AI comes to Chrome OS — what school administrators need to know
Now that Google built AI into Chrome OS itself, it's not enough to monitor and restrict 3rd party apps. We'll guide you through the new features and how you can keep students safe.
Help Me Write allows users to use AI to generate text to fill any textbox.
It uses the context of the page to help with generating appropriate text, so if a student is on a quiz, the AI will automatically get the question and any reading passages to use while it answers. Here's what it looks like:
In case you had any doubt...this is absolutely the correct answer based on the sample text passage written at the top of this Google Form. Scary stuff!
Still, Google is rolling this out carefully and has it disabled by default for Education customers.
Second most important: "Create theme with AI" generates images to use as themes in Chrome
You might not have spent much time customizing how Chrome looks on your computer, but you can select the color of the window and a background image to display on the new tab page. Chrome will now allow you to generate these images using AI. The video below is courtesy of the Google blog post on this feature:
Thankfully for schools, Google is taking the cautious route on this one, and only letting users select from a couple of pre-selected categories of images. Note, though, that just because the categories are innocuous does not mean that any image generated is assured to be safe. We highly recommend disabling this one in schools since the benefit is low and risk is medium.
This feature will just group your tabs based on the content of the pages.
We don't have any material concerns with this in a school environment.
Why disable these features if they're already disabled by default?
You might be wondering why you need to do anything if these settings are indeed disabled by default for any Google Workspace for Education customers.
There are a few reasons it's worth taking the time to configure them for yourself:
Defaults change - Simple on/off settings within the Google Admin Console actually have a subtle 3rd option: "Unset". This is the default option and means you haven't configured the setting in either direction yet, so it will use the default value from Google. When Google changes the default value, this only affects organizations where the setting is "Unset", so it strongly benefits you to set the policy to the value you want so it can't be overwritten.
Clarifies your organizational policy - If you're at a larger school system with many different administrators working on different schools, you have probably encountered challenges with keeping policies consistent across schools. One way to help can be to set a setting at the top-level organization so that admins see the value is coming from your organization instead of simply being the default.
Allows opting-in your Admin or Staff OUs - Rather than shying away from AI completely, we'd recommend you test out these features yourself so you know what's coming. You may never want to enable something like "Help Me Write" when your students are sitting for an exam, but you might want to enable it for the after-school computer science club. Better to know what your options are by seeing the feature for yourself.
Special modes: guest sessions, kiosk mode, and locked mode for Google Forms quizzes
All three of the above features are available to users and guests on your Chromebooks, so we recommend disabling them on both the User Settings page and Managed Guest Sessions page within the Google Admin Console. Kiosk mode doesn't have themes or tabs, and Help Me Write is already disabled within kiosk mode (with no setting for you to control), so no action is required.
We're still waiting to test this, but we expect locked mode for Google Forms quizzes will follow the setting for the user.
Instinctive
