From everyday tools to smarter learning: Lismore’s approach to Google Workspace and Gemini

Across Catholic education, technology environments, local priorities, teaching practices and levels of digital maturity vary considerably, and there is rarely a single technology solution that fits every need.

For Tracey Catling, Lead, Digital Technologies for Learning at the Diocese of Lismore Catholic Schools, innovation starts with the problem rather than the technology, looking for practical ways to use existing tools to better support teaching and learning.

Tracey Catling, Lead, Digital Technologies for Learning at the Diocese of Lismore Catholic Schools

We spoke with Tracey about how Lismore is using Google Workspace, Google Classroom and, increasingly, Gemini and Google Gems to support teachers and students.

Rather than treating generative AI as a standalone technology, Lismore is exploring how it can fit into established workflows - reducing repetitive work while preserving the judgement, learning and thinking that matter.

Start with the problem, not the technology

The goal is to remove unnecessary friction while preserving the intellectual challenge.

For students, that might mean using Google Forms to gather survey data and immediately visualise responses rather than spending lesson time manually compiling information and constructing charts.

But the learning does not disappear. Students still need to decide what information they need and why. If names or email addresses are not required for a survey, students should learn not to collect them in the first place.

One STEM project put this approach into practice. Primary students designed a prototype application to help families understand the accessibility of local parks. They combined community feedback with publicly available information, captured data in Google Sheets and linked Google Slides to simulate how a real application might work.

The tools allowed students to explore user research, accessibility, data and application design without first needing the technical skills to build a production application.

Turning good prompts into reusable tools

There’s an opportunity for staff to move beyond individual AI prompts towards repeatable workflows.

Google Gems allow educators to customise Gemini with instructions and context for particular tasks. Instead of every teacher starting with a blank prompt, a well-designed Gem can provide a useful starting point that can then be adapted.

Lismore is exploring Gems for tasks including analysing student writing against sentence-structure criteria, supporting classroom learning and assisting teachers with recurring assessment and compliance processes.

The goal is not to replace teacher judgement. It is to reduce some of the repetitive work surrounding it.

“Once teachers get a taste of what’s possible, they quickly start seeing other opportunities. By the end of the day, they were adapting the Gem to support multiple tasks. We simply gave them a starting point.” Tracey

Lismore has also developed a Gem Architect to help educators create their own Gems. It guides teachers through defining what they want an assistant to do while incorporating the system’s data-governance and generative-AI guidance.

Supporting this is Lismore’s PARCTS prompting framework: Persona, Aims, Recipient, Context, Theme and Structure. The inclusion of Context is particularly important, encouraging educators to give Gemini appropriate source material rather than simply asking the model to generate an answer from scratch.

PARCTS Prompting Framework, Diocese of Lismore Catholic Schools

This lowers the barrier to adoption. Teachers can start with a defined problem, see what a well-designed tool can do and then adapt it to their own context.

Keeping humans in the loop

This approach highlights an important distinction: the difference between productive cognitive offloading and outsourcing the thinking itself.

AI can help with mechanical tasks - moving or formatting information, organising material, producing a first structure or supporting repetitive processes. But the teacher or student still needs to understand, assess and take responsibility for the result.

For example, a teacher might draft an email and use Gemini to analyse or refine it, rather than asking AI to decide what they want to say. Similarly, when Gemini is working from source material, the output should remain consistent with that source. If it does not, the prompt, context or knowledge supplied to the tool needs to be reconsidered.

That distinction becomes particularly important as schools consider the implications of generative AI for assessment and student learning.

Creating within the existing environment

Lismore has experimented with creating school-controlled solutions using Gemini, Apps Script, Sheets and Sites. One example is a typing application that allows students to progress through staged activities while teachers track progress and provide feedback - all within the school’s Google Workspace environment.

When an approved third-party mathematics fluency application moved to a paid model, a similar approach was used to create an alternative learning tool using existing capabilities.

Generative AI can lower the technical barrier to creating small, targeted solutions that might previously have required another application, licence or development project.

Introducing Gemini to students carefully

Lismore is also beginning to explore student use of Gemini - but deliberately.

The process of turning on these tools for students in grades 5 to 12, requires schools to perform a readiness check that ensures staff are adequately onboarded in understanding the DLCS Gen AI Framework and are using Gemini themselves.

Within one of the primary schools, access is currently limited to selected Year 5 and 6 students with specific permissions, teacher supervision and strong student guardrails.

“It’s about creating secure environments where students can begin to understand and use generative AI appropriately, while teaching them to think critically about how and when they use these tools.” Tracey

Students can experiment with activities such as “vibe coding”, but the learning objective is not simply to have AI produce something. Students need to describe what they want, test what has been created, identify problems and refine their instructions.

The introduction of Gemini requires explicitly teaching digital and AI literacy rather than assuming students already possess it.

Getting more from what schools already have

Not every example involves AI.

Google Classroom remains important because it can centralise student work and remove repeated manual sharing between students and teachers. Yet there are still instances where teachers create individual documents and ask students to share them manually rather than using the fuller Classroom workflow.

It is a useful reminder that digital transformation does not always require another platform or licence. Sometimes the opportunity is simply helping educators make better use of capabilities already at their fingertips.