Google Gemini for Teachers The Complete Classroom Guide 2026

Hey, look. I'm back in my office. Yes, hello and welcome back to one of our EdTech videos from the EdTech Vault. My name is Paul. I'm the curriculum lead for computing here at Row Tech. It's been busy week supporting our schools with AI and in particular looking at all the Google tools that are available in the Google Workspace for education. What did notice was how many teachers didn't know that these were available or what they did or even how to use them. So, in this quick short video, I'm going to quickly go over some of those free tools and will show you one premium feature to wet your appetite in case that gives you good reason to go for the pro feature. Let's dive straight in and see what we've got. Okay, here we are in Gemini. You can either search for it through the URL here, search for Gemini, or within your Google Workspace in the kind of waffle apps launcher, you can go ahead and select Gemini that way as well. You will notice am using the pro version. So, did use that for work, but what will do is notify you and make you aware what's free and what's premium within your Google Workspace for education because lot of you might be using the free version on that fundamentals package. So, will make you aware about what you've got access to in particular. Let's start simple then. This is something I'd use tomorrow morning. You can imagine I'm in the morning and I'm thinking, no, haven't got any math starter questions for my morning work when the kids come in." can quickly jump onto my Gemini here, go into my chat function, and just simply paste something in and say something like this, "Create five morning starter questions for year five math class focusing on arithmetic, include mix of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Include answers and make it suitable for 10-minute starter." Go ahead and submit that. You'll notice here that I'm using the fast mode. This is perfect for quick tasks like we've got here on starters or simple resources. And here we go. I've got really nice morning activity here for my pupils that if wanted to, can just copy and paste onto sheet, print off and give to them, or could copy that and put it into my Google Classroom stream, and the children then could come in, grab their morning books, and do the work from the questions that are in on the Google Classroom stream there, which is pretty cool. What if though I've got some pupils who need more challenging questions? can just go ahead and type that into Gemini. So, I've written here, "Can you make these slightly challenging?" Go ahead and submit that, and it will produce slightly more challenging challenging questions that could then set for other pupils within the classroom for their morning work as well. All very simple, all very quick to go and grab that straight from the Gemini chat there as well. Perfect. Maybe this time rather than some maths, I'm doing some English work. I'm doing about active and passive voice. So, I've put here, "Create short three short starter questions for year six class to identify active and passive voice. Include answers." This would be great start to the lesson, wouldn't it? Again, on the fast mode, go ahead and submit that, and I've got three questions to go ahead and have go at here. Identify the voice, rewrite the sentence, spot the object. Perfect for starter. And we've got the answers, which is we all love as teachers, don't we, in particular. What could do as well is could say, "Turn this into quiz." And what it does is just that. It does exactly what it says on the tin. So, now I've got quiz that if wanted to, could put straight onto the board if wanted to with the children. But more appropriately, what probably would do once it's finished writing it is sharing this, grabbing the link for it, sharing it with my pupils, and they can then access the quiz and have go. So, could share that link within something like my Google Classroom. Nice and easy straight away already just using the chat function. On the fast mode there, we've created some instant resources that we can go ahead and use in the classroom instantly. Before going any further, it's important to understand how this works for schools. Gemini for education offers enterprise grade data protection. Your data is not used to train models. Your chats are not reviewed by humans. Your data is not used for advertising. In simple terms, what you type in stays private and protected. Let's go ahead then look at another feature we can use for free on the Google Workspace for education, and that's creating lesson plans. Now, could just type it into the chat, but it would give me the lesson plan within the chat. It would be better if had the lesson plan created on Google Doc for me that can just export straight into my Google Drive. To do that, I've got to make sure on the tool section, click on canvas. Let's go ahead now and paste in the prompt, and here it is. Act as an experienced UK year five teacher. Create descriptive writing lesson set at lighthouse during storm. This is not based on book or anything like that. It's an idea I've got that'd be really good for descriptive writing. Include learning objectives, success criteria, key vocabulary, model sentences, and final writing outcome. Keep it to 60 minutes using simple classroom resources, and go ahead and submit that. Straight away, you can see it starts to load up the lesson plan there within the Google Doc on the right-hand side where can start to now easily scroll down and have look through the lesson plan to see if there are any changes that want to make within the lesson plan. And can do that straight away if need to. All I've got to do is just highlight something on the document itself and tell Gemini what it is that