So I just spent the last 20 mins making my own web app! (well AI did….) I wanted to create an interactive writing tutor to help one of my students practice the skills he needs to complete the Level 2 Writing standard and gain UE Literacy. Here’s the workflow:
Add all the related NZQA Docs into a NotebookLM (Standard, Exemplars, Clarifications)
Ask NotebookLM to create a detailed knowledge base to be used for an interactive writing tutor.
Switch to Gemini and use this knowledge base and the Canvas tool to create a web app that is hosted by the free to use Sandbox.io (full, detailed instructions generated by AI below – it does get a bit complicated with Apps script, API key and Sandbox but every time I got stuck, I just asked Gemini)
As teachers, we know the potential of AI, but we also know the pitfalls: generic advice, hallucinated standards, and chatbots that just give students the answers instead of making them think.
Recently, I set out to build InkForge, an interactive AI tutor specifically aligned to the New Zealand NCEA Level 2 English Writing Standard (AS91101). I didn’t just want a chatbot; I wanted a live coach that guides students step-by-step, gamifies their learning, and strictly follows the grading boundaries (Achieved, Merit, Excellence).
The best part? You can build this entirely for free using tools you probably already have access to: Google Sites, Google Apps Script, and CodeSandbox.
Here is the step-by-step guide to building your own secure, embedded AI tutor.
The Architecture: How It Works
Think of this setup like a restaurant:
The Dining Room (React App / CodeSandbox): This is the visual chat interface the students see on your Google Site.
The Kitchen (Google Apps Script): This is a hidden middleman script living securely in your Google Drive.
The Chef (Gemini API): This is the actual AI brain processing the student’s text.
Why the middleman? If we put our secret AI API key right into the website, tech-savvy students could steal it and use up our quota. By using Google Apps Script as a middleman, the students only ever talk to your Google Drive, keeping your API key 100% hidden and secure!
In the Dependencies section on the left, search for and add lucide-react (this gives us our cool icons).
Open the public/index.html file. Right under the <head> tag, paste this line to turn on our design system:<script src="https://cdn.tailwindcss.com"></script>
The CSS (styles.css)
In your src folder, open or create styles.css and paste this to make it look premium:
Open your App.jsx (or App.tsx) file. Delete everything and paste your main React code.
(Note: The React code block is quite large, so I’ve hosted the template here: [Insert Link to your CodeSandbox or GitHub gist of the React code]).
The most important part: At the top of that App.jsx file, look for the scriptUrl variable. Paste the Google Apps Script Web App URL you copied in Step 2 here. This links your front-end to your secure middleman!
Step 4: Embed on Your Google Site
Wait for your CodeSandbox mini-browser to refresh and show your app.
Copy the shareable URL address at the top of that CodeSandbox preview pane (it looks like https://xxxxxx.csb.app).
Open your Google Site in edit mode.
Click Embed -> By URL, and paste that link.
Resize the box to fill the screen, hit Publish, and you’re done!
Your students now have a completely custom, standard-aligned AI tutor embedded right in your class website.
What an incredible few days at EduTech Sydney 2025. The conference was a great showcase of the tools shaping the future of learning, but of more value were the people I was able to interact with. Rather than a minute-by-minute recap, I want to share the big ideas and the practical tools I’m going to explore.
Sal Khan’s Vision: AI as the Ultimate Teaching Assistant
To open the conference, Sal Khan, the founder of Khan Academy, delivered a powerful vision for the future of education—a future where Artificial Intelligence serves not to replace educators, but to empower them, finally solving the age-old challenge of personalised learning for every student.
His message was clear: the true potential of AI in the classroom is to augment the irreplaceable role of the human teacher, acting as a tireless assistant that frees up educators to focus on what they do best—inspiring, motivating, and connecting with their students.
Here are the key themes from his address:
The Human Core of Learning
Khan’s journey began not with technology, but with a human connection: tutoring his cousins. He quickly learned that pre-recorded videos could handle the explanations, which allowed his live sessions to become deeper and more focused on higher-order thinking. This led to a foundational insight: his most important role wasn’t just to explain concepts, but to motivate his cousins and hold them accountable. This principle remains the bedrock of Khan Academy’s philosophy.
