In Miami Classrooms, Teachers Are Using AI to Win Back Time for Students

The most interesting thing happening in Jessica Collazo’s classroom at Southwest Miami Senior High School isn’t the technology. It’s where the teacher is standing.

After a recent exam, Collazo ran her review session through NotebookLM and Gemini: students opened a shared class notebook on NotebookLM to revisit their test questions, then used Gemini’s Guided Learning to dig into why they got an answer wrong — not just what the right answer was. With the tools handling the walkthrough, Collazo was free to move around the room, giving one-on-one attention to more students than a front-of-the-class review ever allowed.

That scene comes from Ben Gomes, Google’s Chief Technologist for Learning & Sustainability, who visited Southwest Miami Senior High and Miami Dade College in late October 2025 and described the trip on Google’s The Keyword blog. And Collazo wasn’t the only educator improvising. One teacher who had never written a line of code used Gemini to build a trivia game for her students. An AP English teacher created a custom Gemini Gem that worked as a writing assistant for her students’ argumentative essays.

“We’re technologists, not educators, and we recognize that the best products must be built hand-in-hand with the people who use them,” Gomes wrote on The Keyword.

The scale behind one classroom

Collazo’s exam review is one room in a much bigger experiment. Miami-Dade County Public Schools is the third-largest school district in the country, and according to WLRN it is undergoing one of the largest deployments of classroom AI tools anywhere.

Under the expanded Google partnership, 100,000 high school students are slated to gain access to Gemini for Education, and 18,000 teachers are set to complete Google’s Generative AI for Educators course and Gemini Academy certifications, EdTech Innovation Hub reports.

“Students learn in classrooms, they learn online, they learn in the community, and with Google’s Gemini, our students now have an additional tool to safely and responsibly enrich, accelerate, and enhance their world of learning,” Superintendent Dr. Jose L. Dotres told EdTech Innovation Hub.

The pipeline doesn’t stop at high school graduation. At Miami Dade College, students have used AI skills courses to open new career pathways, per Gomes’s account. Google is also contributing $2 million to the National Applied AI Consortium to expand mentorship programs across 30 community colleges in 20 states, with MDC participating through the Google AI for Education Accelerator. The college will adopt Google Skills, a platform with more than 3,000 AI-related courses and labs.

“We are proud to be leading the charge to ensure AI education is accessible to all,” MDC President Dr. Madeline Pumariega told EdTech Innovation Hub, calling the funding “a major milestone in MDC’s ongoing mission to democratize AI training.”

The guardrails came before the rollout

What makes Miami-Dade’s approach worth watching is that the rules weren’t an afterthought. On August 12, 2025, the school board approved a proposal to develop districtwide ethical guidelines for AI use in K-12 classrooms — including a tiered framework for student use and resources for families, WLRN reported.

“We need to move at the same speed as AI is moving in many ways,” board member Roberto Alonso said at the meeting, according to WLRN. “As these tools become more and more accessible to our students and our educators, we need to, as a district, provide clear expectations for their use within the classroom and even at home.”

Dotres put it more bluntly to WLRN: “An AI tool is no longer the future, it is now. So we have to be able to help our students utilize this tool to maximize learning in a way that deepens their understanding… and teach them that what you get from AI you have to make it yours.”

A fair caveat: the classroom account comes from Google’s own blog, and the tool-maker has an obvious interest in telling it well. But the people, the school, the board vote, and the partnership numbers are corroborated by independent local and trade reporting — and the headline figures describe planned reach, not yet completed training.

What sticks, though, is the picture of a teacher walking the rows of her classroom, finally able to sit with the students who need her most. The technology didn’t replace her. It bought her time.

Based on reporting by Google – The Keyword, with additional reporting from EdTech Innovation Hub and WLRN.

Miami-Dade’s insistence on ethical guidelines before mass adoption mirrors what we tell every organization we work with: access and accountability have to arrive together. If you’re building AI capacity in your own community, start with our guide to responsible AI adoption — and if you’d like hands-on help bringing AI literacy to your school, nonprofit, or neighborhood, join one of our workshops.