want to change. So, maybe don't want this success criteria here. just highlight this. Gemini comes up, and just say remove cuz don't want that learning objective there. It now takes that out for me, which is absolutely brilliant. There we go. It's now gone. What if don't have 60 minutes? I've actually changed my mind, and actually I've now only got 45 minutes. I've now got to say, "Reword or we'll put actually we'll put restructure for 45-minute lesson." Notice how I've made mistake there? Not problem. It will know what mean. Let's change that to 45 minutes now, and we'll see lot of changes happen to the lesson plan. It will highlight those changes to you in the lesson plan so that you know what's been changed now that you've changed the lesson from 60 minutes into 45 minutes. As go down, you can see all of this highlighted content here is telling me that these are the changes we've made because we've now gone to 45-minute lesson as well. will point out that my screen might look different to you because love working in dark mode. Much better for my eyes. You might like the same as well. Once I'm happy with that lesson plan, can then go ahead and click on the exports and export that to doc. It creates doc, and that will automatically be saved into my Google Drive, which is perfect, and now can access it. Wouldn't it be cool if could create that image of the lighthouse in the storm for the descriptive writing? Well, can. can do that in Gemini itself as well. And Gemini is really good at producing images using their nano banana technology. Let's go ahead and make sure this time on the tools, we go ahead and click on create image. I'm going to go and paste in my prompt, which says, "Create realistic image of lighthouse during violent storm at night with waves crashing, lightning, and dramatic lighting. Suitable for year six writing inspiration." Go ahead and submit. Now, don't have to turn on create image if don't want to. If just say something like create an image and start the prompt off that way, it will also know what mean and create that image for me as well. And here we go. It's produced the image. This is stimulus don't need to go off and find myself. can just create it this dramatic image to help inspire six creative writing. Notice the contrast between the cold, violent power of the stormy ocean and the warm, solitary light of the lighthouse, and think about what story that atmosphere suggests. Absolutely brilliant. It's even told me things that could encourage my students to explore with different perspective of the image. As come down, here is my image. Wow, I'm pretty impressed with that. That would be great for descriptive writing piece. could share that with my pupils in my Google Classroom or other formats if I've got those available as well. Now, wouldn't it be cool rather than an image, we could create video? Now, I'm sorry for all you guys who are on the fundamentals package, the free version. This is part of the pro version. But would hope that somewhere along the line, they give you this as the free version cuz it's absolutely brilliant. And it's probably the biggest reason or one of the reasons why lot of my schools go and pay for the premium version. Let's go ahead and create something. So, on the tools this time, I've got to go and create video, and I'm going to go and type in my prompt. And this time I've said, "Create cinematic scene of lighthouse keeper climbing the stairs during storm with wind and waves crashing and tense narration describing the setting." And I'm going to click on submit, and that will go ahead and create my video. The nice thing is about this, you can just describe exactly what you want. Maybe didn't want the narration describing the setting. Maybe wanted to hear the waves crashing against the the lighthouse itself, the rain hitting the windows maybe, and those loud kind of noises instead. It's entirely up to you. That's the beauty of it. You can create video exactly how you want it. Now, cuz it's the video. It's going to take little bit longer, so we'll leave this for second and see what we get. Okay, here we go. The video is produced. What will say as bit of advice, know some of our schools have been creating videos and they've been saying to me, "Sometimes it gets stuck and then like it goes around and around creating it for like half an hour and nothing's happening." What would recommend here that normally works is open new tab, go to Gemini, close your old tab, go to that chat that you had to create the video, and your video is probably in there. Why that happens, don't know, but it normally works. Let's go ahead and see what we've got here. The sea gives no quarter tonight. Wow. Very nice turn there. The sea gives no quarter tonight. That kind of means it's kind of the sea is ruthless and relentless. That's pretty cool. The sea gives no quarter tonight. Wow. Wouldn't that be cool to use in an English lesson? have already created some other resources like this as well, even just an introduction to topic on the Vikings as well. Let me show you this one. So, what actually did first was create an image of Viking explorer based on me. Is that obvious or not? don't know. mean, the picture wasn't great of me. There was there was background in there. Lighting wasn't great, guess, but can you tell that's me? Then what did was took that picture, uploaded it, and said, "Use this Viking image and create my video." And gave the prompt of what wanted the video to do, but also what wanted the character to say in the video to introduce the topic to my class. Here we go. Here's what was produced. Hello, year five, and welcome to your new topic all ABOUT THE VIKINGS. That's pretty cool, right? And then what you could do is once you've got that video is pop that pop that into the opening slide