Solving an Old Problem with New Tools
For centuries, the gold standard of education was the personal tutor—an “Aristotle for Alexander the Great” who could tailor learning to an individual’s specific needs. However, this was never scalable. The Industrial Revolution gave us the “factory model” of education, grouping students by age and moving them along at a set pace. While this dramatically increased literacy rates, it often left students with knowledge gaps.
Khan argues that today’s AI-driven economy demands we move beyond this model. For the last 15 years, Khan Academy has worked to use technology to approximate that personal tutor for everyone. With the arrival of advanced AI, Khan believes we are closer than ever to achieving that goal.
AI with Purpose: Building Guardrails for the Classroom
When OpenAI first demonstrated what would become GPT-4, Khan’s team was one of the first to see its potential. They immediately confronted the same risks that schools grapple with today: cheating, accuracy, and oversight. Instead of banning the technology, they decided to turn these risks into features. The result is Khanmigo, an AI tool designed with pedagogy at its core:
It’s Socratic: It nudges students to find the answer themselves rather than giving it away.
It’s Transparent: It provides teachers with full oversight of student interactions.
It Puts the Teacher in the Loop: The system is built around the idea that the educator is the “conductor of the symphony” in the classroom.
Empowering the Educator is the End Goal
Perhaps the most compelling theme was the focus on AI as a tool to reclaim teachers’ time and energy. Khan noted that educators are often asked to adopt new tools that just add to their workload. Generative AI is different. Teachers using these new tools are reporting saving five to ten hours per week on tasks like lesson planning and writing progress reports. This recovered time is crucial, allowing educators to be more sustainable in their careers and, most importantly, giving them more energy to dedicate to their students.
A Call to Action: Lean In
We are living in a moment that feels like science fiction. AI is advancing at a dizzying pace, bringing both incredible opportunities and legitimate fears about job dislocation, fraud, and intellectual property. Khan’s closing message was a call to action: technology is fundamentally neutral. If good people don’t engage with it, a negative outcome is all but ensured. He urged everyone in education to lean in and actively shape this technology, ensuring it is used for the most positive purpose imaginable: to enhance human intelligence, purpose, and meaning for generations to come.
Authentic Assessment in the Age of AI
A central theme coming up in session after session was the critical need for authentic assessment. This wasn’t just a buzzword; it was a foundational concept that speaker after speaker returned to, urging a collective rethink of how we measure student success as we navigate the complexities of AI in education.
Across a number of workshops, a clear definition emerged. At its core, authentic assessment is about bridging the gap between the classroom and the real world. The consensus was that we need to move beyond traditional testing and create assessments that are inherently relevant and practical. These are tasks that are complex, demand higher-order thinking, and mirror the multifaceted challenges students will face in their future careers. The focus is shifting from what students can recall to how they can apply their knowledge in dynamic, real-world situations.
A powerful question resonated across several talks:
“What if we stopped assessing for the past?”
This idea challenges the long-held view of assessment as a restrictive, backward-looking tool. Instead, the presenters championed a new vision: assessment as a forward-looking catalyst for deeper, more engaged learning.
However, the discussions were also grounded in pragmatism. A consistent message was that authentic assessment is not a panacea for the challenges presented by AI, nor is it a magical solution for academic integrity. Rather than being a specific type of task, it’s a guiding principle that should inform the design of all our assessments. Experts emphasised that authenticity exists on a continuum; even small modifications to make an existing assessment more application-focused are valuable. The collective call to action was clear: it’s time to design assessments that are not just an evaluation of learning, but an integral and meaningful part of the learning journey itself.
Climbing ‘Feedback Mountain’ with AI
A session that resonated with me was from Ryan Elwell in the Google Teaching Theatre. He talked about the relentless challenge of providing timely and effective feedback, framing this as “climbing feedback mountain”—a powerful metaphor for a task that can feel overwhelming. The session offered a practical framework for making the climb manageable, not by working harder, but by working smarter with the help of AI.
