Google turned on its Gemini chatbot this week for some elementary through high school students using its popular Classroom app for schools, escalating a race among U.S. tech giants to train students on their artificial intelligence tools.
Google Classroom, a learning management system for posting assignments and turning in schoolwork, is used by more than 150 million students and teachers worldwide. Until this week, Google automatically enabled Gemini in Classroom only for students 18 or older.
Now, a new Gemini tab within Classroom will allow students of all ages to seek A.I. help on math problems and writing assignments. They can also generate course aids like study guides, quizzes and flashcards, as well as produce images.
In an email, Google said it had made Gemini available in Classroom because the new setup would enable students to ask the A.I. about specific course materials and assignments provided by their teachers.
Google said the A.I. changes in Classroom would affect only schools that allowed student access to its Gemini app or Gemini Notebook, another Google product. School administrators may turn Gemini access on or off for all students, the company noted, or for specific groups of students, like those in lower grades.
Even so, school administrators said Google made so many changes to its A.I. products for schools that it could be difficult for them to keep track or even know what was turned on or off.
“We seem to be the last to know,” said Derek Moore, chief technology officer for the Palo Alto Unified School District in Palo Alto, Calif., which allows high school students to use Gemini only for specific purposes permitted by their teachers.
Google’s drive to increase student access to its A.I. tools ramps up a longstanding battle among tech giants like Apple, Google and Microsoft to capture classrooms and secure students as long-term customers. Newcomers to the school tech market, like the A.I. start-ups Anthropic and OpenAI, have recently started programs for K-12 teachers. But so far OpenAI and Anthropic have not made their ChatGPT and Claude chatbots available for student use in U.S. public schools.
The industry is pushing for classroom chatbots as parents’ groups in New York City, Los Angeles and elsewhere are pressing schools to temporarily halt rollouts of student A.I. products. These groups say A.I. chatbots can pose risks to children’s safety, privacy and critical thinking. Some warn that using chatbots to generate study aids like flashcards and text summaries may hinder students’ learning.
Google’s A.I. changes illustrate a longstanding power dynamic between consumer tech giants and the U.S. public education system. Tech companies regularly turn on new education product features for students. The automatic changes often require school administrators to opt out, rather than asking schools to switch them on.
In interviews this week, several district leaders urged tech companies to allow schools to vet significant changes to A.I. tools for students first and then decide whether to turn them on.
“A school district should not accidentally adopt an A.I. platform simply because nobody happened to find the right check box six months ago,” said James O’Hagan, the digital equity, innovation and library services director at the Glendale-River Hills School District in Glendale, Wis. He noted that Google had previously turned on a different A.I. service, Workspace Intelligence, for school district customers, a change he criticized in a LinkedIn post.
“The default should be permission, not adoption,” he added.
This fall, Google plans to turn on another new setting for students younger than 18 who are logged in to school Google accounts, this time as part of its Search services, according to a company notice for school administrators posted this week.
Called the Search Personalized Recommendations Control, the setting enables the company’s search system to customize suggestions based on students’ Google account data — “like saved activity across Google sites and apps,” including location data — the company notice said. For example, Google said, the system might analyze a student’s past search queries about science topics to make responses “more relevant to what the student is learning.”
In an email, Google said the new recommendation setting would be turned on this fall only for schools that enabled its search services.
After discovering the notice on Thursday, Mr. O’Hagan said, he used Google’s school administrator dashboard to turn off the company’s search services and pre-empt the new feature for students.
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