10 Surprisingly Useful Gemini Features for Teachers

0:00Welcome back to the Titcher's AI Cafe. I'm Kane, a teacher and a parent who wants AI to give us back our time. I share practical classroom-tested AI strategies to cut down your workload and prove your feedback and reduce stress so you can get your evenings back and be more presently a friend of family. No jargon, just actual steps, grab your mug, now let's get going. Today I thought I'd talk about Gemini. It's been getting a lot of publicity lately. lately he's been getting some updates and this is separate from the notebook LM which is obviously part of the Gemini Google Suite of AI. So today I thought we'll go back and have a look at specifically Gemini and the things that it can do and some of the ways you can use it because we've had a lot of different episodes around where we haven't actually gone through some actual practical tasks which is one of the points of my podcast. So getting a little bit back on track today. So I'm going to look through 10 surprising useful features Gemini can have that you can actually use it within the classroom. So what are we going to start with?

1:02Let's start with the big picture. Why Gemini feels different and the school workflow compared to other environments. The simplest way to describe Gemini is this. It's increasingly designed to sit alongside Google Work space for education. Rather than feeling like a separate tool you must constantly feel to manage and say like open AI's. Google positions Gemini for education as supporting teacher time-saving, personalized learning experiences and so on. I did generation. Privacy and security context is important for institutions and it's within the educational space it's working towards that. And this matters because many teachers are actually in Google schools and that's the tool they're going to use and I was told we know that a friend's 50th on the weekend that we went rocks off schools are going to use co-poll and so forth. And that's where the challenges things like Claude and a chat GPT will have challenges getting into that ecosystem and being embedded within that. So what's 10 things you can do with Gemini

2:05with classroom examples? So let's start with upload and reference files including drive. One of the most immediately useful habits in treating Gemini is like a reading partner for your existing materials because we all have a lot of materials online. So upload a PDF chapter and ask for discussion prompts at three levels of difficulty. Point out a slide deck and ask for a short quiz, longer quiz or a travel practice exit ticket. If you're already keeping your resources in your Google Drive the workflow becomes it really is just a direct reference there. So less steps for you to go having to copy paste move material around. Fewer formatting problems because they're within one ecosystem and more consistency between I guess because you're drawing the resources that you've got to what you actually want to achieve in the classroom. Example problem would be using the slide deck drive 10 question quiz with an answer key. Sure five questions test core knowledge three tests cause an effect and two require evidence from a specific slide.

3:10Number two we can connect Google with other apps using chat references. So Gemini can connect into parts of the Google ecosystem which can be especially useful for planning coordination. Provide your school settings allow it obviously check with your IT department and practice this is a difference between AI that I guess writes an idea in AI that helps you schedule the idea. So if it works within yours you can bring in calendar constraints, locations, related resources when you're organising excursions say assessment timetables and parent information sessions sessions. So classroom use would be planning revision sequence that aligns with your actual remaining lessons including interruptions people three days public holidays or bank holidays wherever you are on the world and event days that often we don't realize or put into our planning when we're actually scheduling out tasks and assessment sequences. Number three you can use your phones camera to actually start a prompt this sounds small but

4:10it's actually really powerful and especially in messing teaching. So snap a photo of a book cover a worksheet or even a photo plaque when you're on excursion and then ask Gemini Generator Summary Kivo cab and discussion questions it's quick triage of the most when you need support on the spot rather than after school when the moment has passed. An example prompt would be summarise this text for a year or nine student and generate five comprehensive questions into extension questions. Number four guided learning mode and what matters for your students because we do want our students to use it. So freaking concerns is students will use AI to take shortcuts or we discuss this in general but like I said it's a tool we're going to get them to use it. Goose to Scraw. Scraw guided learning approach in Gemini that aims to push learners towards understanding step by step support and questioning. Now I did review it way back when it first came out so I should really visit it. Like I said it wasn't that impressed compared to what the open AI version was but like I said it's been quite a while yet who knows what advances are made.