The core of the discussion centered on three simple but profound questions that every student needs answered:
Where am I going? (Clarifying the goals)
How am I going? (Tracking progress towards those goals)
Where to next? (Identifying the next steps for improvement)
This is where AI is becoming a game-changer. The workshop highlighted how AI tools can be leveraged to help students answer these questions with greater efficiency. For instance, Ryan showed how a tool like Google Vids could be used to create a short, personalised feedback video, allowing a teacher to talk through a student’s work far more quickly than typing out lengthy comments.
Crucially, this frees up the teacher to focus on the “Where to next?” conversation. By automating the more routine aspects of feedback, educators can dedicate their valuable time and expertise to the human elements of teaching that AI cannot replicate: the ability to inspire, guide, and connect. The ultimate goal isn’t to replace the teacher with technology, but to use technology to empower them, making the climb up feedback mountain less about administrative burden and more about meaningful, forward-focused dialogue.
Teaching Entrepreneurship with UTS Startups
One of the most practical sessions was a deep dive into the UTS Startups @ School program, presented by Dr. Keith Heggart from the University of Technology Sydney. This initiative is designed to demystify entrepreneurship for secondary students and equip them with tangible, real-world digital business skills.
The program is structured as a series of hands-on “Missions.” This isn’t about writing business plans in a vacuum; it’s about doing. Students get their hands dirty by building actual micro-businesses and digital assets on the very platforms shaping today’s economy. The learning journey is incredibly practical:
It kicks off by creating a print-on-demand store on Etsy.
From there, they learn to create and sell low and medium-content books using Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP).
Students then explore modern content creation by building “faceless” YouTube channels.
The course covers dropshipping, first by learning to generate traffic organically through TikTok, and then by scaling with Facebook ads.
Finally, the program culminates in crucial lessons on due diligence for digital assets and a period of reflection to plan their next steps.
What’s so impressive about this initiative is its focus on action over theory. It provides students with a low-cost, high-impact pathway to understand market validation and digital marketing, turning the idea of being an entrepreneur from an abstract concept into a tangible reality.
A Treasure Trove of Resources from EduTech 2025
The sessions at EduTech Sydney 2025 were brimming with fantastic tools, projects, and resources. To help you explore some of the exciting ideas discussed, I’ve compiled a list of the key resources I came across.
AI & Productivity Tools
A major focus of the conference was leveraging AI to enhance learning and streamline teacher workflows. Here are some of the standout tools:
Google Gemini: At the heart of many discussions, Gemini was showcased as a versatile assistant for both teachers and students. Its capabilities with Canvas include everything from creating flashcards, quizzes, and timelines to generating complex simulations and drag-and-drop activities for interactive learning. A premium subscription (Gemini Advanced) unlocks more powerful features.
NotebookLM: This AI-powered research and note-taking tool was a highlight. Grounded in your own source materials (like class readings, reports, or research articles), it can help you discover new connections, generate summaries, create an FAQ, or even compare documents, such as analysing the changes between old and new curriculum documents.
LearnLM: This is a family of models from Google, fine-tuned specifically for learning. It’s the technology that powers many of the educational experiences within tools like Gemini, designed to help students by providing guidance and feedback that aligns with pedagogical best practices.
Google Labs: This is the home for many of Google’s early-stage experiments. It’s a great place to explore the future of technology and see what new tools are on the horizon. Many of the creative tools below originated here.
Creative & Design Resources
From generating images to creating engaging presentations, these tools can add a creative spark to your educational content.
Flow: An experimental AI filmmaking tool from Google Labs. It allows storytellers to generate and edit video clips using text prompts, leveraging advanced models like Veo.
Veo: While integrated into Flow, Veo is Google’s powerful generative video model. It can create high-quality, short video clips from text and image prompts, a fascinating tool for digital storytelling projects.
Whisk: A generative tool for animate still images.
