One of the most popular tech platforms used by schools, Google Classroom, recently opened use of its Gemini chatbot to K-12 students of all ages, giving schools little time to determine how to restrict or monitor its use.
Until August, Gemini had been turned on only for students who are 18 and older. Using the new Gemini tab, students can turn course materials into flashcards, create practice quizzes and study guides, ask for help on math and writing assignments, and generate images.
The tab is available only to districts that had already granted students access to the Gemini app or Gemini Notebook. Where a district had switched Gemini off for students, it will stay off.
The change—made for a learning platform that Google says is used by more than 150 million students and teachers in the world—occurred without schools going through the usual vetting of online services that they typically have time to do before students have access to certain technologies.
That is what is making this expanded access to Gemini hard to manage for schools, said Justin Reich, an associate professor at MIT who studies education technology. Adopting a new technology feature normally means there is time set aside for staff to weigh the benefits and drawbacks of the technology before deciding to use it.
This time, districts had to decide almost immediately whether or not to prohibit access to Gemini. That is problematic, he said, because it sends the message that schools now have to manage technological change “whenever the tech industry decides we have to deal with it.”
Beyond those concerns, experts and educators point out that access to AI tools to students of all ages puts schools in a difficult spot in determining when it is age-appropriate to introduce students, especially younger ones, to artificially intelligent technologies.
Google makes the argument that the Gemini tab lets students work with it in a way that is grounded in their course materials and based on effective teaching practices and online safety measures.
Google announced the plan to make Gemini available to all students in a blog post back in June. The company has made the point that the announcement gave schools time to prepare for the change. Also, school district administrators can turn Gemini off at any time, according to the company.
Michael Martin, the new principal of Plymouth High School in Plymouth, Ohio, learned about Google opening access to Gemini for K-12 students of all ages from a news story, not from Google or official district communication.
Given that Gemini is an AI-driven chatbot, that poses some challenges for school districts in Ohio, because the state requires every district to have an AI policy that clarifies when it is appropriate for teachers and students to use artificial intelligence, That policy requirement took effect this summer.
Gemini is turned off at Plymouth because teachers “as a whole haven’t been trained to use it,” Martin said.
Robbie Torney, head of AI and digital assessments at the Youth AI Safety Institute, part of Common Sense Media, said the rollout “defaults to adoption rather than permission.”
Gemini is the only AI chatbot that is available for use by students of all ages in K-12 schools.
Microsoft’s Copilot, an AI chatbot, arrives switched off for elementary and secondary student accounts, and a school district technology administrator has to turn it on for students who are at least 13. Younger students do not have access to it.
Open AI’s free workspace for teachers excludes students, and the teen version of ChatGPT released in August runs on personal accounts rather than through district accounts. Anthropic bars minors from using its Claude AI chatbot and limits its classroom product to teacher use only.
It’s worth noting that some K-12 students had limited access to Gemini through Google Workspace for Education, but now would have far more opportunities to use Gemini, primarily through Google Classroom.
Torney’s team at Common Sense Media had released a report in January that was critical of the access some kids had to Gemini in Google Workspace for Education because the chatbot often generated responses that were not age appropriate for prompts related to topics like emotional support, generating responses that were not that different for a kindergartner and high school senior based on a similar prompt. The report also found the chatbot tends to miss warning signs of conditions like psychosis and ADHD.
Tammy Wincup, CEO of Securly, which supports more than 26,000 schools worldwide with online safety services, said Gemini’s use on multiple platforms forces school administrators to play “whack-a-mole” in trying to figure out where students are allowed to use it and seeing how they are using it.
Arman Jaffer, CEO and founder of Brisk Teaching, which sells AI tools that run alongside Google’s, said the gap between a teacher’s perception of how students are using Gemini and what students are actually using the chatbot for is the challenge.
The biggest challenge with the quick release of Gemini may be instructional, said Torney, who is concerned that most teens likely have never talked with a teacher about what it means to be AI literate.
Shameka Joyner, former principal of a middle school in Cumberland County, N.C., and now principal of Ferguson-Easley Elementary School in the county, said her school district trained principals, counselors, and teachers this summer about AI literacy.
She suggested that deciding which students get access to Gemini or other AI tools is not just about age. She said it should also be based on a student’s cognitive ability and academic skills.
In addition to students, Joyner worries about the effect easy access to AI tools like Gemini will have on her teachers.
“I don’t want teachers to lose their creativity, their professional judgment,” she said. AI “should be used as a tool, but it should not be the foundation of our educational system.”
Martin frames it differently. Nearly all of his students already have access to the tool through their smartphones.
“It’s not who has AI,” he said. “It’s who is learning to use AI.”