of your slide deck. So, I'm going to have show you now how to do that very quickly. First things first, go ahead and download the video first and foremost. Once it is downloaded, we'll go into Canva or wherever it is that you're storing your presentation. Here I'm in my camera account. I've already got my Viking slide deck here that I'm going to open. And this is the first lesson in the history topic, so it'd be cool if they saw that video first. They knew that we were learning about the Vikings. I'm going to go ahead here and right click and click on add page, move that page to the beginning, then click on uploads, and then what would go and do is just drag that video or upload the file, and I've already done that. So, in my video section here, here is that video that made. I'm going to drag it over. Very cool. I'm going to go and make it little bit bigger, so it kind of fits the whole page like this. And then when we start the lesson, present my slides. Hello, year five, and welcome to your new topic all about THE VIKINGS. QUITE COOL LITTLE WAY OF just introducing the topic as well for our pupils. And then we can go into our slides and start to teach our lesson, which is pretty cool. And here's one more that made for school recently who were looking at the Viking raids. And it's kind of narration very small narration from the villager who's watching the Vikings coming up on the shore and attacking the village. Let me know what you think about this one in the comments. They are here. Longboats crash upon the shore. They show no mercy. Run. So, only very short video there. You can see the narration from the villager saying that they're crashing up on the shore and they're coming over and attacking with no mercy as well. Quite nice little way to see it from narration point of view from villager as well. Heading back into Gemini then, let's go ahead and load up that lesson plan we had moment ago. To get back to anything I've created, expand the menu, and then all of your chats that you've created will be on the left-hand side here. So, I'm going to go ahead and find the year five lighthouse storm writing lesson plan. There it is. Wouldn't it be cool if could now take that lesson plan, but make series of lessons to continue after this lesson as well. So, this time rather than kind of making changes within the document, back into the chat function here, I'm going to type in and say, "Adapt this into sequence of three lessons showing clear progression from vocabulary to modeled writing to the independent write that we want our children to do, so we can level that writing." Click on submit, and here we go. It's now expanded the single lesson into structured three-part sequence. And because I've got my canvas on, it's built that into Google Doc on the right-hand side here. So, we've got lesson one, we've got lesson two, and we've got lesson three into that sequence of lessons into that independent write. could then take those lessons individually, expand them little bit more, and ask for more information of what do to teach it within the lesson. Let's say to support some of my learners actually need little bit of writing frame going on. could type that in there and say, "Create simple writing frame to support pupils with their setting description." Go ahead and click on submit, and this time it will now again change the document on the right-hand side into that writing frame for me with that key vocabulary to help them as well. Isn't that cool? So, now could just export that, and remember every single time that you create something, do go ahead and export it. But if you miss something, so let's say missed that three sequence plan made minute ago, click on the here and close that. There's that writing support. If go up little bit higher, then here is that kind of sequence of lessons. can just reopen it, and there it is again. So, you don't lose it if you suddenly make something different within that same chat feature, you can just go back and grab it and export it. Now, let's apply this to different subject, history, my favorite. Let's go ahead and paste in prompt. This time, create year four history lesson in unit on the Romans. Focus on the inquiry question, "Why did the Romans decide to invade Britain?" Pupils already know what an empire is. Include recap, key vocabulary, and main activity exploring reasons such as resources, power, and trade. Discussion opportunities, assessments, learning objectives, and success criteria. Let's go ahead and create that lesson plan. And want to show you this time how haven't turned the canvas on. Look how that's still there, but actually if want to make changes, I've got to go up and down and read the document. It would be better if the document was on the right-hand side. That's why always make sure that when I'm creating lesson plan, do always turn my canvas on. So, I've got that side by side to make those changes for me. Here we go. Here is our lesson plan. Fantastic. As well as making changes in the document itself by highlighting things and typing into Gemini, can make those changes on the left-hand side in the chat function as well. So, here I'm going to say, "Add an engaging hook, an exit ticket, and highlight key subject knowledge the teacher needs to know for this lesson." Go ahead and click on submit, and it will add that within the lesson plan for me. It won't override what we've just created, but it will add it in for me as an additional thing. And as scroll down, here we go. There is our teacher's subject knowledge. Now, once I've created my lesson plan, it would be fantastic if could have slide deck. So, even within the same chat, all I've got to do is go and ask for that, but make sure the canvas is on. Here we go. Turn this lesson into clear slide deck for teaching. Include title