GenType: An AI experiment that generates unique typographic designs, offering endless creative possibilities for classroom projects, presentations, and visual communication.
Stickity for Slides: A fantastic Google Slides add-on that allows you to seamlessly integrate digital stickers and icons. This is perfect for increasing comprehension, providing visual cues for tasks, and making slides more engaging for all learners.
Zilla Slab Highlight: The specific font mentioned for making text pop on slides with background images. It’s a clean, modern slab serif available on Google Fonts.
Educational & Maker Projects
These resources provide inspiration and practical tools for hands-on learning and understanding the impact of technology.
Day of AI Australia: A fantastic, free program that provides curriculum and hands-on activities to introduce K-10 students to artificial intelligence and how it works.
Precious Plastic: An open-source project providing blueprints and machines for recycling plastic. This is an incredible resource for STEM and sustainability projects, allowing students to design and create with recycled materials.
Strandbeest: The official home of artist Theo Jansen’s kinetic sculptures. These “beach animals” are a breathtaking example of the intersection of art, engineering, and physics, perfect for inspiring students in design and technology.
Experiments with Google: A collection of inspiring projects that blend creativity and technology. Here you can find fun experiments likeGen Chess, which uses AI to create unique, playable chess sets.
Conclusion
The message ringing through every session was clear: the future of education lies in the thoughtful partnership between human pedagogy and artificial intelligence. From rethinking assessment to be more authentic, to leveraging AI to make daunting tasks like feedback more manageable, the focus was never on technology as a replacement, but as an enabler. It’s about using these incredible new tools to free up our time for what truly matters—inspiring, guiding, and connecting with our students. The resources and ideas shared were a powerful reminder that we are at the beginning of a truly transformative era in education.
A note on creation: In the spirit of embracing the very tools discussed at the conference, this blog post was crafted with the assistance of Google Gemini. The core ideas, insights, and resources were gathered from my rough notes taken during the sessions, and Gemini helped to structure, refine, and articulate them into this final piece.
The core of my session focused on the role of AI not as a replacement for human creativity, but as an augmentation—a partner that can help students brainstorm, iterate, and overcome creative hurdles.
Key themes I covered include:
AI as a Creative Catalyst: We discussed how AI is reshaping art, design, and media, providing students with new expressive tools and future-ready skills. The goal is to see AI as an infinitely imaginative partner for co-creation.
The Language of Visuals & Prompts: To effectively command our creative muse, we need to speak its language. We delved into the importance of visual literacy and “prompt engineering”—the art of crafting clear and powerful prompts. This involves understanding concepts like focal point, perspective, and artistic style to move from simple requests to specific, detailed instructions.
Using AI to Improve AI Prompts: One of the most powerful techniques we explored was using AI to help students articulate their vision. By using a “meta prompt,” we can ask an AI to transform a simple idea into a detailed, well-crafted prompt for an AI image generator, leading to significantly richer results. For a fun activity, try Google Arts and Culture Say what you See.
Navigating AI Responsibly: A crucial part of our discussion was the importance of using these powerful tools critically and responsibly. This includes teaching students to identify potential AI-generated fakes and using tools like reverse image search to understand the origin of an image.
Classroom in Action: We looked at inspiring student projects and practical classroom activities. To get you started, I’ve shared the “AI BINGO” challenge from the presentation, which provides a fun, hands-on way to experiment with different image generation prompts.
Resources:
For a closer look at the concepts and examples, you can download the full presentation and the activity sheet here:
Attending the EduTech conference in Melbourne on the 12th and 13th of August 2024 was an invaluable experience. The conference covered a wide range of topics, from AI integration in classrooms to fostering innovation in schools. I was fortunate enough to be selected to present at the Google Teaching Theatre and it was awesome to connect again with the Google Champions network.
As I discovered last year, it was again an intense two days with some awesome workshops and connecting with some amazing educators. What follows is an attempt to sort my messy random notes into some sort of coherent form. Of course I used AI (Google Gemini and Claude) to help me draft this and organise my information.
