Brent Warner 0:00
Google has so many AI tools; it’s hard to know which to use for what. We’re breaking down when to use search, Gemini Gems, and Notebook. This is the HigherEdTech Podcast, Season Eight, Episode Three.

Tim Van Norman 0:25
Welcome to today’s HigherEdTech podcast. I’m TimVan Norman, the Assistant Director of Technology Services at Irvine Valley College, an adjunct professor of business at Cypress College,

Brent Warner 0:35
and I’m Brent Warner, Professor of ESL here at IVC. We both enjoy integrating technology into the classroom, which is what this show is all about.

Tim Van Norman 0:43
Welcome. We’re glad you’re here with us.

Brent Warner 0:45
All right. So, Tim, as we mentioned before, I’m on leave, but how are things going on campus?

Tim Van Norman 0:51
Busy through the first couple weeks. That really helps. Yeah. At least for, I I think for faculty, for staff, for everybody. All of a sudden, you hit that third week and fourth week. Things just get into a rhythm where you can actually sustain.

Brent Warner 1:08
Yeah, all the little glitches are kind of smoothed out. All the you know scheduling and logins and all those things are kind of cleared up. So

Tim Van Norman 1:16
We hope (Laughter)

Brent Warner 1:18
Mostly! Yeah. Cool. Well, yeah. Glad things are going along. So we are today, Tim. You kind of suggested like, hey, there’s lots of. It it starts to feel now like there are many main tools from Google and Google AI, and it’s like, wait, which 1am I using and why? Right. And so today we’re gonna jump into a little bit of a breakdown of Google’s AI ecosystem. Not all of it necessarily. There’s it’s kind of tied into everything at this point, but like kind of the main ones. And and I think there’s a lot of people getting confused about which choices to make and when. And so let’s jump over to it.

Tim Van Norman 2:02
So the first one we have here is Google Search. I know Google Search is not supposed to be AI. We’ve had this discussion several times in the past as well, but was have been very disappointed in the fact that Google Search actually immediately comes back with an AI solution, and then oh by the way, if you want something else, here’s some other stuff too. But as we look at these different aspects, Google search Gemini gems Gemini notebook. Every time we talk about it, everything’s going to be kind of blended together. But there’s a time for each of them, right? And that’s kind of what we’re looking at here. So Google search still is appropriate for general searching, but understand often you’ve got to do multiple searches, just like you would have to prompt Gemini or something like that. It may not come back back with what you’re looking for because it’s trying to, I think it’s trying too hard.

Brent Warner 3:04
I will push back a little bit on that. I understand your phrasing when you say it’s appropriate to use for you know your general search, but honestly, Google has just killed search. Like their their own search, from my perspective. Google search used to be such a great way to find information and ideas that are already processed and thought thought out and developed by other people, right? And like, if they had kept that as the intention of Google search, it would have been really wonderful. There, a couple of years ago, a great article came out by Ed Zitron. I’ll get the link in the show notes, but it’s kind of like who killed Google Search or something like that. And it’s basically about, and this is a very real and and I mean this guy is a good reporter and documenter of it. Essentially, like all the people who built Google Search got kicked out, and the advertising team came in and took it over completely, and so all of the, you know, the kind of search engine optimization bros out there, like all of that stuff, was like kind of like a fight between Google Search and these people, and basically Google like kowtowed, and so all the results that come up now in Google search are kind of crummy, optimized choices instead of like well thought out or well made things by people that are actually trying to respond to what you’re searching for, and so and this is all in pursuit of the bottom dollar. It’s a real shame because Google search was such a wonderful tool, and unfortunately now they’re they’re pushing the AI side of it so hard. We’ll talk about this when we get into AI. But from my or the Gemini side of things, but from my perspective, Google you should not be using search and AI for the same purposes. Tim, do you agree with that or do you disagree?