slide, recap slide, vocab slide, main teaching slides, activity instructions, and final assessment slide. Keep text minimal and suitable for year four pupils. Click on submit, and that will start to think about generating slide This will take little bit longer than your lesson plan. Now, with all slide decks that are out there, whether it's Google Gemini or something different, the output is never the final polished version. will try and do another YouTube video on that next time looking at all the different ways that you can make slide decks, and we'll rank them, and we'll see which one's the best. But here you go. It's starting now to change from the document, and now it's starting to make that slide deck. Let's give it few minutes and see what it produces. Here we go. The slides have been produced. As we go through it, have look. Got my title slide. My recap slide's not great. It's bit boring, but can change that. It's cool. What's an empire? Key vocabulary. Like say, it's not the best in That's bit better, guess. But we've got our reasons. Maybe not the best picture there, guess. Power, revenge, cool discussion question. It's not bad. can see that I'm missing slide with my success criteria in. Let's go ahead and add that in. So, we're we're going to say, "After the recap slide, include slide showing the success criteria." Let's add that slide in. It's now updated the slides. They've changed slightly, but what do have now is I've got my steps to success within there. Now, here see where I've got to go and export the slides. Click on export slides, so it starts to export those into my Google Drive, where can now go in and make those changes. The slides are now created. It tells me at the bottom, "New slides created." can click on open slides. It push pushes that open into my Google Slides, and here is now where can go in and make those changes, change images, change text, add things in, and delete them. Another feature of the pro version is you can use AI to change the format of the slides without having to do it any of the manually. But again, that is on the pro version. But it's only reason why lot of our schools like to pay for the pro version. So here, click on slide, can just click on beautify the slide, and it will try to make it look better and more inviting on what it thinks. But what you can do as well is within the box at the bottom right-hand corner, you can describe exactly how you want the slide to look. And I'll look at that more in follow-up session on YouTube to have look at map that more closely and how we would make slides more akin to what we want. Let's have look and see just by pressing beautify the slide what it creates. mean, already that does look much better than the old one. There's the old one. This one just straight away looks much better. Click on it. Click insert as new slide. There's the old one. There's the new one. Straight away it looks so good. Let's try another one. Let's try one with more text in it. Let's try this one. Okay, so slide, beautify the slide. Let's try one more time and see what it looks like. What have found with this though is if the text is already small and you just press beautify the slide or even type in the instructions that you want, it will still keep the text very small. So what would do first is make the text, the images, anything kind of icons there you want bigger, and then it will keep that size as well. So you can see it's kind of kept the same size there. But once again, it just looks very much more akin to what we were looking for in terms of kind of room and theme there as well. Another feature of the Google Gemini tools is the guided learning. It does exactly what it says on the tin. Guides you through your learning. For us as teachers, this is great to learn about something that we're not too sure on that we're about to go and teach. Or how should we explain this to our pupils in this class, in this year group, at this age? I'm going to type in prompt. I'm going to say explain the phases of the moon clearly for teacher preparing to teach year five. Include why the moon appears to change shape and common misconceptions. So type this in and it starts to help me and guide me through my understanding of what is going on. As work my way through, it helps support me and can learn much better. It gives me common misconceptions, which is great, and then gives me other things it wants me to explore until I'm happy that am confident that understand this content and can go and teach it. Once I've understood it, could type in something like turn this into simple explanation suitable for year five pupils using an analogy. So pop that in and it helps me to on teach it to my pupils in way that they might understand and nice little graphic there. Really, really useful for me. Finally, can go ahead and test myself to see if fully understand it. So what could do is type in something like create short four-question quiz to check teacher's understanding of this concept. can read the question and then go through and select what think the right answers are and it will mark it for me telling me if I'm right or wrong. And at the moment, as you can see, haven't done very well. can also click on analyze my performance where it goes through and here is probably going to tell me that absolutely learned nothing from what I've read on the guided learning. Very, very positive there though. Nice work on completing the practice questions, but you've clearly learned nothing. So can go back and kind of, you know, have have more support, which clearly need here to improve my understanding. could then think this could be good quiz to give to my pupils. It was little bit text-heavy there, wasn't it? Okay for me as teacher, not for my pupils. I'm going to say adapt this quiz so it can be