How Gemini AI transformed my work-life balance as a teacher

Posted on by J.J. Hamilton

For as long as I can remember, I’ve always wanted to write. I wrote stories about the things that I was into as a kid, creating and drawing out a story to go alongside my favourite shows and series. Little did I know at the time, but this was effectively fan fiction created by a seven year old. Now, I try to write whenever I can. Every year, I set lofty goals of writing every single day and, while that might not always pan out, I like to think that, little-by-little, I’m making progress towards my writing goals.

And yet, the internet has reduced our creative powers to almost zero.

You can’t go far without reading some new article about how yet another person has ‘written’ yet another book, self-published on Amazon or somewhere else, entirely with Artificial Intelligence. This could be hundreds of pages long, generating a hefty income, and it could have been written entirely by a machine.

That’s not even considering the vast environmental impact that AI usage can have on our planet. It would be silly, though, to think of AI as something that’s going away. Based on how companies have reacted to generative AI, this is clearly something that’s here to stay – for better or for worse. So, if this is the future that we’re going to live through, it’s up to us to ensure that it’s used responsibility. Less of relying on ChatGPT to answer our queries in a way that a simple Google Search could have done, and more using your phone’s on-board AI to act as your personal tour guide – as I did in Florence earlier this year, using the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra. Or maybe something as groundbreaking as developing cancer treatments.

In my work life, our school has readily embraced the possibilities of AI. I’ve become part of an AI Trailblazer programme, powered by Getech, to use the full capabilities of Gemini to complement my workflow. In the past, I’d simply dabbled in ChatGPT’s free version, but this is on the next level.

Here’s how it transformed my work-life balance as a teacher.

Using Gemini to plan and create high-quality cover work

This has been, by far, my most useful innovation this year (if not in my whole career so far).

As teachers, we always want the best for our students, even when we’re not there. But we’ve all experienced that 7am panic. You feel unwell, know that you can’t come in and should be in bed; yet, you’re sat at your desk wondering what on earth you’re going to set for year 9 to do in your absence.

This then leads to a frantic scramble. The result is a disjointed set of resources outside of our curriculum sequence that doesn’t represent a valuable use of learning time. Producing high-quality, bespoke, resources can take considerable time – and it’s not a great idea to do this when you’re under the weather. That’s where I turned to Gemini.

The key part is your starting point when using Gemini (or any AI, really. The tool doesn’t matter), and creating a good prompt. So, I uploaded our long term plan and stated, ‘Act as a History teacher creating a guided reading for 11-12 year olds. The topic is the Norman Conquest. The resource must be high-challenge but accessible. It needs to include: an introduction, a key vocabulary list with definitions, a main reading task of about 400 words, a set of 10 comprehension questions, a creative follow-up task, and finally, an answer key for a non-specialist.’

I’d then alter this prompt based on the class for whom needed the cover work. The result was a high-quality, challenging, accessible, piece of guided reading. It’s simple to set, easy to check once you’re back in the building, and easy to share among colleagues. As with any resource created using AI, it will need to be quality assured by you – the expert teacher – but this single process massively reduced my workload.

While most challenging cover resources would take 20 minutes or more to create, this takes five at most. The time that I saved from creating cover resources for our first cycle of work for Year 7 alone was about 5 hours.

Immense.

Using Gemini to mark work

This one’s still in its infancy. Gemini offers ‘gems’, where users can upload resources to give the AI a specific context. In the case of marking, you can upload mark schemes, past papers and real answers to questions to help it to understand how and why you award marks in certain ways. Then, you can try your hand at uploading a student’s piece of work, asking for it to be marked according to certain criteria – i.e.,give this piece of work a mark out of 40, a grade from 1-9, a glow and grow and a specific next step.

I’ll be honest: I don’t fully trust this yet. All of the work that I’ve had Gemini mark has been checked by me, and often it doesn’t fully hit the mark. That could come from the continuous refinement that I need to do for my prompt but, at the moment, it feels like I’m doubling my workload, rather than reducing it. Marking is one of the more time-consuming activities as a teacher, so cracking this one would be really high-leverage.

At the moment, I’ve been using it to generate model answers (again, it goes without saying that these need to be quality assured). Some of my A-Level materials can take up to an hour to write by hand, so this also represents a huge step for work-life balance.

Using Gemini as a non-specialist

This year, I taught a lot of KS3 Geography.

I haven’t studied Geography since I was in Year 9. Sometimes, though, that’s just how your timetable works. As a Humanities subject, you can quite often be expected to fill in for lessons that another department can’t fully staff – this might be due to how many specialist teachers that are at your school, of because the specialists are part of the Leadership Team, and therefore have other responsibilities which means that they have to be elsewhere, rather than in the classroom.

Getting the opportunity to teach Geography was actually really fun. I learned a heck of a lot more subject knowledge and feel like I have a better understanding of where our students are at in other subjects while I teach them History. However, while our school does share lessons among teachers, it’s important that individuals adapt these to our teaching styles.

As a non-specialist, this can be tricky. Having taught History for five years, I know the subject inside and out, meaning that I can adapt plans in the moment. Improving lessons before teaching them is often a five minute job. When you’re teaching as a non-specialist, however, this can be a lot more time-consuming. So, each week, I would plug the lesson content into Gemini, as well as the teaching styles or methods that I wanted to use, and ask Gemini to help me to co-plan it. For instance, I might create a Cornell Note worksheet about weather systems and the climate, tailored to my year 8 groups.

While others might view using AI in education as a replacement of a teacher’s job, I much prefer viewing this as a kind of virtual assistant. As the expert, I’m not using AI to blindly create a set of resources, mark work and track progress. Instead, I’m using it to help me with the trickiest, most time-consuming parts of my job, so that I can focus on what matters: teaching. It’s the same as doing your own research, finding resources online, compiling and editing them together – except this time, you’re halving the time it would usually take.

How are you using AI in teaching? What have been your greatest levers for change? Or are you totally against AI? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

Remember: using AI at work must comply with your organisation’s rules on GDPR.

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