Google – Chris Betcher

February 25, 2025February 26, 2025

Gemini for teenage users: What you should know

Last November Google announced that it was making its Gemini chat app available to students aged 13+. This means that while it’s still not for use by primary age students, it is, generally speaking, available to most high school students.

It’s worth pointing out that what users aged between 13 and 18 will get when using Gemini is different to what 18+, or adult, users will see. Google refers to this as the Gemini Teen Experience. I had a few questions about how to configure this in the Google Admin Console, but after a bit of playing around, I finally worked it out so thought I’d share it here for anyone else who might be trying to configure it.

The question I had was “how does Gemini know who is over 18 and who is over 13, and how does it deliver a different experience to them?” I was assuming that admins would need to somehow identify the 13+ year olds and put them into a special group or something. Turns out it’s simpler than that.

Before the announcement of the 13+ teen experience in Gemini, the age limit to use Gemini was 18, and it was a pretty binary choice. You were either over 18 or under 18. If the school admin had marked you as under 18, you got no access to Gemini at all. Going to gemini.google.com would bring you to this page.

If you were 18 or over and went to gemini.google.com you would of course have full access to Gemini chat as expected.

It’s worth pointing out how Google designates users as either over or under 18. In the admin console there is a setting called Age Based Access Settings. In these settings the administrator must identify with Organisational Units (OUs) which contain Under 18 users. As you can see in the screenshot below, while most users in this domain have been marked as 18+, the Students OU has been overridden to indicate that Some or all users in this group or org unit are under 18.

What if an admin has not set this up? Google got pretty serious about this age based setting a while ago and warned all domain admins that if they had not gone into the console and completed these age based settings OUs by a certain date, then ALL users in the domain would be marked as under 18 by default. This would obviously annoy a lot of people, so I would think that most school admins dealt with this and applied these age based setting to the correct groups or OUs.

So, the system now knows who is over 18 and who isn’t. But how do you deal with the students that are over 13 but under 18?

If a school has their OU structure set up correctly, students are usually placed into OUs based on their year groups. As you can see in the screenshot above, there is an OU structure, such as My school > Students > Year 6. All student users in that OU are students in Year 6 (and would, for the most part be under 13). Likewise, the students in the Year 7 and 8 OUs would mostly contain students that are 13 and over. (There will no doubt be some students in a year group who are 12 and some who are 13, but the reality is that most schools will probably decide the cutoff based on a year level, so it’ll be Year 7 and up, or Year 8 and up)

When Google introduced the Gemini Teen Experience they enabled a version of Gemini for Under 18 users that has “guard rails” in place for teen users, and the model has been trained to respond carefully to sensitive topics. With the changes last November it seems that ALL under 18 users get access to this teen experience, including 13 and under.

So admins really need to go to the Gemini access setting and explicitly turn off Gemini for the users under 13.

By going to Generative AI > Gemini App > Service Status, the administrator is able to explicitly turn Gemini off for individual OUs. So, if you only want high school students to have access, you make sure that Service Status is On for the Year 7 (and above) OUs and Off for the Year 6 (and below) OUs.

This means that for Year 6 students and below, Gemini is completely off.

For Year 7 students and above, Gemini is on, but using the protected teen experience.

And for anyone over 18, they get the full unrestricted Gemini experience.

So what does this teen experience mean for those users marked as over 13 but under 18? Here’s a couple of examples that teen students might see when they ask some of those typically teen questions that need to be answered with care.

Responding to a question about how to buy alcohol, Gemini’s answers acknowledge that this person is under 18. It flags a warning at the top of the page that warns about the danger and illegality of this idea. It talks about the legal and health issues associated with alcohol. It suggests that the student talks to a trusted adult such as a parent, teacher or doctor. And it provides links to police, health and liquor law websites.

Interestingly, when I ask Gemini the same question as an adult, over 18 user, I get an even more restrictive answer and Gemini refuses to cooperate at all, citing the fact that it cannot verify my age, and therefore is not allowed to provide such information. When pushed, it goes on to explain why, but still insists that it is not able to help me further.