used with my year five pupils. Let's go ahead and generate that and have look. Much better. Still four options, less text to read as go through. I'm still getting them wrong, aren't I'm going to choose for all of them. one was We're all right there. And then we'll go click on true there. It was wrong. But that's nice quiz. Again, like before, we can just go to the share option and share that link with our pupils and then we've got nice quiz that they can do as well. Another feature is the deep research on the tools. So click on tools, deep research, and it will go into deep research mode and research it for you. So here I'm going to type in prompt. Research the prim approach in computing education. Explain each stage. Why is it effective in key stage two and include classroom examples. My computing lead has told me we're now going to use prim pedagogy in our computing lessons. Why? What is it? How's it helpful? I'm going to research this so know lot about it. This time I'm going to change from the fast model to the thinking model because want some more deeper considered response here. I'm going to click on submit, and this is going to take little bit of time because it is going to generate research plan and go away and research it for us. And here's the plan that it's put together for me. What it's going to do, and once I'm happy with this plan, click on start research. If I'm not happy with the plan, just go and edit the plan to exactly what want. Yeah, I'm happy with those going off, researching websites, analyzing resources, creating report. Sounds good to me. Click on start research. Here we go. That starts to build our research on the right and shows all the thinking that is happening, and this is going to take fair amount of time to track how far that you are going through the process. If you look closely on the left-hand side here, you can see this kind of bar is going round the circular point here, and that is our progress bar. So as that blue bar goes round and round even more, that is telling us how much longer we've got left of the research here for our topic. And it's now completed our research for us, which is fantastic. What we can do is if we can't read all of this research, what we can do is under on the right-hand side here, we can create an infographic, and there's really nice-looking infographic, very inviting for our teachers to print off to hand out maybe in staff meeting where you maybe have gone through the prim pedagogy and they've got something to look at during the staff meeting and leave with as well. Maybe instead, maybe during the kind of research been done here, maybe you haven't got time to read all of this as well. So maybe you want to go ahead and create audio overview as well so that you can listen back to it as bit of podcast on your day-to-day work that you've got going on in the background or maybe on your kind of travels and your journeys as well so you can listen to that and you can just go ahead and download that, which is pretty cool as well. Have you ever been asked to deliver an assembly and you're scrambling around trying to find some music as the pupils come in? Or real hook to start the assembly in the morning? Or maybe just some music to put as part of lesson that you're teaching? Well, now you can create short 30-second music snippet within Google Gemini as well. Go ahead under tools and click on create music. I'm going to type in and this will be really nice case use of the school's values. So I've put create short rap for primary school based on the values safe, respect, pride, brave, success. The primary school is called Woodlands Primary. Click on submit and it will make short up to 30-second rap about those values and hopefully include the school name that we can play to our pupils. And there we go. It didn't take very long at all. It also always creates graphic for us as well, which is really cool. Let's have listen and see what we've got. Hey Woodlands. Let's go. Very cool. Feeling safe and sound, best school spirit in the whole town. Show respect to everyone you meet. Love that. can hear some of the values coming through. straight away heard the school name as well. You can download that as just the audio or with the kind of picture in the background as well, too. Now you might not want to keep typing in the same prompt over and over again. If it's long prompt as well, it's going to take you lot of time and you've got to remember that prompt then. You don't want to keep doing that when you want to create an output. So it might be worth using Google's what they call gems, which are kind of pre-made tools based on your instructions. We did that in our very first ever YouTube video. So look back at that if you want to see how made gem. But what you can do is within Gemini, once you've got your gems, expand the menu, go down to your gems, and you can use whatever it is that you've created. So like back in that first video, created waggle writer to help me produce quick model text on different year group, different genre, and different kind of theme. So maybe it's going to be something like year five Romans and diary entry. So I'll just pop that in and it will write for me nice little model text that can give to the pupils and underneath I've asked it for some teacher notes as well, which is pretty cool. Remember, if you can't see some of the features I've shown today, it could be one of two things. Number one, it's part of the pro version, or number two, it could be that in your admin controls it hasn't been switched on yet. For us here at Royal Tech, our IT technicians control the admin for our schools, so it might be worth being to your IT support, too. As always, many thanks for watching today's video. do hope you found it useful. Until next time, all the best. Goodbye.