Keynote by Sal Khan
Sal Khan, founder of Khan Academy, shared his vision for AI in education:
AI can serve as an “on-demand version of a tutor,” helping students work at their learning edge.
The combination of amazing teachers and amazing technology can amplify human intent in education.
Khan Academy has developed “Khanmigo,” an AI-powered tool to support student learning. This is currently only available to students in the USA but has just been released for teachers in over 40 countries and will soon be available for students in more countries.
This was certainly one of the highlights for me a I had just read his book, Brave New Words: How AI Will Revolutionize Education. In this book he argues for embracing AI technology rather than fearing it, explaining how these tools can transform learning and teaching. Khan outlines how AI can personalize learning, adapt assessments, and support classroom success.
The book goes beyond technology, discussing practical implications for educators and administrators, how AI can be used in the workplace, and ethical and social considerations. Khan envisions AI as a tool to create a more accessible global education system. He provides a roadmap for teachers, parents, and students to navigate this new landscape, emphasising the need to harness AI’s power for good while acknowledging its limitations.
Understanding and Implementing AI in the Classroom
Several sessions focused on demystifying AI and its applications in education:
James Curran from Grok Academy outlined how our kids are using the Kingswood model of Gen AI – the worst iteration it will be. Gen AI is auto complete in steroids and James went through a number of great examples using tools like NGram viewer, “I saw the man on a hill with a telescope“, to help explain how these models work (check out his slides at this link).
Ryan Elwell emphasized the importance of moving from AI prompting to AI fluency, treating AI as an assistant while recognizing the nuances of this relationship. Does using an advanced tool mean the same thing as cheating? Eg advance golf clubs, swimsuits banned in the Olympics for being too fast
One of the most pressing concerns in education today is how to maintain academic integrity while acknowledging the prevalence of AI tools. In a blog post by Adam Sparks he suggests that instead of relying on ineffective AI detection software, educators should:
Set clear classroom policies that allow for some AI use
Incorporate more writing instruction across the curriculum
Teach students to use AI effectively in their writing
Focus on personal reflection and defense in writing assignments
Emphasize the “why” behind assignments
The key message: Stop chasing easy solutions to complex problems and instead adapt our teaching methods to the new reality.
Fostering Innovation in Schools
Luke Callier from St Hilda’s Anglican School for Girls presented on why schools need intrapreneurs. He outlined seven steps to innovation:
Cultivate a culture of innovation
Identify gaps and problems
Ideation and research
Write and pitch ideas
Engage stakeholders
Celebrate and tell the story
Evaluate and iterate
An inspiring session on the “Tinker Train” model by Eleni Kyritsis showcased how sustainability, visible thinking, and inquiry-based learning can be integrated across subjects. This approach includes:
Using inquiry walls (floor-to-ceiling pin boards)
Incorporating technology like Minecraft and AR in units on sustainable housing
Implementing badge systems for reporting
The exhibition hall
Another highlight is wandering around the massive exhibition hall and talking with various companies about their products and services (and getting some swag!). Here’s some of my favourites:
Precious plastic: have a pretty awesome shredder and extructor so you can make your own injection moulded products. Check out the Brothers make Youtube channel for inspiration.
MakersEmpire: have an awesome Nationwide space themed design thinking competition (soon to be coming to NZ!)
Toddle: a pretty awesome LMS with so much functionality
The EduTECH Congress & Expo highlighted that AI is not just a tool, but a transformative force in education. As educators, we must embrace this change, teaching our students to use AI effectively while maintaining the core values of learning and academic integrity. By fostering innovation, promoting sustainability, and leveraging AI’s potential, we can create more engaging, personalized, and effective learning experiences for our students.
This page is your one-stop shop for all the resources mentioned during the ‘Take the plunge with Gemini’ session at the Google Teaching Theatre – EduTECH Melbourne 2024.
If you came to my session, I’d love to hear your feedback! Complete the short form in the EduTECH app and share some ways you are using AI with staff and students.