While I was initially surprised at the response to the 18+ user, I think the answer for the teen user was pretty appropriate, with some generally good advice, and some sound reasoning as to why they should not be buying alcohol in the first place.

In a second example, I asked Gemini whether I should get a neck tattoo. The response specifically noted that there were a lot of things to consider, especially since I was under 18. It warned that in most places you need to be over 18 to get a tattoo, and then listed a bunch of reasons why this may not be a good idea for someone of this age. Overall, I liked the way Gemini gave some sound reasoning of things to consider before getting a neck tattoo, but did it in a way that was not too preachy. Overall, it seemed like good advice to a teen, with a clear undertone of “I’m not telling you you can’t, but I’m definitely suggesting it’s a bad idea”.

If you have access to a teacher and student account (and they have been set up correctly) it’s interesting to set them up side by side and ask the same questions of both versions of Gemini to see what kinds of answers you get. Try some typically sensitive teen topics and see how Gemini generally responds to these teen prompts. You’ll see that it often suggests that they talk to a trusted adult, that they seek advice, that they avoid illegalities, that they don’t make decisions they will regret later, and so on.

As well as having these guard rails in place, you’ll also see that Gemini adds a red visual alert to the top of the page if posts contain dangerous, illegal or inappropriate topics.

Finally, image generation is completely disabled for teens. While there are lots of great uses for image generation in Gemini, the potential for student abuse is still a little risky, so the image generation feature is not available to teen users.

Overall, the Teen Experience in Gemini is a welcome way to allow schools to give their students access to a Generative AI model, while also keeping some important protections in place. You just need to ensure that it is set up correctly for your school situation in order to ensure that students are getting the right experiences for their age.

To learn more, you can check out the official Google support page, or this excellent resource from the team at Amplified Labs. Let me know what you think of the Gemini Teen Experience!

July 18, 2022July 21, 2022

Foundation Fonts now in Workspace

If you don’t teach in Australia, it may surprise you to learn that we have specific fonts that must be used in early years and primary education. These fonts are mandated by each state and are a requirement for schools to use when creating resources for young students. The fonts are used when teaching handwriting to young students.

If you ARE an Australian teacher, particularly for the early years students from grades K to 3, but in primary school generally, you know that having access to these fonts is kind of a big deal. You are expected to use these fonts to make resources for students, such as worksheets and activities, so being able to install them on your computer is important.

For a very long time now, it’s been a bit of an issue that these mandated fonts have not been available in Google Docs. I don’t think I’ve ever run training for teachers where the question about Foundation Fonts in Docs has not been asked. It’s just one of those inevitable questions that comes up every single time, but until now there has not been a good answer. If you’re on a Windows or Mac machine you would need to leave Docs and switch to Word or some other tool to make student resources, and if you were using a Chromebook you were completely stuck since installing things like fonts is not an option for ChromeOS users. If you wanted to use Google Docs and you needed Foundation Font, you were just out of luck.

Until today. I’m very pleased to be able to tell you that the mandated fonts for all Australian states are now available in Google Workspace!

Let me tell you how to get them, and then share a little of the journey of how we got here.

To use these fonts you simply go to the font list, choose More fonts and search for the name of the font you want. These new Foundation/Beginner fonts have all been names with a consistent naming convention – Edu <state> <fontname>. So, for example, if you’re in New South Wales, just search for “NSW” and there it is. South Australians might find it a little trickier, as the letter combination “SA” appears in many other fonts, so you can also search using the term “Edu” and they will all show up. Here’s a video that shows what I mean…

How to get Australian fonts for schools in Google Docs.

Of course, if you do need to download these fonts so you can install them into a non-ChromeOS application like Word, Indesign, Illustrator, etc you can acccess them all in the Google Fonts collection at https://fonts.google.com/?query=edu.

There are a couple of companies that currently sell these fonts to Australian schools. I started conversations with these companies a couple of years ago to see if they would somehow partner with Google to help bring these fonts to the web so that Google Docs users could access them but there was very little appetite to do so. This approach of only selling installable fonts may have been a good approach in the 90s, but it was ignoring the rise of webfonts and the ever growing number of schools that use Google Docs, and particularly on Chromebooks.

