Before You Roll Out AI in Your District, Read This

What IT leaders need to consider before implementing Google Gemini or Microsoft Copilot in K–12 environments

AI is coming to the classroom, fast. Google Gemini is now part of Google Workspace for Education. Microsoft Copilot is already embedded in 365. That means your teachers and students may be using AI tools, even if your district hasn’t officially adopted them.

For IT leaders, that’s both a challenge and an opportunity. The right move now can set your district up for success, or expose it to risk, confusion, and costly rework later.

At Arey Jones, we work with K–12 districts of every size, and here’s what we’re telling our partners right now: slow down, plan smart, and ask these five questions before you deploy.

1. Is Your District’s Infrastructure Ready?

AI tools are compute-intensive. While Gemini and Copilot are cloud-based, real-time performance still depends on bandwidth, device age, and endpoint security.

Checklist:

• Are your student and staff devices compatible with the current Workspace or 365 features?

• Have you reviewed your network capacity for sustained AI usage (especially in classrooms)?

• Do your firewalls and filters play well with Gemini or Copilot endpoints?

Tip: Many legacy Chromebooks or unmanaged Windows machines won’t fully support these tools without slowdowns or security gaps.

2. What’s the Educational Use Case?

Not every classroom needs AI right now, and not every teacher wants it. Start by identifying where and why AI would support instruction.

Questions to ask:

• Are you piloting with tech-forward teachers first or doing a district-wide rollout?

• Will AI be used for lesson planning, student writing support, or accessibility tools?

• What training and PD are required to support ethical, effective usage?

Framework: Gemini is conversational and multimodal, Copilot is deeply embedded in documents and spreadsheets. Match the tool to the task.

3. How Will You Manage Privacy and FERPA Compliance?

This is non-negotiable. AI platforms process huge volumes of user data. Even "Education" versions come with different policies than standard licenses.

Key steps:

• Review the data-sharing terms of Gemini and Copilot for Education editions

• Check whether students can opt-in - or are defaulted in - based on license tier

• Confirm where data is stored, how long it's retained, and whether it's used to train models

Reminder: Consumer AI tools like ChatGPT are not FERPA-compliant. Don’t assume all AI is safe for K–12.

4. Who Handles Support When Things Go Wrong?

AI tools are dynamic: features change fast, bugs happen, and users get confused. A successful deployment includes a support model that doesn’t flood your help desk.

Plan for:

• In-app troubleshooting guides for teachers

• Training for your IT staff on Gemini or Copilot management consoles

• A feedback loop to track usage and adjust permissions

5. What’s the Long-Term Strategy?

This isn’t about getting Gemini or Copilot "turned on." It’s about making AI a sustainable part of your tech ecosystem.

Strategic moves:

• Develop a district AI policy that addresses ethics, bias, and academic integrity

• Build in opt-outs or tiers of access based on grade level or user role

• Budget for future training and tool evolution—this space will not stand still

Pro tip: Bake AI strategy into your 3- to 5-year tech plan now, before decisions get made for you.

Final Thought:

You don’t need to be first, you need to be right.

Gemini and Copilot have potential, but only when deployed with clarity, caution, and alignment. 

Top Chrome Extensions For The Google Classroom

Google Classroom has been instrumental in changing the way education looks today. It streamlines assignments, boosts collaboration and fosters seamless communication to help make teaching more productive. There’s also the advantage of being able to integrate hundreds of Chromebook apps and extensions that save teachers and students time and make it seamless to share information. Extensions enhance the browsing experience by tailoring Chrome’s functionality towards individual needs and preferences. 

Here are some of our favorites.

Grammarly

Grammarly is an online editor that gives all of your text the once-over before you send it to colleagues, parents or students. It’s a free extension that revises the text you type in Chrome, Facebook, Gmail, Twitter, Linkedin and anywhere else on the web. It suggests corrections based on both spelling and grammar, and it explains alternative options because we call all still learn.

Screencastify

Screencastify is a great tool to use when you need to create a quick demonstration or instructional video. It is a screen recorder that allows you to capture, edit and share videos in seconds. It can tell a story in just a couple of clicks.

CheckMark by EdTechTeam

This extension is designed to give teachers the ability to provide students with feedback quickly and easily. When a teacher highlights text in Google Docs, an overlay pops up with quick shortcuts to frequently-added comments such as “Spelling” or “Check Punctuation,” or “Evidence needed.” CheckMark has both comments related to grammar as well as concepts, citations and more.

