When my principal suggested we use some funding allocated for the 2025-26 school year to explore ways to use Gemini to support our Enhanced Autism Center (EAC) teachers, I have to admit, at first, I was skeptical. This funding was supposed to support enhancing instructional design and student learning through digital tools, and though using Gemini was something I was comfortable with, I had not been successful working in an EAC class in the past. I knew I would need support to be successful.
My principal heard my concerns and compiled a planning team that included assistive technology specialists, an applied behavioral analysis coach, and special services specialists from our Central Office for this project. Together, we designed seven half-day sessions to support our five EAC teachers to better scaffold literacy instruction for their students.
We started small and built this project as each session progressed, doing the work in three phases to make it more manageable and give our EAC teachers multiple opportunities to practice in each of the phases. In Phase 1, we started with a simple concept: how could we capitalize on technology tools to add more literacy into our enhanced autism students’ morning meetings? This was a practice already in place, but our goal was to make it more robust.
In Phase 2, we shifted focus to whole-group literacy, and how we could use technology tools to scaffold whole-group reading instruction for our EAC students. Our basal curriculum was not accessible to these students, and these sessions helped teachers build bridges to the content. Finally in Phase 3, we focused on how we could leverage student-facing technology tools to better meet EAC student needs.
Let’s look more closely at each of the three phases. I hope this work can serve as an inspiration for other schools in this space.
Phase 1: The Literacy Morning Meeting Gem
We began this project with an idea shared by our ABA coach to better support literacy instruction: What if we could weave literacy concepts into a morning meeting routine our EAC students already knew? We decided to create a “Gem,” which is a customizable AI assistant in Gemini that you can build around a specific task or routine. As a planning team, we determined what instructions the Literacy Morning Meeting Gem would need and what kind of output would actually serve teachers in the moment. As we added what we believed the teachers would need as part of their Gem, we knew that we were giving them a starting point. The training itself was where the real work and customization would begin.
Giving teachers a starting point was essential—it helped them visualize this idea and take the next steps to make the Gem their own. Together, we engaged in a process of iteration during our first 3 sessions. The slides Gemini created gave our students’ classroom morning meetings a structure and provided teachers with a mostly finished slide show they could use with their students. We loved watching what the teachers created as they experimented with their slide decks to create a new type of morning meeting over the first few sessions. Here are some of their highlighted enhancements:
- Adding in 3-4 core vocabulary words from their literacy units with high engagement activities.
- Ensuring that every slide featured a communication pathway and visuals for students with Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) devices
- Including a reinforcement slide with an embedded age-appropriate game or video to maintain momentum.
Changes like these took our teachers’ morning meeting structure and created a dynamic literacy scaffold for all their students.
We started with a simple concept: how could we capitalize on technology tools to add more literacy into our enhanced autism students’ morning meetings?
Phase 2: Scaffolding Access to Literacy
The next challenge we decided to tackle was improving EAC students’ access to literacy tools. My district uses a basal reading program, and our EAC teachers shared that it was a struggle to make it accessible to their learners, who often needed different supports or were at a different reading grade level than the program. We worked alongside our teachers to help them leverage AAC devices for their students who had limited speech or were nonverbal and created a second Gem—a scaffolding gem. This created a lesson launchpad that served as a teacher-facing resource for them, providing them ideas for making the grade level content more accessible for their whole-group reading lessons. This launchpad included:
- A simplified “big idea”—reframing the core concept of a lesson
- A visual support plan
- Communication and comprehension scaffolds for core words and literacy content
- Differentiated participation and responses for students with different needs
- A suggested engagement hook
Much like the literacy morning meeting, this supplemental resource gave our EAC teachers a starting point and helped them better reach their students. Teachers felt empowered as they used the Scaffolding Gem to lighten the load and help them plan lessons that better met the needs of their students. We also used a pre-made Gem—the Storybook Gem—to help our teachers create stories to build background knowledge for literacy.
This series of lessons was transformational. I realized how many staff in our building, myself included, had no idea how AAC devices worked. Many times, they were not brought to the students’ specials classes, like PE and music. How could this be, I wondered. If we truly wanted to be inclusive, we could not deprive our students of their voice any more than we would deprive a student of their glasses if they needed them. This insight helped our school better leverage AAC devices all day, including within specials classes.
Phase 3: Vibe Coding and Student-Facing Digital Resources
As we approached the last few sessions of this project, we shifted our focus to student-facing resources that could make learning more accessible. I had just learned about vibe coding—using natural language in AI tools to create code—and wanted to try to create a student-facing website, using Gemini, to help educators vibe code tools for their students. Our planning team created both a Google form, where teachers could share students’ specific learning needs, and a base prompt where we shared the accessibility options we wanted in each activity. such as tone, audio support, scaffolding options, styling, etc.
Watching our teachers vibe code student-facing websites to better support their students was amazing. These teachers became empowered designers and created literacy supports for their students’ needs. Some teachers created activities that incorporated the students’ IEP goals based on comprehension, writing, and phonics; other teachers created activities to scaffold the daily literacy content. Teachers reported that their students loved them and engagement was high.
Our final step in this phase was sharing other resources that teachers could use to support literacy. We helped our teachers explore tech tools such as Wixie, Pear Deck, the Lamp Words for Life phonics page and Read and Write for Google. It was an exciting way to wrap up this project by sharing some ready-made tools that they could use to make a difference in their students’ learning experiences.
These teachers became empowered designers and created literacy supports for their students’ needs.
This Changed Me
Prior to this experience, I had no idea the challenges that our EAC teachers faced as they teach multi-age and multi-track classrooms. This changed my outlook on teaching challenges. I began a personal mission to learn as much about this work as I could. I started attending ISTE Special Education and Education Specialist meetups and attended my district’s special education conference to learn and present. In fact, I was so passionate about this, I applied to the Atlanta Google Innovator Academy based on these experiences. I am delighted to share that I was accepted into the Atlanta Google Innovator Academy — because this work deserves to reach beyond our five classrooms.
During this work, I think one of my EAC teachers put it best. “I came in as a person that was not tech savvy, but now I feel much more confident using the different literacy based activities for my students.” She was not alone in that feeling. Through these seven sessions, our planning team had connected in new ways with our EAC teachers. The teachers shared that prior to this series, they had felt invisible—overlooked by the very systems meant to support them. After this work, that feeling had changed. They felt seen and better prepared. Now, they had the tools to make literacy accessible for all of their students.