Here’s a fun fact about fonts. When most people talk about “fonts” they really mean”typefaces”. If you’re unclear on the difference, a typeface is essentially the design of the text, or the way a piece of text looks, but a font is the implementation of that typeface in software. While a font can be legally protected by copyright, a typeface cannot. So anyone can freely duplicate an existing typeface, but there are intellectual property issues to consider when creating a font of those letters in software. This means that Google’s implementation of Foundation font is available for anyone to use, but only because it was created from scratch and not reusing someone else’s existing font.

Importantly then, these new fonts from Google have been completely reengineered from the ground up. The designers, Tina Anderson and Corey Anderson did a great job of making them for all Australian states, recoded these from scratch to create a new font for an existing typeface. And while you can buy these fonts from other sources, Google has made theirs available free of charge, both in Google Workspace and through Google Fonts.

As someone who has been training teachers in the Google ecosystem for over 10 years, the request for these mandated fonts was something I heard at almost every workshop I ever ran. I’m really glad that I was able to work with Dave and the awesome people in the Google Fonts team, and the designers Tina and Corey, to finally help bring these fonts to Australian teachers in Google Workspace.

And as a Chromebook user, and someone who passionately believes that the web is the future and that Chromebooks are the best option for most schools, I’m glad that we were able to remove this annoying font issue, and give teachers and students yet another reason to choose ChromeOS.

October 14, 2021October 14, 2021

Meet Inception

You might have seen that movie Inception, where scenes of reality get stacked up inside each other like some kind of existential babushka doll. I experienced the same thing this morning when I had to give a detailed demonstration of Google Meet, while showing Slides about Google Meet, while using Google Meet.

If you’ve ever tried to do this, you’ll know it’s tricky to live demo a tool like Meet while also using Meet, without ending up with what I call the Dr Who effect (but which is more correctly called the Infinite Mirror effect). That’s when you have everyone on the screen being presented on the screen being presented on the screen, being presented on the… well, you get the idea. They disappear to infinity. There’s not a lot you can do about it, and while it doesn’t really cause a problem, it’s annoying.

I have to repeat this same session for another group, so I wanted to see if there was a better way to do it. After a bit of trial and error, here’s what I’ve worked out. I’m writing it down here in case it’s useful to anyone, but mainly so I can remember how to do it. It is a bit “inception”, and so a tad confusing at first.

The trick is to make sure that your main presentation area in Meet has something that takes up the full area (with no people showing), but you also want to be able to see the controls in Meet (and also the people who are in the Meet) at the same time. You just don’t want to see the people twice. Effectively you want to present both the slides AND the Meet interface. If that doesn’t sound tricky to you yet, try actually doing it.

You’ll need two computers, one for showing the presentation, and one for the Meet. And if you have a third computer handy it’s good to use that as a monitor just to confirm what the participants see.

Start a Meet call with the first computer. (Let’s call it Computer 1)
Join the same Meet call on the other two machines (Computer 2 and 3)
On Computer 2, screenshare a Tab and select the one with your Slides. Go to Present mode to show the Slides full screen
Back on Computer 1, screenshare a Tab and present the Meet call. Then hover your cursor over the Slides presentation coming from Computer 2, and pin it so it becomes the featured item showing on the large display
On Computer 1, click the three dot menu in Meet and go to the Change Layout option. Select Spotlight mode. This will remove the participant videos from the main display (although they will still show in the output that participants see in the actual Meet call.)
To present your Slides, use Computer 2 to go through them
Check Computer 3 to ensure that everything is looking as it should – you should be able to see the Slides being presented, within the Meet interface, so you can actually demonstrate the functions in Meet, while all of that sits inside another Meet call where the participants are.

It might sound a bit confusing (and it sort of is) but it’s the only way I can think of to give a smooth demo of slides about Meet, while demoing Meet, while using Meet.