What's your best feature update for the start of the 2026/27 academic year?
I wrote an article on mine, I'd love to hear what you're excited about.https://aieducator.tools/articles/10-back-to-school-ai-updates-for-educators
17 replies
Still the traditional, "Call the parents BEFORE you meet the kids." Keep it short and sweet, a prepared paragraph helps make it quick, and our school had Remind that let me send a voice message which went straight to voicemail. Making that personal connection makes it easier when you have to make a negative call, and helps keep parents on your side. (Yes, I know it's not an AI feature, but...
I agree! The chrome extension for both Diffit and SchoolAI make huge difference in real-time decision making for actionable use of formative data!
If I had to pick just one update for my classes this September, it’s hands down Contextual Gemini in Google Classroom. Teaching both Spanish and Computer Science, my biggest headache with AI has been stopping students from either getting confused by out-of-scope answers or just copy-pasting code solutions. This feature locks the AI strictly to whatever files I’ve uploaded for a lesson. For...
The standout is Gemini embedded directly inside Google Classroom. The important shift isn’t simply “more AI”. It’s that AI is becoming grounded in the learning environment I have designed. Gemini can work from the class context, assignment instructions and teacher-selected curriculum materials, then help students generate study guides, quizzes, flashcards and audio overviews. It moves us away...
Gemini Notebook (rebranding NotebookLM)
Gemini Notebook
Wish I could put students on it. :-( Still not allowed
Our school just declared Gemini as the AI platform for teachers. After seeing which students need some remediation with their writing, Gemini helped me take the essential standards we chose for writing and turn them into a student friendly set of mastery statements. That way students can begin to help them prioritize which skills need their attention. It helps me as a teacher also tailor...
Context: Often students will miss an assignment and turn it in late a week later. Our LMS does not let me know when students have turned in late work. Worse, sometimes those students will turn in blank work and try to show their parents that they've completed all assignments. The Fix: I created a Google App script to scrape the work students are turning in, Use Gemini to decide if it is blank...
Not really a feature per se, but I've been using ChatGPT to create an Instructor Guide (well, in its words, an "Instructor Excellence Guide") for one class and had it help me clean up a shell that I inherited for another. For the first class, I fed in all of the PowerPoints and originally asked it to give me some filler material to make the class last more than 30 minutes. After mentioning UDL...