Google dropped an update... So What?

Yes, Google just dropped a lot of new tools (remember, they do have a habit of taking them away as quickly as they bring them in, Jamboard ahem!!). Gemini is being woven into nearly every surface of their education ecosystem: from forms and classrooms to Chromebooks and lesson planning tools. And yes, it’s impressive. Free access for teachers, new analytics dashboards, learning standards tracking, and even NotebookLM being adapted for under-18s. It's slick. It's powerful.

But here’s the bit we’re not hearing loud enough.

Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

Implementation isn't plug and play. Strategy matters. Context matters. And if you’re a school leader being seduced by a glossy toolset pushed by influencers who forgot to mention their sponsored posts… pause.

As as my brilliant former colleague Zoë Elder PhD always shared: if you ask "so what?", you need to be able to follow it up with "so that..."

So that what?

So that planning time is reduced because the tool aligns with curriculum goals, offers editable, subject-specific exemplars, and saves the teacher from building everything from scratch.

So that feedback becomes more effective because the platform supports live commentary within learner work, linked to success criteria, and is accessible to students when it matters most.

So that accessibility improves because the tools support multimodal instruction, translation, dictation, or assistive features that meet the needs of actual learners in your classrooms, not just a slide deck demo.

These are the kinds of specifics that are needed. If your reason for adoption stops at "workload will be reduced" or "teaching will improve," that’s not a strategy. That’s a slogan.

Simon Sinek and his 'why' are important, but if you can’t articulate the how, don’t pretend the why is enough.

Getting technology working in a school is the easy part. Installing it, switching it on is relatively straightforward. But embedding it well, with intention, with confidence, with competence with cognisance, consistency within your context? That’s the hard bit. That’s what the 5Cs Olly Lewis and I wrote about in The EdTech Playbook are all about.

And that’s why the human in the loop is critical.

No matter how capable the system, it is your people who make the difference. Teachers, support staff, leaders – they carry the weight of making any tool live, and live well, in practice. When we chase tools for the sake of the feature list, we risk forgetting the point: pedagogy first, technology second.

Before rushing into the latest platform shift, ask:

• What exactly do we need?
• How exactly does this help?
• Who is supported and who might be left behind?
• How will we know it’s working?

As Victoria Hedlund articulated this week following Ofsted 's sharing, it's not good enough just to have AI in your school; if you're going to use it, how is it being used to improve outcomes? There's more to unpick here, which I will do soon.

I'd add, how are you using it to not leave anyone behind, too? As we read recently in The Alan Turing Institute 's paper, children who don't recognise themselves in outputs from AI don't want to be involved with it, use it, learn about it, or, well, anything. So...

It's not about chasing the latest shiny tool. Keeping your head while everyone about you is losing theirs (chasing the latest update...)... you'll probably notice the hat tip to Kipling's 'If' there. There are lots of parallels, I think.

Ask "so what?" with rigour, and don’t move forward until you can finish that sentence with a clear, purposeful, and practical "so that..."!!!

One for Kai Vacher Matt Jessop Antoinette Hamilton Olly Lewis Al Kingsley MBE Alex More Emma Darcy Ed Fairfield Ashley Bryant Kat Cauchi Ivan Langton Andy Perryer Andrew Perry Matthew Coleman Stewart Brown NPQH FCCT