Artificial Intelligence

How Gemini for Education Can Optimize Your Classroom

At CDW’s Connected Classroom workshops, educators and IT professionals rolled up their sleeves for a full day of hands-on instruction on artificial intelligence. Here’s what they took away.

Tammy Lind

Tammy Lind is a Senior Strategist, Google for Education Programs at CDW.

When it comes to learning new skills and adopting new tools and technologies for the classroom, I’ve been truly impressed by the willingness of the teachers and educators who attend CDW’s Connected Classroom workshops. Our most recent series of in-person events covered ways to get more out of the Google for Education environment using Google’s AI assistant, Gemini for Education, and NotebookLM.

As teachers progress from thinking about artificial intelligence less as an efficiency tool, and more as a thought partner or assistant, having true conversations with Gemini marks an important turning point in their adoption. This is not a Google search. We work closely with attendees to discuss what true conversations with AI can achieve as we dive in and practice hands-on prompts or demonstrations that show what’s possible in their own classrooms.

Click the banner below to view on-demand webinars and K–12 in-person workshops.

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Use AI to Personalize and Differentiate Lessons Faster

I taught special education before moving into my current role, and one of the areas that excites me most when I lead our workshops is helping teachers discover opportunities to differentiate and personalize learning experiences. Gemini is an assistant that can help educators do more, with a lot of unique features that serve classrooms well.

Using Gemini, I can build a study guide, tie standards and questions to it, and specify the precise support a student needs, such as imagery or maps, in just a few minutes. I can even ask Gemini to generate and include those images within my document. Other students may need different types of study guides, which Gemini can also create quickly. All of that saves hours of time for the teacher, but I’m even more excited for the students who benefit from these additional supports, and the potential to get them valuable and useful materials so quickly. Using these tools to help them walk into a new unit ahead of the game, or help them become an expert before a new unit starts, truly brings immeasurable value when it comes to student success.

Help Students With the Process of Learning With AI

As educators gain experience and get more comfortable with Gemini, they also improve how they’re leading students through their own hands-on uses of the tool. I recently worked with a school district that turned on Gemini access for all students. We spent a lot of time talking about ethical use, what that truly means, and asking students themselves what it meant to them as they considered how they might use AI. We talked through how it could impact what they do together as a class, and ways to use it safely, while also focusing on how to use AI to understand content together, beyond more individual uses.

Teachers who join our sessions arrive with different ideas around AI in the classroom. We frequently have conversations about opportunities to show students how to focus on the process of learning, rather than a final product. We also spend time looking at Gemini’s results, thinking about how we should edit those to make them more accurate or effective. Gemini offers opportunities for real efficiency, but sometimes it’s wrong, or returns ideas that we hadn’t thought about. We need to remember that humans are in the lead, and teachers are the experts on their particular instructional situations.

We also need to remember the importance of working closely with students as partners — no matter the grade level — on how to learn with AI. That’s only going to become more critical as AI’s use and acceptance grows within our broader world. We’ve already seen a big shift in schools that are no longer asking whether they will use AI, but instead how they will use AI ethically and responsibly. It’s essential that we help our students understand why they must always use AI responsibly, too.

For those who remain nervous about AI, NotebookLM offers a secure first entry into all of the “wow” moments of using AI. Using only your content as its source, it can very quickly create multimodal audio support, infographics, slide decks and more.

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Understand Gemini as a Core Service

Another takeaway from our workshops is the need to reinforce that teachers are using Gemini for Education as opposed to the larger Gemini tool within their personal accounts. Gemini for Education is made specifically for educators, and falls under the terms of service that apply to schools and districts. That's important for security, safety and compliance, as you input specific classroom information or data.

Our workshops offer separate tracks for IT leaders and educators, but we also make time to bring them back together for specific conversations. We work through challenges together because, as schools move forward with AI and explore ways to use Gemini more effectively, the strategic IT/educator partnership ensures that schools maintain and adhere to essential AI use policies. Removing the barriers of fear and allowing everyone hands-on opportunities to use these tools without fear helps students, teachers and IT move forward together.

This article is part of the ConnectIT: Bridging the Gap Between Education and Technology series.