Tim Van Norman 4:59
100% In fact, that’s something that I’m hearing over and over again by in articles, in conversations, and everything else. Is you need to use AI for higher level thinking, not just for general search, and that doesn’t it doesn’t help when Gemini forces you into AI right away. It’s great to get a summary, but the other day I was looking for what’s the difference between a fluid cup and a and a cup measure of you know for like powder or something like that, like sugar or something, and the first thing that came up was talking about the physical cups.

Brent Warner 5:48
Right, right. I’m like, no, I want to know.

Tim Van Norman 5:51
I want to know. Is it the same volume?

Brent Warner 5:54
Right, right, right.

Tim Van Norman 5:55
And I had to prompt it like three times because even the articles then that came up were from a completely different thought, than I was looking for.

Brent Warner 6:04
right? They’re not even looking in the right direction,

Tim Van Norman 6:06
and so I couldn’t even just scroll down and pull that up. And so now, all of a sudden, I’m prompting search to get to what I’m looking for, and yeah.

Brent Warner 6:19
And before these things were really wonderful, clean, easy to find. Right, the old image search was great. Like we just click over. Oh, it’s pretty close to what I’m looking for. You know, like all these little things. I think anybody who’s been on Google in the last year or two has clearly seen the decline of quality. And and then because Google puts now a Gemini AI search right at the front, it’s like assuming that it understands what you’re looking for, and then right underneath it are kind of ads, and then lower down below are SEO optimized things, and so you don’t really have an option to even see good quality results in Google search at all, at least not on the first page, and this is why I moved away from Google search completely. I use Cogie now, which has been great, but you do have to pay for it. And there’s a part of me that’s going like, I think we’re moving into the world where free stuff made by companies is, you know, we we know that old saying, you know, if it’s if it’s free, you’re you’re the you know you’re not the customer you’re you’re the product right that whole thing which I do agree with and so now I’m like okay I guess I got to pay if I want something that’s going to actually work so I am now on CUG But that said Google search if you’re looking for if you’re searching for information that people have already found answers to written about created. You know you’re trying to get sets of predetermined information. Then that’s when you’re going to look for Google search, right? If it’s not very important, I would say you can kind of move toward not very important. I got to have to phrase this in the right ways. If it’s not so important, you can move towards AI, right? If it’s like a curious thing, or you know, I want these ideas on like how this and this might link together. There’s lots of great things that you can use the AI for, but it’s not the same purpose as search, right? And that’s that’s where we need to really spend some time thinking about, like, do I just want a quick answer as though I’m talking to a friend, or do I want to dig into this as though I’m talking to a librarian, for example, who can help me kind of get some proper and thoughtful progress on finding my answer to this?

Tim Van Norman 8:37
Yeah, I I equate it kind of like you said. Do I care that the information I’m getting is directional or accurate?

Brent Warner 8:46
That’s right. There you go. I like that. And so, and that whole thing too. Just keeping in mind that AI is still predictive, right? Like, I mean, it’s better and better, but it’s still just predicting what the most likely next part to this is going to be, and that of course is where you know this idea of hallucinations or what we might just call mistakes, wrong information comes up. At so, but with that, let’s move over and talk about AI because there are places to to look at this.

Tim Van Norman 9:18
Yes. So Gemini AI, I’ve actually started to use Gemini quite a bit because I like it better than Copilot, and it’s free to us with our with Google Workspace for Education, and so it’s their general purpose conversational AI chatbot. It is the large language model used for writing, brainstorming, etc. I’m finding that, and the more I hear about it, people who are using Gemini and comparing one of the things I like is people are using Gemini and comparing it to the other ones. Okay, to to compare that comparison. Makes a huge difference. All of a sudden, they see something and they go, “Oh, that one didn’t. The other one didn’t have it, or Gemini gave me an old version of it, or something like that. And that’s been really key, especially in coding. I’m hearing that a lot about coding between Claude, Gemini, Copilot, a lot of lot of different areas there that is that really is working well.

