What is Gemini? Teaching With Google's AI Chatbot | Tech & Learning
Gemini, Google’s flagship generative AI model, can help educators with lesson planning and more, though it's not as effective as platforms specifically designed for education.
Google Gemini is the tech giant’s flagship generative AI model. When I first wrote about it back in 2023, Google was struggling to catch up to its generative AI rivals. At that point, I felt Gemini was impressive but was falling behind ChatGPT in the world of chatbot supremacy overall and as a teaching tool in particular.
Gemini also powers a number of education-specific AI tools for Google, including LearnLM, which recently left me very impressed, and a suite of Gemini for Education tools available through Google Education. For this review, however, I focused exclusively on the out-of-the-box version of Gemini 2.0 Flash.
Gemini Performance in Education
Here’s how Gemini performed on a variety of tasks related to my work as a college professor and education in general. Class prep is a common use case for AI in education, so I started by asking Gemini to create an outline for a freshman composition class...
Interaction with Students
To see how a student might interact with Gemini, I asked it to help me eliminate the opinion elements from a piece I had written that was full of opinion statements and therefore not a good traditional news story.
However, like all AI writing tools I’ve tested so far, I’m not impressed with its broader rewriting attempts...
Student Engagement and Learning
Without elaborate prompting, Gemini acted as an on-demand search engine, quickly providing answers to various questions, which was still helpful and might be desirable in non-education settings but isn't perfect for teaching and deeper learning...
Writing Capabilities
One of the ways many educators interact with AI tools is when their students use any to submit a piece of writing...
Conclusion
Gemini is a great, free AI tool that answers questions with speed, access to the internet, and an easy interface. Given Google’s prominence in the technology field, it’s a tool with which teachers will likely want to familiarize themselves...
Google and others offer more education-focused tools that are probably better in the classroom, but for educators just looking for a quick AI tool to use for activities such as class prep and brainstorming, Gemini is a great option.