Shareaholic

Shareaholic gives you the ability to share and bookmark great content, without stopping what you’re doing on Chrome. It works with Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and more than 200 other services. It makes all your shared links searchable in one place and won’t slow down your Google Chrome.

Alice Keeler – Teacher Tech

This extension gives you quick access to Alice Keeler’s Teacher Tech blog – which covers all things classroom and Google Classroom. A quick click on the extension pulls up a list of her most recent posts. Topics include: 50 Things You Can Do With Google Classroom, A Tour Of Google Classroom and Google Slides, Create a Drop Shadow on Text.

LastPass: Free Password Manager

This handy extension saves all your usernames and passwords in one spot. It gives you secure access and will autologin to your websites and sync passwords. Plus, anything you save on one device is instantly available on all your other devices. Slick.

We'd love to know your favorites on Chromebooks, too.

Experiential Learning: To Learn By Doing

How and what we learn is determined in large part by how and what we experience—at least if Psychologist David Kolb has anything to say about it. His experiential learning theory combines traditional cognitive and behavior theories to create a more holistic approach.

Kolb believes that experiential learning incorporates emotions, environment, cognitive function, and experience as part of the transformative process of knowledge acquisition. We don’t learn in a vacuum; our feelings, the classroom, the concepts, and our past experiences influence how we absorb, retain, and recall information.

In other words, we don’t just have to learn the meaning of something to retain it fully; it has to be meaningful to us.

One-to-one technology can be a vital tool for the experiential learners as it’s often been shown that we as humans learn better by actively participating in our own learning and exploring. To fully harness the power of this type of learning with technology, a thoughtful approach is in order.

How to use technology for experiential learning.

• Use technology to relate curriculum to real life and personal experience, rather than rote recitation of facts and trends.

• Encourage online collaboration and positive relationship-building

• Record lectures and teaching plans so they can be accessed by students in a more familiar or comfortable environment.

• Empower students to use given technological tools to uncover their own research, resources, and opportunities.

• Adapt social networks as part of the interactive learning experience.

• Use technology that employs sensory input, like being able to take pictures, record sounds, and take notes.

• Virtual and game-based environments can increase the ‘fun-factor’ for many lesson plans, increasing the rate of retention.

While you can’t always make every lesson mean something for your students, you can give them tools to be active learners in their own lives. By stimulating them emotionally, developing a positive classroom environment, and providing them with self-guided resources, you can help them use technology to transform their experience in real and impactful ways.

To give your students the tools to be active learners, click below.

The Worldview: How US Academic Technology Compares

One of the biggest international cross-section of comparative tests is the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which measures reading ability, math and science literacy and other key skills among 15-year-olds throughout the world.

The test is taken every three years, the last of which was 2015. In it, the U.S. landed right in the middle, #38 out of 71 countries in math and 24th in science.

Given the push for more technology in the schools over the last decade, these scores can appear disheartening; school budgets have been increased to incorporate new, better, and more computers, platforms, accessibility, and resources. While the scores are deflating, it may not be an indication of a wasted effort; it may simply be too soon to tell.

Consider the following statistics gathered by StatisticBrain in 2015:

• 98% of schools that have one or more computers in the classroom

• 3% of schools that have high-speed internet

• 7% of schools have laptops available

• 81% of teachers think tablets can enrich classroom learning.

• 64% of high school seniors say a tablet helps study more efficiently

This doesn’t reflect one-to-one initiatives, which, on a grand scale are relatively low; students are more likely to share devices in a classroom than to have one at every desk. It’s one thing to compare the United States to China or India or Japan with math and science scores alone; quite another to understand the significance of the disparities in access, funding, and challenges the United States must address on a daily basis.

While there are hundreds of technological tools for available to increase the breadth and scope of learning, we are only just beginning to harness the information that will enable teachers to make more of an impact on their students with customized lesson plans. The important thing is to get the hardware and framework in place so that the data can start speaking for itself.

Access to technology will have a huge impact on how students in America engage and compete with the rest of the planet for jobs and opportunities. The sooner and more completely we use technology tools both in teaching and in learning, the bigger the difference we can make in how students understand what they are being taught, and how well they test on the material.

While developing countries are gaining on the West in terms of cell phone and smartphone usage, they, like the rest of us, have a ways to go in incorporating all of its possibilities into our educational experience.

Ready for educational technology to make an impact on your school? Click here to learn more.