I hope everyone had a wonderful half-term break! In this post, I would like to share how you can create a Gem Assignment in Google Classroom, which will support your students with their learning. In other words, I will show you step by step, how you can create a Study Partner, fully personalised to your students' needs, using the content that you, as a teacher, want. This could be extremely useful to help Y11 students in their learning for mock exams and for the real exams in the Summer. This feature, together with Brisk Boost Student Activity function, NotebookLM and Mizou, are in my opinion at the moment, the best students Study Partners for KS4 and KS5 students.
How does it work?
The idea is to create an activity, generated by AI, where a virtual tutor will guide students to learn/memorise/revise key content for their GCSE MFL exam. To help the process, I based my instructions on the following GCSE AQA New GCSE Sentence Builders booklet, which can be accessed here. These are the steps to follow:
1. Go to GoogleClassroom, select your class and go to Classwork
2. Click on Create. Here, together with the classic, Assignment and Material, you can now find NotebookLM and Gem. Click on Gem.
3. Click on New and Study Partner. This will create an assignment, with an attached document, which is the new Study Partner gem, where normally you would have found any document to share with students, such as Slides or Docs. It will look something like the picture below.
4. Click on the document Study partner with the blue Gemini star next to it. This action will open the Study Partner in Gemini. It will look something like the picture below.
6. This action will open open the Instructions and Knowledge boxes for you to define the Persona of your Study Partner Gem, what the objectives of the app are and what to use as a reference for the guided instruction. There are some templates which I modified to give specific instructions.
Under Knowledge, (you can add documents here) I added my GCSE Sentence Builder Booklet. Under Instructions I made clear reference to the new GCSE AQA syllabus and the importance to guide students to learn the structures in the booklet so that they could create sentences and paragraphs on their own, using different tenses, giving opinions and reasons and where possible, to be encouraged to talk about someone else by adapting the vocabulary found in the attached booklet. On the right, you can see a preview of your Gem to test it.
7. Close the Gem and you will go back to your GoogleClassroom Assignment/Material box. Click on Post, as you will do with any normal assignment. That's it!
By the way, when giving instructions, you can also change the name of your Gem. I called mine Study Amigo.
Overall, a high impressive Study Partner which was generated in minutes, using our specific vocabulary input.