Ask a group of teachers this fall which AI tools they are using, and most will name apps that live outside the Google Workspace their district already pays for. Meanwhile Gemini has been built into Docs, Slides, Sheets, and Classroom, and many of the teachers we work with have never been shown what is sitting there waiting for them.
That was the starting point for the first episode of Season 3 of The EdTechTeacher Podcast. Tom Driscoll and co-host Brandon Hall, a Massachusetts district technology director, take a practical tour of the Google tools already available to teachers, and talk honestly about which ones are worth your time. Nothing in the episode requires a new purchase order, a new login, or a new student data privacy agreement.
Below are the five stops on that tour, plus two prompting habits worth stealing. The full conversation, including the story of an eighth grader who built an AI car mechanic in ten minutes, is in the episode.
Listen or watch here. 👇
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Start with Gemini Notebook
If you used NotebookLM last spring, it has a new name and a much deeper set of tools. Gemini Notebook is where both hosts told teachers to begin, and Brandon called it the Swiss Army knife of the platform.
The reason it works for educators is the boundary around it. You choose the sources, so the notebook answers from your curriculum, your unit, your readings. That constraint is also the honest answer to the hallucination worry many teachers raise first.
What teachers are doing with it right now: special education teams load a full unit into a notebook and share a single tool back out to students for review. World language teachers use the flashcards and quizzes. And the audio overview has become the feature teachers show their colleagues, partly because you can interrupt it and ask a question mid conversation. Brandon turned an eight page biology PDF his daughter found daunting into a ten minute audio overview on cell structure, and she listened to it until the material stuck.
One tip from the episode: open the Studio panel on the right and click the small arrow next to each item. The customizations hidden there, four audio styles including a debate and a critique, adjustable length, and a focus you can specify, are where the tool gets genuinely useful.
Gems let teachers and students build their own tools
A Gem is a custom version of Gemini with your own instructions. Brandon covered a class of eighth graders with no lesson plan, showed them how to build one together, then turned them loose. One student, deep into cars, built a Gem that takes a year, make, and model and returns the service intervals, approximate costs, and the parts that tend to wear out early on that particular car. He had it working in ten minutes.
The same tool does administrative work. Brandon's leadership team refined a full page prompt, grounded in their district best practices, that turns raw classroom observation notes into the feedback structure they want.
The most interesting Gem in the episode came from a Rhode Island teacher who got tired of AI agreeing with her. Her instructions tell it to drop the helpful persona, act as a hostile critic, and name three ways an assignment could fail, two assumptions she is making without proof, and one counterargument she has not addressed. Her closing line is the best prompt advice in the episode:
"Don't be polite, be precise."
Red pen feedback Gem, shared on Season 3, Episode 1
Canvas mode, for when the tool you need does not exist
Canvas mode lives inside the Gemini app, under the plus button or the more tools menu. It is built for writing, coding, and making slides, and it is the gentlest on ramp to what people now call vibe coding.
Brandon's district wanted a free, safe typing game for students with free time and could not find one. So he described what he wanted: an Asteroids style game where each keystroke fires at a letter, levels of a set length, and a boss at the end you defeat by typing whole words. It built three levels. His total prior coding experience was a high school QBasic class. The students use it, the teacher likes it, and because the game is simply embedded in a Google Site, there is no student data privacy agreement to negotiate.
A teacher built exactly the practice activity the class needed, and it collects nothing.
The Gemini tools inside Google Classroom
Google Classroom now has a Gemini section in the left menu with prompt starters built in, and a small blue see examples button at the top that opens a document full of usable samples. You can also assign a notebook to students as a class material.
And if you do not use Google Classroom with your students, Tom's answer was blunt: it does not matter. An elementary school he worked with in Chicago runs on Seesaw and still uses the Gemini tools in Classroom as a place to build teacher materials. Do not skip the tool because you do not use the platform with kids
Workspace Studio, for the invisible work
The least known tool in the episode is Google Workspace Studio, which builds automated workflows across your Google apps. If you remember If This Then That from a decade ago, the idea will feel familiar, except now it runs inside your own Workspace. You pick a starter, a schedule, an incoming email, a calendar event, and then define what happens next.
Summarize my email each morning. Pull the five action items that came in today. File this sender's attachments in that folder and log them in a sheet. The tasks are unglamorous, which is the point: this is the work that quietly consumes a school leader's week. Most educators we talk to have never heard of the tool.
A prompt habit worth stealing
Name the expertise you want applied. When classroom games kept coming out formatted poorly, Tom added one sentence to the end of the prompt, asking it to use best practices in educational game design and mechanics. The next version applied industry standards to the game the teachers had built. If you are not sure how a field does something well, ask what experts in that field would do and have it model that.
Where to go next
Spend twenty minutes inside the tools you already have before you go looking for new ones. Open a notebook. Build one Gem. Click the arrows in the Studio panel.
If you would rather do that with company, EdTechTeacher is hosting two free webinars with Google for Education as part of the Google AI Educator Series, and you can earn your badges during the session or while watching the recording. The first is on October 8 from 7:00 to 8:00 PM ET, covering scaffolds that support reading comprehension and assessments that capture student thinking. The second is on October 20 and includes a live demonstration of Workspace Studio, along with designing problem solving scenarios that encourage critical thinking with AI. Registration is on the events page at edtechteacher.org.
Listen to the full episode above, or find The EdTechTeacher Podcast wherever you get your podcasts. If you have a question you would like Tom and Brandon to answer in an upcoming Ask Me Anything episode, send it to [email protected].