaking concerns is students will use AI to take shortcuts
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or we discuss this in general but like I said it's a tool we're going to get them to use it.
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Goose to Scraw. Scraw guided learning approach in Gemini that aims to push learners towards
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understanding step by step support and questioning. Now I did review it way back when it first came
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out so I should really visit it. Like I said it wasn't that impressed compared to what the open AI
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version was but like I said it's been quite a while yet who knows what advances are made.
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So in terms of teacher you can start.
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You can model on how to ask for hints, work steps and check for understanding rather than just
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searching answers. Five canvas mode for long-term work. For long lesson plans, newsletters, draft,
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policies, younger overviews all that sort of stuff. Chapterids can become unwirly. A canvas
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style word space is useful because it behaves like a document. You can write then manually edit
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and ask for target revision in the bottom section without losing the structure of the whole piece.
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The sort of fits better with real teaching but I'll see it's not an exact science often messy.
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So think of a prompt. Revise only the assessment section to include success criteria,
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accommodations and a short marking guide. Keep the rest unchanged.
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Number six. Advanced image creation and editing. And I'll start with another teacher tonight
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when I was out. Have my daughters award ceremony. So Gemini can make tools and things and this
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can be really handy for accelerating things like prototyping and design.
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Particularly with the nano to banana. Sorry, nano banana number two version.
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As the latest image generation photo editing model is actually really good. So for every
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educator you can then use this to generate. For example work samples in your classroom and things
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you want students to actually work towards and actually achieve. So you can use it to create
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source style image historical inferences task. Now I don't recommend this but if you need to
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generate something specific but do time it's AI generated if it's poverty. If you're actually
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doing actual source work always use primary sources. Diagram style images, science explanations,
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visual prompts, creative writing. Now if you get it to do diagrams and things do double check it.
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They make still makes some mistakes. It looks fantastic. Lots of mistakes built into it. I was
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a little looking at these Facebook posts today. I was doing about using it. I had a diagram
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and a frog and but all these people were saying look so many mistakes. She had the things
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wrong label wrong and the spelling mistakes in that. I found that recently trying to make a video
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it was terrible. But anyway, but it's a starting tool always double check the actual inside it. So
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7. Use Gemini inside your Google classroom. So it's now getting positioned as a central tool
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within the Google classroom in terms of creating content resources. And I said as I said another
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might take updates being rolled out across the different educational tools for Google.
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And in mistress can then control access through these age based settings for example
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and service controls in the admin console. It's important to go look those up. So we're emphasizing
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if you do not see feature, they may not be. It may be simply settings if you don't see access to it.
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But what you can do is drive different instructions generate lyrics and make those resources
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just often take a long time based on your experience and knowledge. 8. Create and share custom gems.
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Now gems are as a part of Google where you can personalize different characters within that.
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I've made a couple of gems I've been using for. And that's same quite interesting.
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The idea is you can create gems to do different jobs within AI for yourself within the classroom.
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The next example who teaches say my area say if you do a geography teach you can have a geography
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one you can have history one you can have civics one. So you can then swap between the different
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topics or areas of study in your learning area because they have different backgrounds.
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The measure are actually doing like modern art and freshness and so on.
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They'll have different background, different resources, different focus. You can create custom gems
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to actually meet that need. And the idea of gems is you can actually share whether people say you might
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create gem for sourcing else's scaffolds one for literacy, one for assessment feedback comments
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a lot and share them with your colleagues support each other out. Number 9. Do some deep
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research reports with sources and this is important sources are important. So when you go and do
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the deep research and get the data make sure I outputs the site and resource the sources
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then actually go check them. For example, create a brief
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heat islands in Australian cities. I was doing that with my students this week. So create a
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research brief on heat islands and Australian cities focusing on causes impacts on student health
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learning and school level mitigation strategies provide sources and one page executive summary
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which is really good way to get your resources for a class activity. Finally generate audio
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summaries from research and I think this is wonderful. So that way your students don't have to read
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all the time. Just say instead of getting a dense report or something you got students like
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over the further moment don't want to really want to read you can then create an audio support
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your reluctant readers get them to listen to it still get the content listen to it first then
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actually read it or you got time for families of students who can listen to them from school for
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example. And the idea is the treat is like a summary and all authority of source itself
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and for the ideas you can use it to widen the accessibility of your learning material to
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more of your students. An audio review for example assessment policy or a short parent friendly
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explanation of a unit that would be fantastic. Now one of the things you might want to look at is
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Google introduced a Gemini Certified Educator it doesn't actually take too long I think I knocked it
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off in less than a day as a few hours so go check that out as well it does teach you some basic
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skills in there and obviously with everything you do you could have courses work within the guard
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rails of the educational tools and your schools and obviously double check everything based on your
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professional knowledge. I also can say if you take one practical step of this and you are a
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Google school build one reasonable repeatable workflow so the ideas who can repeat these workflows
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that we need to do over and over again at the same time. Choose a single unit task you run every
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term create a gem for it so you got more personalized prompts and information for the IID use
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and then test the output against your existing standard and then refine and improve.
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So hopefully you found this useful as always give us a review if you want to come on talk about
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your personal AI journey within education drop me an email and it will arrange time to do
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till then keep up the work look after yourself.