Brent Warner 10:26
Yeah, I mean it is. I mean we have to step back because I know like I I also have a tendency to go like okay this is cool and then I also have a tendency to go like let’s hold back on these things right which I personally believe is the healthy approach but but some of the just amazing things. The way that I kind of think about Gemini or any chatbot in comparison to a search is kind of like multi-step thinking too, right? Where it’s like, okay, I want to combine idea A and idea B, and then I want to see what happens when that comes out of step, you know, into step C, right, or whatever it is, and so that to me is a thing that search could not do, right? It wasn’t a thing that search did, and it never was. So, for example, I’m planning this cross country road trip, right? And I said, hey, I want to go roughly along this path, I want to drive roughly six hours a day at the max, right? Ideally, I want to camp on Bureau Land Management free camping, dispersed camping sites, right? And I want to, and I want you to give me recommendations for really high quality coffee places, and I and I’m interested in quirky roadside attractions, right? Well, that is not something search could ever give me, right? But…

Tim Van Norman 11:49
You’d search each of those, and then you all yourself would have hours and hours

Brent Warner 11:52
…and hours putting it together. And Gemini did this for me in 30 seconds. You know, it’s like boom, here you go. Here’s a possible itinerary, and very quickly I can go. Oh, I don’t like this one part of it. I want to change it. Well, for again, for me to go do that in search by myself would be another adding hours into it, recognizing that there was a mistake, and it’s seconds of Gemini AI going. Okay, here you go. Quick adjustment to this and this and this. Right. That is that multi-step, multi-process thinking that I really love about AI and that’s really valuable. Obviously, we can apply that to education as well. But but that’s where I start thinking. Okay, this is the point where I do want to be using AI, not where I want it to be. You know, a search information. And again, this also goes back to the whole like, am I controlling my own thinking? And am I, you know, like when we’re talking about the academic integrity for students, right? It’s like this has nothing to do, like any concerns about like am I using it right or wrong, or am I, you know, like whatever else it is. It’s like okay, this is a really practical way to use something that’s going to be beneficial, that’s going to save time, that’s going to help out, right? And so that is my process currently. It’s not fully developed, but it’s my it’s my kind of way of thinking through like which am I trying to use and for what purposes right now.

Tim Van Norman 13:11
Absolutely, I also love the fact that it’s integrated into Chrome, and so I can it literally says Ask AI at the top, and I can click on that and say analyze this. Tell me, tell me what I’m missing here, or compare these things, or something like that. And at least I get something based on or referring to what I’m working on or looking at.

Brent Warner 13:35
That’s right.

Tim Van Norman 13:36
So that’s really a nice feature.

Brent Warner 13:38
Yeah, they clarify that. That’s did you say? Ask AI. Mine says ask Gemini.

Tim Van Norman 13:43
I’m sorry, ask Gemini at the top. Yes.

Brent Warner 13:46
So at the very, very, very top right corner of your Chrome browser, if you’re using Chrome, you click on that button, and that’s great too because what it does is it’s a double interaction. It’s interacting between the text on the page and what you’re trying to think about or what you’re trying to ask it to. That’s another multi-step thing that is blending different points together, right? And so, so that same concept where it’s like, okay, hold on a second, how am how do I want to link this towards what I’m thinking about what I’m doing? That right there is a good way to do it, as compared to like search, where you’re like, I don’t know what I’m looking for, or or I already have these things, but I don’t have my second part right. So so yeah, love Gemini for things like that.

Tim Van Norman 14:30
The next one here, gems. So at first I’m like, well, I don’t understand. We’ve got notebook notebook LM at the time, and we’ve got Gemini. What do we need in the middle? I’m actually using gems quite a bit right now.

Brent Warner 14:46
Oh, are you?

Tim Van Norman 14:46
Because I can load something in, get the gem all configured the way I want, and then use it as I want to use it. Doesn’t necessarily. I can have it keep record of what the interactions are with the gem, but it’s more about I can load in. So, for instance, in my role as assistant director, I loaded in all of the people and information about those people, and then I loaded in all of our projects, and I didn’t assign the projects to anybody. And I said, “You assign the projects, okay? And it came back, and it assigned projects, and I moved them around because of different things that I knew that I just hadn’t thought of when I was uploading things about the people. And then I said, “So, who’s got time available for another project? In no point did I put in how long the projects would take, and I loved the fact that because I had already loaded stuff, I can now ask it questions on that information, and I don’t have to do it all in one sitting.

