Gemini in Google Classroom: Your New, personalised, AI Teaching Assistants
Google has recently integrated Gemini for Education directly into Google Classroom. These AI assistants accelerate the preparation of responsive teaching and learning resources, allowing teachers to differentiate and scaffold content to a much higher level.
What Makes This Different?
Unlike generic AI tools, Gemini for Education is purpose-built for schools with enterprise-grade privacy, age-appropriate filters, and admin controls. It appears as a dedicated tab in Google Classroom, offering over 30 AI-powered tools that integrate seamlessly into your existing workflows. Previously, many teachers have had to rely on 3rd party Apps to do much of this work - and then transfer resources across into Google Classroom. The streamlining of these workflows is so very welcome to our hard-working community of teachers.
Key Features:
Lesson Planning: Teachers input class details, including student numbers, learning needs, and available devices. Gemini generates lesson plans with objectives, materials, activities, and anticipated student misconceptions. Plans are then exported directly to Google Docs, typically for further editing and optimising.
Quiz Creation: The system generates quizzes with multiple choice, short answer, and true/false questions, then exports them to Google Forms with correct answers pre-configured. A key component of “Retrieval Practice” which is so valuable in effective learning.
Text Relevelling: Adjusts reading levels of existing text to match students’ current capabilities while maintaining essential vocabulary. This supports differentiation for English Language Learners and students with learning challenges.
Parent Communication: Creates draft emails to parents and guardians with specific student updates, which teachers can then edit and customise.
Impact on Teaching Practice
By automating typically 80% of routine preparation tasks, teachers can redirect time toward:
Providing multi-modal, formative feedback to individual students
Conducting more interactive classroom discussions
Developing targeted interventions for struggling learners
Implementing differentiated instruction strategies
Considerations for Learning Implementation
Teacher as Navigator: While Gemini is a powerful assistant, it is vital to remember that it is a tool, not a replacement for human pedagogical expertise. This highlights that teachers remain the critical decision-makers and instructional designers. The AI provides a strong draft or starting point, but the teacher's professional judgment is essential to ensure the content aligns with specific student needs, curriculum goals, and effective pedagogical practices. This is why we at Learning First, advocate for the 80/20 model whereby AI does 80% of the work and the last 20% is done by the teacher. Instead of referring to AI (Artificial Intelligence), we often talk about IA (Intelligent Assistance).
The Art of the Prompt: The quality of Gemini's output is directly tied to the detail and clarity of the teacher's prompts. Teachers may need to develop skills in crafting effective prompts to get the most insightful and relevant results. This shift requires a new form of digital literacy. A quick and effective strategy is our 3 C’s model - specifying Character, Context and Challenge. Here is an example that you can copy/paste and edit and then add to your collection of Gemini Gems:
“You will be acting as a highly experienced New Zealand teacher who regularly uses stories, analogies and examples to connect with your students. Your students live in <Insert location here>, New Zealand, which is a regional town. Many of your students are Maori and it is important to include Maori culture, language and ideas wherever possible. About 40% of your students have low literacy and engagement levels with learning. Your lessons are to be planned to address common misconceptions of the content - they also need to be planned so that they are well scaffolded and have easy options to differentiate content. All lessons must include a bullet point summary and a list of new vocabulary. In addition, every lesson should include 10 recall questions and 5 higher-order questions”
Heads-up, Google Admins: Gemini for Education has been automatically enabled for all teachers in your organization. If you prefer to preview such tools before a full rollout, consider disabling it initially and offering it to early-adopting, tech-savvy colleagues. This allows a select group to trial and evaluate the new release.
In summary Gemini for Education is a great addition to Google Classroom. Just remember this is a new product and it will improve with time. Like all AI software, the more we use it the better it will get. I have found expert prompting makes a big difference to the quality of your outcomes. Results may differ over subject areas also. Some subjects will pull on much larger amounts of data than others. If you feel you would like help with developing AI literacy please feel free to contact us at Learning First. We would be happy to give advice and help out with PD for you and your staff.
