Reflection: Auckland Google Summit 2025

The first Google Summit in Auckland in a very long time - and possibly the first Google Summit I attended in 10 (?) years. It was great to see some familiar faces (Juliet and Justine come to mind), and though the summit was not as large as what I remember past events, the crowd was engaged and highly curious. My heartfelt thanks to the team from Deploy Learning to make this event happen at Albany Senior High School and for free!

Eric Curts from Control Alt Achieve gave the keynote and set the scene for a day that was all about AI: "Level up every learner with AI". Not only should we look at AI to assist educators, they can empower our learners. He focused on four specific areas: Personalised Learning, Feedback, Creativity and Accessibility, and he provided a wide range of examples of how AI can empower learners in these areas (check out https://www.controlaltachieve.com/p/resources-ai.html).

From there we split off into different hands-on sessions, where we explored (mainly) AI technology under guidance of our respective presenters. I attended sessions led by Steve Smith Notebook LM and Gems - use your info to build custom agents, Chris Betcher A Sense of Place: Cross-Curricular Storytelling with Google Earth, Eric Curts Hipster Google - Tools You Probably Never Heard Of, and Luke Starczak Exploring Gemini Canvas. 

What have I taken away from the event overall?

1. As in the past, there are still many passionate educators in Aotearoa New Zealand that will spend the first day of their term break learning, many seven pending their own money on travel and accommodation.
2. While online meetings are convenient and much cheaper, there is real potential in bringing back in-person events: The value of the 'meeting people in person' experience cannot be overstated, and there are many people who are willing to contribute in different forms. I would like to see some of the grassroots events reemerge, may it be tech breakfasts, teachmeets, educator meet ups in regions etc. The end of kāhui ako does not have to mean the end of collaboration and learning with and from each other?

What about AI?

Since I started working as facilitator for Manaiakalani in May, I have been dabbling with AI use, but I am yet to fully get on board. Work is very supportive of exploring AI use, which is different to my previous sector, and we have regularly briefings on new uses for our practice, provided by some of our colleagues.

I can see the benefit of AI doing (some of the) legwork for educators and facilitators, I can see the advantage of AI created images versus trying to find the elusive creative commons image to support a presentation - and yet I'm somewhat reluctant: A child of the 70s and 80s, am I influenced by the HALs, Skynet, and VIKIs of the movie world? Is it the Playcentre mother in me, encouraging my children to create their own understanding of the world around them? Where is the balance between human creativity and and AI? Not engaging with AI is not really an option for me: If I want to have an informed opinion, I need to explore and see what is out there. A healthy dose of scepticism might be useful if I want to achieve that above balance.

AI and education

I can see some useful AI assistance for educators and for facilitators:

• I have created a Gemini Gem to help me develop the skeleton of lesson sequences at different (age) levels, a task that took less that 15 minutes from start to finish where it would have taken me much, much longer. From there I will flesh out the lessons and find or develop supporting materials (slides, exemplars, templates). It is my understanding that it being a 'Gem', I will be able to reuse this for other contexts and other year levels.
• Gemini Canvas has helped me create two versions of a Cybersmart game that students can use to practice their Digital Citizenship skills.
• Adobe Express has helped me create a range of images to use over the last few months. While I can still see cultural bias within images, this is now less obvious than previously.

AI can help create:

• From some of the simple creation tools like autodraw.com to Canva and Adobe Express, AI can assist the budding artist. My wonderings include: How do we ensure that our learners still practice their manual skills, that they learn how to utilise the AI tools effective, and they give credit to AI?
• Even as an amateur, you can create some cool little animations; this is a little experiment I created in Wisk, using a photograph of the design on my handbag: https://labs.google/fx/tools/whisk/share/animate/3rp25vtef0000. How will these tools affect our creativity: How will we ensure we continue to expand our own ideas and not limit ourselves to what we can get AI to do? What roles will our exisiting animators fill in future now that AI can do their jobs?
• Many of our learners in rural areas have limited access to resources: How can AI powered creative tools help level the playing field for them, without crating a different kind of inequity?

AI as a personalised Teacher Aide / Teaching Assistant for learners

I'm intrigued by this, and still I yet have to make up my mind on it: Being able to provide learners with immediate, personalised feedback 24/7 is something that seems impossible to achieve without AI assistance. My questions center around the intersection between AI Teacher Aide and teacher:

• How does the teacher know what AI assistance has been provided and how successful this was?
• How can we ensure that AI assistance is according to what the teacher has planned? At a base level, I'm thinking of those times when I have liaised with the classroom teacher before teaching a Raranga Matihiko class to ensure I was using the terminology students were familiar with.
• How do AI and teacher collaboratively work with the student to help them get to the next step of their thinking and learning? 

So, AI is here to stay, and we have choices about what this will look like.

Overall, a very thought provoking day, and I look forward to more in-person events in future!