Brent Warner 16:02
Yeah, that’s right.

Tim Van Norman 16:03
I could do this over time, and I’m not really trying to do research. There’s no numbers based thing or anything like that, but it can give me that insight. And oh, maybe I need to move this around. What what was the assumption about this? You know things like that, and it helped me start to start to identify some trends that maybe I want to adjust, and that was actually really good, especially as I’m looking at new projects.

Brent Warner 16:33
Yeah.

Tim Van Norman 16:33
Where do they fit? Who do they fit with? That type of thing. Plus, I can now take the output from that and load it back in and store it as part of that documentation.

Brent Warner 16:46
Yeah, yeah, that’s very cool. So I I love that side of it. I think the big thing with gems for me is repeated work, right? Like, hey, I’m gonna do this same type of thing over and over again, or many times, or maybe, and actually, Tim, this is probably one that I should pay more attention to. Maybe it’s something I only do once a semester, and I kind of forget the process for it. So, like, maybe that’s something like you know submitting grades, or you know, whatever else. I’m not going to connect it to my grade book, of course, but like, but I’m just trying to think of these things. Like, every once in a while, I’ll reach out to you, and I’m like, Tim, I can’t remember how to do this, and you’re like, Oh yeah, because you only did it one, you don’t do it once every six months. It’s likely that you’re gonna forget, right? Right. So it could be built into processes like that, where the process itself can kind of get done for you, but the information is what you’re changing inside of there. I use I I haven’t used gems for this one so much, but I use Claude’s equivalent to it, the Clod workspaces for for tidying up the transcript of these shows, right? Because we every episode has the transcript, and so we use Otter, and Otter is okay. Surprisingly, hasn’t gotten much better over the years, but you know it works. It gets me 80% of the way there. But sometimes it’ll be like the end of my sentence right now, and you say that’s right, and that that that’s right comes in as my spoken words in order instead of yours. Or sometimes it even cuts off in the middle of a sentence, and I’ll be like, “So, and then you say, “We need to go to, and then it becomes, you know, me saying, “So we need to go to, right? And it’s like, and so, anyways, all these types of things happen inside of a that level thing. But I can go in, build my own setup, and say, “Hey, these are the common mistakes that happen in these transcripts. Please go through, clean them up. Make sure to keep the timestamps the same. Just make sure that you’re adjusting a little bit here and there for you know grammatical accuracy and spelling of certain things, and it can clean up a lot of that work. Where I might spend an extra 2030, minutes reading through, trying to check everything, it can get that down to a few minutes and just scanning. So, so again, it’s not that you have to be doing transcript work. Of course, it could be anything for your classes, right? So, repeated, repeated activities, things that you’re kind of doing over and over again that are a little bit tedious for your classes. You know, maybe building up, you know, different types of assignments that are kind of on patterns that you’re looking for students to kind of show their understanding of things. All those can be done pretty well in a gem, and you can save that memory of it too. So…

Tim Van Norman 19:30
Well, and you can share it.

Brent Warner 19:31
Yes!

Tim Van Norman 19:32
You can share it with your your class, with coworkers, whoever you need to share it with, and then they can use that. They can prompt it as well.

Brent Warner 19:43
Yes, and that’s a big one. I keep forgetting to talk about this part of it too, though, because because the the sharing part now is wasn’t always there, right? It was like that button to click and share a link, and so that anybody else can then enter. Interact with it. It wasn’t always there, and now it is that you can get a solid link to it, and then students can go in and interact with that link. So this is the vibe coding where where you would do vibe coding in Google stuff would be in Gems would be the primary place. I mean, it’s Gemini. Gems is a subset of Gemini, right? But but that’s where you would do it.

Tim Van Norman 20:22
Absolutely. And then that last one we wanted to talk about is now called Gemini Notebook.

