From Repetitive Tasks to Personalization: Gemini Gems Use Cases
Butschi says teachers in K–12 schools are using Gems to streamline repetitive tasks such as creating exit tickets. They’re also using it to create specialized activities aligned to their district standards and classroom norms, as well as customized lesson plans that are tailored to their students’ needs.
“In the learning context, it can be really helpful for teachers to personalize Gemini by saying, ‘Here are my curriculum standards for my district, and here is information about my class and how I like to teach.’ So when they say, ‘Help me create an activity for the beginning of class the day after a snowstorm,’ Gemini has those contextual references and is able to create activities that are more personalized for you and your students,” Butschi says.
Gemini Gems is being used for more than just core academics, Butschi says. For example, physical education teachers are using the tool to create customized exercises for particular students.
“A phys ed teacher might say, ‘I have one student that has a certain disability. Help me figure out an alternative option that still accomplishes the goals of this exercise routine, but in a different way for them,’” he says.
Administrators in K–12 education are also using Gemini Gems, Butschi says. For example, he says a superintendent in Illinois told him that because school board elections happen every few years, newly elected members often start with no context on education and have to get up to speed on district governance and policy very quickly.
To address this issue, the superintendent created a Gemini Gem with all of the district’s board policies and governance documents. New members can log in immediately and ask questions — “Can I fire the football coach?” invariably comes up — and receive answers tailored specifically to their district’s policies.
A Community of Sharing and Collaboration
Butschi says one of the most exciting developments in the education space is that teachers are creating Gemini Gems that can be shared with other educators not just at their school but everywhere.
“There’s a great website called EduGems that was created by an educator named Eric Curts,” says Butschi. The site includes roughly 200 examples of the ways that educators are using Gems, from creating class syllabuses and exit quizzes to planning field trips.
“Similar to how you would share a Google Doc, you can say, ‘I created this really cool Gem that shows how to create an exit ticket for your class; let me share that with you and you can adapt it for yourself as opposed to starting from scratch,’” he says.
Other teachers can copy a proven Gem, tweak the instructions to fit their own students or standards, and quickly put it to work.
Privacy Guardrails for Gemini Gems
A critical piece of the puzzle for school IT leaders is understanding how Gemini Gems handles student and educator data behind the scenes.
When an educator uses Gemini Gems within their FERPA-compliant Workspace for Education account, which Google provides for free to schools, everything that they do in Gemini is kept confidential. “It’s not used to train models, it's not reviewed by humans and it’s kept confidential to you, just like if you’re using Google Drive,” he says.
In addition to these privacy controls, Google for Education also provides a layer for administrators to be able to review and set policies on what can be shared. “For example, a school may decide that you can only share Gems with people who are within your district,” he says.
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