The lazy days of summer offer the opportunity to dive deeper into self-paced learning for ideas and to explore professional development independently. With the advent of tools like NotebookLM, new possibilities exist. As I have written on the impact of AI in schools, I acknowledge that we may all pay for something incredible in the rapidly evolving landscape of AI. For now, the best AI tools depend on personal preference and use. Educators should keep riding the backs of capitalism as companies try to one-up each other, offering the best free AI tools.
Google’s Gemini is emerging as an AI tool for educators, offering free resources to transform teaching, research and personal organization. Gemini is demonstrating its prowess as sophisticated yet accessible AI while integrating with existing workflows and providing powerful functionality that cater to educators’ unique needs.
I explored Gemini’s beneficial, free applications and am sharing their potential to streamline tasks, stimulate critical thinking and empower both teachers and students.
What can Gemini do for educators?
One of Gemini’s standout features is its commitment to reliability and verifiable information. “Hallucinations” in AI are a concern; Gemini offers a robust “double-check” function that allows users to verify response accuracy. Click on the three dots next to an output and select “double check Gemini’s response” to reveal a detailed search, evaluating results to ensure legitimacy. The visual cues of green, orange and no highlight indicators simply convey the reliability of content. Green marks a highly dependable response, orange cautions and no highlight indicates it’s unable to verify. This is a terrific way to address hallucinations, which continue to persist.
This built-in fact-checking tool is helpful for teaching source evaluation and providing a critical eye on information legitimacy. Teachers get immediate assurance on the reliability of AI-generated content, making it more trustworthy in research and lesson preparation. I used it to check content I had published versus what I knew I hadn’t written and I was impressed with its fact-checking and how it differentiated my known content from something that I hadn’t written.
Gemini stands out for its deep research capability. Gemini can explore vast information and synthesize key themes, which is particularly beneficial for academics and research. I prompted Gemini to conduct deep research on my published works and it quickly generated comprehensive summaries, identified overarching themes and produced a neatly organized table of titles, publication dates and concepts. It even included a “works cited” section, providing readily available references for exploration. This reduces time spent on literature reviews by magnitudes, allowing educators to focus more on analyzing and applying research findings. Knowing my writing, I was impressed with my testing!
Image manipulation for visual aids
Gemini also ventures into creative image manipulation, offering a fun and practical application for visual aids and unique content creation. I decided to test this by uploading an image of me on a cable car and prompting it to add elements like a thunderstorm, a dog and a cat. This was very cool! It showcased the capacity to modify images in a meaningful way. The image editing feature offers possibilities for creating customized visual resources for lessons, presentations and projects. The flexibility to experiment with different visual elements allows for creativity.
For tasks performed repeatedly, Gemini’s “Gems” helps you build a library to access custom prompts easily. For instance, I created a Gem for writing letters of recommendation based on a teacher’s resume, since, as a school leader, this is a common chore. A teacher might set up a gem for generating lesson plan types. This streamlines repetitive tasks and for me, frees up valuable time with students and staff, rather than being stuck at my desk. The ability to refine “Gems” with personal knowledge or specific instructions ensures that the AI’s output remains tailored and relevant while ensuring human oversight for proofreading and refinement. Find the Gem manager in the left-hand panel and start creating!
The Canvas feature in Gemini provides a structured environment for generating longer-form content, like essays and historical accounts. Gemini generates well-structured and informative content by simply clicking on a predefined prompt or creating a custom one, complete with historical context and key details. Exporting this content directly to Google Docs further enhances its integration into existing documents.
This feature can be a valuable resource for students working on research papers or for teachers looking to generate background information quickly for lessons.
Audio overviews can boost accessibility
Beyond text and image generation, Gemini has expanded to include audio overviews of documents, like NotebookLM. By uploading a document, users can generate an audio overview, often presented as a mini-podcast featuring two AI-generated voices discussing the document’s content in a natural-sounding way. This innovative approach to information consumption caters to diverse learning styles, providing an auditory alternative for those who benefit from hearing content. Downloading audio overviews as MP3s furthers accessibility, allowing for offline listening during commutes or workouts.
This feature has significant implications for accessibility and differentiated instruction, providing another avenue for students to engage with academic content.
Gemini’s growing integration with Google’s ecosystem amplifies its utility for educators. Its connectivity with Google Drive, Photos and Classroom makes it a terrific companion for classroom tasks. For instance, the ability to leverage Gemini within Google Photos demonstrates its capacity to categorize and organize personal or professional media intelligently.
Navigating my thousands of Google Photos with Gemini’s integrated search has become so easy. I simply tap the magnifying glass icon in the app and tell Gemini what I’m looking for, like “create a timeline of photos from dancing.” It’s remarkable how quickly it sifts through years of memories, even finding pictures from my short but sweet dance career alongside those of my daughters. This can also index the chronology by date and identify known individuals such as my daughters. This integration is beneficial and makes for an intuitive experience.
Gemini offers a robust suite of free AI tools. Simplifying some new powerful ones aids educators in their work and play. Upgrading the learning environment for teachers and students with Gemini’s integrated features in Google’s ecosystem makes it worth exploring for educators, especially those already connected to the Google ecosystem.
Opinions expressed by SmartBrief contributors are their own.
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