5:15So in terms of teacher you can start. You can model on how to ask for hints, work steps and check for understanding rather than just searching answers. Five canvas mode for long-term work. For long lesson plans, newsletters, draft, policies, younger overviews all that sort of stuff. Chapterids can become unwirly. A canvas style word space is useful because it behaves like a document. You can write then manually edit and ask for target revision in the bottom section without losing the structure of the whole piece. The sort of fits better with real teaching but I'll see it's not an exact science often messy. So think of a prompt. Revise only the assessment section to include success criteria, accommodations and a short marking guide. Keep the rest unchanged. Number six. Advanced image creation and editing. And I'll start with another teacher tonight when I was out. Have my daughters award ceremony. So Gemini can make tools and things and this

6:17can be really handy for accelerating things like prototyping and design. Particularly with the nano to banana. Sorry, nano banana number two version. As the latest image generation photo editing model is actually really good. So for every educator you can then use this to generate. For example work samples in your classroom and things you want students to actually work towards and actually achieve. So you can use it to create source style image historical inferences task. Now I don't recommend this but if you need to generate something specific but do time it's AI generated if it's poverty. If you're actually doing actual source work always use primary sources. Diagram style images, science explanations, visual prompts, creative writing. Now if you get it to do diagrams and things do double check it. They make still makes some mistakes. It looks fantastic. Lots of mistakes built into it. I was a little looking at these Facebook posts today. I was doing about using it. I had a diagram and a frog and but all these people were saying look so many mistakes. She had the things

7:21wrong label wrong and the spelling mistakes in that. I found that recently trying to make a video it was terrible. But anyway, but it's a starting tool always double check the actual inside it. So 7. Use Gemini inside your Google classroom. So it's now getting positioned as a central tool within the Google classroom in terms of creating content resources. And I said as I said another might take updates being rolled out across the different educational tools for Google. And in mistress can then control access through these age based settings for example and service controls in the admin console. It's important to go look those up. So we're emphasizing if you do not see feature, they may not be. It may be simply settings if you don't see access to it. But what you can do is drive different instructions generate lyrics and make those resources just often take a long time based on your experience and knowledge. 8. Create and share custom gems. Now gems are as a part of Google where you can personalize different characters within that.

8:26I've made a couple of gems I've been using for. And that's same quite interesting. The idea is you can create gems to do different jobs within AI for yourself within the classroom. The next example who teaches say my area say if you do a geography teach you can have a geography one you can have history one you can have civics one. So you can then swap between the different topics or areas of study in your learning area because they have different backgrounds. The measure are actually doing like modern art and freshness and so on. They'll have different background, different resources, different focus. You can create custom gems to actually meet that need. And the idea of gems is you can actually share whether people say you might create gem for sourcing else's scaffolds one for literacy, one for assessment feedback comments a lot and share them with your colleagues support each other out. Number 9. Do some deep research reports with sources and this is important sources are important. So when you go and do the deep research and get the data make sure I outputs the site and resource the sources

9:26then actually go check them. For example, create a brief heat islands in Australian cities. I was doing that with my students this week. So create a research brief on heat islands and Australian cities focusing on causes impacts on student health learning and school level mitigation strategies provide sources and one page executive summary which is really good way to get your resources for a class activity. Finally generate audio summaries from research and I think this is wonderful. So that way your students don't have to read all the time. Just say instead of getting a dense report or something you got students like over the further moment don't want to really want to read you can then create an audio support your reluctant readers get them to listen to it still get the content listen to it first then actually read it or you got time for families of students who can listen to them from school for example. And the idea is the treat is like a summary and all authority of source itself and for the ideas you can use it to widen the accessibility of your learning material to

10:29more of your students. An audio review for example assessment policy or a short parent friendly explanation of a unit that would be fantastic. Now one of the things you might want to look at is Google introduced a Gemini Certified Educator it doesn't actually take too long I think I knocked it off in less than a day as a few hours so go check that out as well it does teach you some basic skills in there and obviously with everything you do you could have courses work within the guard rails of the educational tools and your schools and obviously double check everything based on your professional knowledge. I also can say if you take one practical step of this and you are a Google school build one reasonable repeatable workflow so the ideas who can repeat these workflows that we need to do over and over again at the same time. Choose a single unit task you run every term create a gem for it so you got more personalized prompts and information for the IID use

11:30and then test the output against your existing standard and then refine and improve. So hopefully you found this useful as always give us a review if you want to come on talk about your personal AI journey within education drop me an email and it will arrange time to do till then keep up the work look after yourself.