As part of my daily routine, I scan dozens of blogs, visit a handful of Facebook groups, and skim through Twitter.

The goal: find the most helpful resources, tools, and articles that I can share with my teacher friends (that’s you!). Here are my favorite links for April 2026!

Episode Sponsor: John’s Summer Gemini Tour!

I’m hitting the road this summer to facilitate the Gemini Academy for Teachers in six different states. I’m also hosting two online academies. If you are ready to level-up your use of Gemini in the classroom, this event is for you!

April Google EDU Update

Generate custom avatars with Vids – Google Vids continues to add impressive new features which now includes custom branded Avatars with logos, and unique outfits to match your school culture and spirit! 

Language support for Gemini in Classroom– Good news for all non-english speaking educators! Gemini for Classroom is available in 75 languages! 

Personal Class Notebooks for college students – Google is rolling out the ability for higher education students to generate personal class notebooks through Google Classroom. K-12 teachers can currently do this on behalf of their students. I would anticipate this feature to roll down to K-12 schools in the near future. 

Create content in seconds with Gemini in Docs – If you have EDU Plus you will see a new Gemini button at the bottom of Docs. You can use this to prompt gemini to improve existing content or create something brand new. It will also match document formatting, making it a great tool for managing tedious tasks! 

Editable Slides with Gemini – Slide decks created with Gemini are now fully editable! This is a big improvement! At launch, this update is only available for users with an AI Pro license, but look for this feature to move down to lower tiers in the near future. 

Impressive videos from NotebookLM – The video feature in NotebookLM has been a little limited, until now. The new “cinematic video” option creates impressive video summaries from your resources. This feature is currently only available for users and an AI pro license, but I expect it will trickle down to lower tiers in the near future. 

Vibe-coding $250k worth of edTech subscriptions – a school district in Washington State is developing custom apps with AI that are replacing expensive subscription-based services.  

Google Takeout and Transfer for graduates – there’s a new app on managed chromebooks called “content transfer” that seniors can use to move their email and drive data to a personal Gmail account. Copy my student instructions here! 

Canva Learn Grid – Canva is consolidating all of its classroom resources into one central location it’s calling “Learn Grid.” You can even vibe code your own interactive learning games. Check out my demo classification matching game! This feature will soon be powered by Canva AI 2.0. 

Cloud Next Recap (260 updates) – Cloud Next is a developer conference that announces major updates that will eventually be developed into consumer and education products. The event is pretty technical, but there were some important updates including “workspace intelligence” and lots of talk of the “agentic era.” 

See you next month!

Those are the Google EDU updates for the month of April! Join more than 20,000 educators who received my monthly updates via email! It’s a free, convenient way to stay up-to-date on the world of edTech!

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