The EdTechTeacher Podcast

Your students are reading texts that outpace their background knowledge, and turning in work that may or may not be their own thinking. In this episode, recorded live as part of our free Google AI Educator Series, EdTechTeacher instructor Lauren Vu and CEO Tom Driscoll show how Google Gemini can help with both.

Lauren, a California educator with ten years in public schools, models her own planning process for an 11th grade US History unit on the Industrial Revolution. You’ll see how she:

• Uses Gemini Notebook (NotebookLM) to pull tier two vocabulary with student friendly definitions, translations, and sentence frames for newcomer multilingual learners
• Rewrites a primary source at a lower reading level without losing the content
• Exports vocabulary as a CSV for Gimkit and other review games
• Uses Gemini Canvas to turn a single assignment into a chunked, multistep assessment that captures how students think, not just what they submit

Want the badges? Both Google AI Educator Series badges covered here are free to earn on your own time. Use the links below, and enter ETTeach as the PD partner code.

Resources
Session agenda and prompt guide: https://tinyurl.com/3fjmaxbb
Google AI Educator Series: https://goo.gle/GES-29
Webinar #2 registration: https://edtechteacher.org/event/google-ai-educator-series-webinar-1-2/
EdTechTeacher newsletter: https://edtechteacher.org/newsletter/
AI Summit at Bentley University | April 2nd, 2027: https://edtechteacher.org/aisummit/

Chapters
00:00 Welcome and agenda
06:19 Meet Lauren and Tom
07:48 Why reading scaffolds matter
09:48 Demo: Gemini Notebook for multilingual learners
14:45 Turning vocabulary into a Gimkit game
15:26 Rewriting a text at a lower reading level
18:17 The prompt guide
24:48 Designing assessments that capture student thinking
28:01 Demo: Gemini Canvas multistep assessment
32:43 Prompts for chunked, AI resistant assessments
34:12 Recap and what’s next
36:18 Finding your badges and free resources

Teachers returned this fall to a set of powerful new AI tools built right into the Google Workspace they already use every day. Tom Driscoll and Brandon Hall open Season 3 with a practical tour of what's worth your time: Gemini Notebook (formerly NotebookLM), custom Gems, Canvas mode for building classroom games with no coding experience, the new Gemini tools inside Google Classroom, and Workspace Studio for automating the busywork. Along the way, hear how an eighth grader built a car maintenance bot in ten minutes, and why one teacher set up a "red pen" Gem to tear apart her lesson ideas before her students do.

Plus: a preview of this season's new formats, two free Google AI Educator Series webinars (October 8 and October 20) where you can earn badges live, and our first community shoutouts, to Wolcott College Prep in Chicago and Neil Sonnenberg of Medfield Public Schools.

Brandon sits down with Narragansett (RI) Public Schools technology integration coach Vanessa Miller, and they chat about tech coaching, vibe coding, and using AI with students. The ability to vibe code with AI has helped both Brandon and Vanessa, and they talk about a variety of projects that they've worked on.

You can find Vanessa Miller on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/vlynnmiller

Brandon sits down with Narragansett High School English and Special Education teacher Sarah Dully, and they discuss all things innovation and pedagogy. Their "yapping" (her words) included using Gemini to modify and personalize lessons, talking about the big picture of teaching, engaging all learners, and using AI to make Masters picks.

"When we use AI effectively, it doesn't replace the teacher; it clears secondary tasks away so we can focus on what actually matters, the one-to-one interactions, the deep personalization of instruction, and the unshakable bonds we build with our students"

You can find Sarah online on Instagram @OceanStateSTOY and on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarah-d-315208354

Welcome back! Dartmouth (MA) Public Schools Instructional Technology Specialist Liz Voci sits down with Brandon to talk about Gemini, Gems, Canvas, and vibe coding with kids and adults. Liz and her students built apps using Canvas and Google Sites that mimicked some popular math practice sites and teachers have gotten crafty creating their own classroom tools, too. Follow Liz on LinkedIN at https://www.linkedin.com/in/elizabeth-voci-innovator

Brandon sits down with Moses Brown Middle School educator Jon Gold to talk about a variety of topics related to the unique challenges of teaching middle school. The discussion ranges from the learning, guardrails teachers can put in place, and mistakes common with middle level learners; what are we grading and why are we grading it; using NotebookLM and Gems for student feedback; and a future that might include making bots that can assist teachers.

Find his work in the New York Times here, and Edutopia here.

In this episode of the EdTechTeacher Podcast, Brandon chats with Dan Levine of Engaging Minds. Engaging Minds offers one-on-one online coaching for upper elementary, middle school, high school, and college students. We chat about how students learn to learn, how technology has shaped the processes at Engaging Minds, and how AI tools have enhanced learning for students with non-traditional approaches.

*Note, Brandon's microphone failed to initialize so at times the recording is quieter than normal. Fear not, a new microphone has been acquired!

AI? Workshops? Best practices with EdTech? We've got it all here on the new season of the EdTechTeacher Podcast, this time with guest Tom Driscoll. Brandon and Tom talk about all the excitement of back to school season along with the tools they're currently using to get students and teachers fired up about learning.

Welcome to Season 2! Brandon sits down with Lucia and Troy from the Holton-Arms School in Bethesda, Maryland to talk about student centered AI, policy creation, watching students create and teach, and much more!

• Holton Student AI Cohort Website - www.innovatorsai.org and Podcast

• Instagram - @ai.innovators0

• Lucia Hassell-Lee on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/luciahassell/ and on the web at www.luciahass.com and Threads - @edtechdmv

• Dr Troy Gordon on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/troy-gordon-16160063/ 

Brandon Hall sits down with EdTechTeacher CEO Tom Driscoll to discuss practical use cases for AI with school leadership. These practice cases include app vetting, PR campaigns for events, teacher observation, and so much more.

To contact Tom about leadership use cases, email him at [email protected]

To check out our catalogue of self-paced summer professional development offerings, go to https://edtechteacher.org/summer/