🗑 6 AI-powered Google learning tools

🖥 A free student screen casting tool?!?

Vivi for Teachers lets students cast whatever’s on their Chromebook/laptop onto the big screen (projector / smart board). I just shared a demo video about it on TikTok (watch it!).

Oh, and it’s free!

• Share your teacher link (image above)

• Students join

• You choose who goes on the screen

• Whatever the student does is projected to everyone

🎁 BONUS: You can control your screen with your phone AND there’s a classroom timer!

Yep, really this easy … and really, really free. Get Vivi for Teachers here.

Note: Some links in this ad are affiliate links. If you sign up for free, I may (at no additional cost to you) receive a small commission.

💡 THE BIG IDEA 💡

🤖 6 AI-powered Google tools for the classroom

As pretty much any other tech company, Google has started rolling out AI features — and new AI-powered products.

They’re adding some impressive ones to support teaching and learning, too.

In fact, Google just recently announced that they’ve developed a series of AI models called LearnLM, trained for and focused on pedagogy and learning. Those models are already showing up in Search, YouTube, and Gemini … and they’ll start appearing in more places in the future.

In our new post — 6 AI-powered Google tools for the classroom — I share some tools that were demonstrated at the recent learning + AI event at Google HQ. For each one, the post shares: description, how to use in edu, terms of use, key features, and a caution.

Here are the six tools (with links to check them out):

• NotebookLM — "Your personalized research assistant." Upload your sources (PDF, websites, YouTube videos, Google Docs, Google Slides, etc). NotebookLM summarizes them and mades interesting connections between all topics. It'll create study guides, FAQs, executive summaries, and more. (We wrote about NotebookLM here.)

• Read Along — Not new, but … Reading program that listens as students read out loud -- and supports them when they get stuck. Choose from hundreds of leveled stories. Recommendations change as their reading improves. Students unlock stars and badges as motivation.

• Learn About — Grasp new topics and deepen your understanding with a conversational learning companion that adapts to your unique curiosity and learning goals. Ask questions. Upload material. Explore related topics that it curates for you.

• Google Arts and Culture — They’ve added three fun new AI-powered features: Mice in the Museum, Talking Tours, and Art Selfie 2.

• Illuminate — Illuminate turns content from the web into an audio dialogue with two AI-generated voices discussing key points of the content. Save any audio discussions you like, or browse publicly-available, pre-created conversations.

• ShiffBot — ShiffBot is an AI chatbot and downloadable Chrome extension. Built using Google’s Gemini API, it's augmented with Dan Shiffman’s inspirational teaching style and educational corpus to help learners overcome coding challenges when they’re working on their own in p5.js without just giving them the answer.

🔗 Read more: 6 AI-powered Google tools for the classroom

🎯 Quick Teaching Strategy / 🗄 Template / 💻 Tech Tip: xxxxxxxxx

Great questions 🫱🏼‍🫲🏽 Great discussions

Ask a good question to get a great answer — or discussion.

We asked the Ditch That Textbook community on social media for their favorite questions to ask students. They came through!

• “How would you sum up this lesson in a TikTok?” — David Platt

• “If you had to give up one of your five sinces, which one and why?” — Julie

• “Should students be able to pick their teacher?” — Amanda Pasley

• “Are you doing what it takes to get what you want in life? Why or why not?” — Canji Rhodes

That’s just four of them!

Read: 20 juicy questions to ask students

👋 How we can help

There are even more ways I can support you in the important work you do in education:

1. Read one of my six books about meaningful teaching with tech.

2. Take one of our online courses about practical and popular topics in education.

3. Bring me to your school, district or event to speak. I love working with educators!