Brent Warner 20:27
Yes,

Tim Van Norman 20:28
They got rid of Notebook LM, which is easily searchable, and went to Gemini Notebook.

Brent Warner 20:33
Uggh! Anyway, every time, every time.

Tim Van Norman 20:38
Yes, it’s amazing how that’s happening. But one of the really cool things about that is, if you’re doing anything research, numbers related, anything like that, it is such a powerful tool. It also can create infographics. It can create videos. It can create all kinds of images, all kinds of things out of that information, whatever you load into it, so it it’s good for analysis and providing citations. It basically locks it into the data that you give it and it doesn’t go out in the world and try to make up its own data. And that’s I think really useful, But also can feel limiting in that I don’t have all the data that I want to get, and it’s not going to go find it for me. Or I have massive data that I want, and it limits you to how much you can use. So love Gemini Notebook. It’s it’s a great tool. It’s just figure out how to use it well for what you’re trying to do.

Brent Warner 21:46
Yeah, for sure. But I think also, I mean, just kind of go on the other side of that conversation, which is, you know, creativity is is born out of constraints, right? And so, like, when you really are starting to think about things, it’s like I don’t need all the information in the world, right? And I, I, and part of, and so shrinking that down and saying let’s just get focused in on this one thing. I mean, I definitely understand where it’s like, hey, hold on a second, I need this bigger set of information. But for most of us, if we’re doing, you know, at least in academic work or the you know, or classroom pedagogy, academic work. We’re kind of like trying to get a focused idea going on with something, and trying to help our students work their way through those things. And so, limiting our resources, limiting the amount of things that we’re going through, and it’s still not, you know, it’s not a tiny limit. Like, there’s still quite a lot of that you can put in there, but then all the different ways to work with that information. I like that they have you know the options for quizzes and different things built right in, so you could share that with your students. Of course, I wouldn’t make those quizzes are summative quizzes, but they could be formative for students, or they could be just practice things to like hey get some show show that you’re understanding these ideas as you’re moving up towards it. Whatever else it is, so so notebook. You know, again, you’re kind of choosing the resources that it’s picking from before it becomes your AI partner there.

Tim Van Norman 23:15
Absolutely. One of the nice things I one of the things I like about especially these last three, Gemini itself, gems and Gemini Notebook, is because we have that the educational workspace license. It is private within the organization.

Brent Warner 23:34
Yeah.

Tim Van Norman 23:35
And that is key. You can use these as well outside the organization. I I’ve got a personal Gemini account, and I use that every once in a while and stuff. But I’m really, I really limit what I put in there, what I ask, and stuff like that, because I realize that that’s not, that’s public, basically. For lack of a better way of putting it, it becomes public, and so the ability to keep gems and notebook, especially private within the organization, is really a key to being very useful.

Brent Warner 24:09
Yeah, yeah, very cool. So hopefully that helps people out a little bit get a little sense on like when to aim for different tools inside of here because part of the confusion here is that Google is just kind of saying like, here’s everything, and it’s like it’s not very clear all the time where to go for what purposes, because a lot of these do overlap with each other. Actually, all of these overlap with each other in different ways, and so, so yeah. Hopefully, that helps picking out, picking and choosing your choices there.

Tim Van Norman 24:40
Absolutely. Thank you for listening today. For more information about this show, please visit our website thehigheredtechpodcast.com.

Brent Warner 24:50
As always, we do want your feedback, so please go to thehigheredtechpodcast.com and let us know your thoughts.

Tim Van Norman 24:56
For everyone at IVC that’s listening, if you need help with technology questions. Please contact IVC technical support. If you have questions about technology in your classroom, please contact me, Tim Van Norman at tvannorman@ivc.edu.

Brent Warner 25:10
And if you want to reach out to me about the show, you can find me on LinkedIn at @BrentGWarner.

Tim Van Norman 25:16
I’m Tim Van Norman,

Brent Warner 25:17
and I’m Brent Warner and we hope this episode has helped you on the road from possibility to actuality. Take care, everybody.