10 important things about NotebookLM for educators and students
1. Terms of use are currently 18+ (but that isn’t a deal breaker).
For most K-12 students, this means most won’t be able to use it directly themselves. However …
- If you, the teacher, create resources for students with NotebookLM and save them (as a document or an audio file), you can provide them to students. Terms of use relate to the use of the NotebookLLM tool — not the resources that you create with them. Teachers can be a “middleman” to get them to students.
- Remember that sometimes students DO use tools they aren’t old enough to use legally. (Shocking, I know.)
Also important to note: Google says NotebookLM won’t use your personal data to train its AI models. If you’re an enterprise (paid) user or an EDU user, it won’t use your uploads or queries — or the model’s responses — to train AI models (and they won’t be reviewed by human reviewers).
2. Audio summary?? WOW. Use it to reinforce and summarize.
The audio summary feature is INCREDIBLE. It turns your source materials into a podcast-style interview you can listen to.
The audio summary can be a FANTASTIC way to review and reinforce, though. Students could listen to it during a commute or while doing any sort of routine task. Or, as a teacher, this could be a MUCH less painful way to get acquainted with a long document.
3. Create audio summaries and share them with students through Google Drive.
If you love this audio summary feature as much as me, don’t let terms of use stand in the way of your students benefitting from it.
- Upload sources to NotebookLM. Create an audio summary. Click the three dots and download it.
- Upload that audio summary file to Google Drive (or OneDrive or Dropbox or whatever).
- Share the audio file with students with a link — or through your learning management system (Google Classroom, Canvas, Schoology, etc.).
Again, the audio file itself isn’t subject to the terms of use … just the use of the NotebookLM tool itself.
4. Create study guides for students — and throw them in Quizlet.
Take your sources that students are supposed to learn from — PDF files, documents, chapters from a textbook, etc. (You can even copy/paste the transcript of YouTube videos as a “copied text” source.
Then, under “Notebook Guide” at the bottom, choose “Study Guide.” It’ll create short-answer questions (with an answer key) and a glossary of important terms.
What do you do with that study guide? You might go to Quizlet (quizlet.com) and create a study guide (and related flashcards) with it.
5. Add lots of sources to make NotebookLM smarter.
If you want to stick to just one main source — like an important PDF file of a chapter — that’s fine. But if you want it to draw from a broader set of sources, just keep adding them. You can add up to 50 sources to a notebook (as of publication of this post).
6. Use this to help your human brain — not to replace it.
Be careful. Use this as a tool just like you should with anything else powered by AI — to accomplish what you want. If you (or your students) need to be well-acquainted with the details of the source material, don’t use it to substitute your brain work.
For students, this could be a great way to reinforce and review material.
For teachers, it shouldn’t be used to make decisions for us by bypassing our valuable human teacher brain.
7. Find keywords and a summary for your sources.
If you click on one of the sources you uploaded (in the top left), you’ll get the “Source Guide.” It summarizes your source. It gives the full text of it. Plus, it identifies key topics. Click any of the topics and it’ll start a chat saying “Discuss (key topic you just clicked” to summarize that key topic based on the source.
8. Get exactly what you want from sources in the chat.
The chat answers your questions and fulfills your requests within the confines of the sources you provided.
The sky’s the limit here, and you can …
- Get answers to quick questions
- Ask what the sources don’t cover (what the gaps are)
- Ask for the hardest parts to understand
- Get an explanation a 10 year old would understand
The chat is powered by Gemini 1.5 Pro, Google’s most capable model (as of publication of this post). So you can do a lot more than answer simple questions and get simple summaries.
Get creative and fun with it. Here are a few I’ve tried:
- Ask it to write the script for a viral TikTok video about your sources.
- Ask it to create a script for the kids TV show Bluey about your sources.
- Ask it to write a haiku about your sources.
9. Save anything you need and go back to it.
Whenever you load NotebookLM (http://notebooklm.google), it shows you the notebooks you’ve created. A notebook is the planning space where you have your sources, your notes, and your notebook guide. You can save it like a Google Doc with a filename and revisit it any time.
10. Share your notebooks with others (for shared lesson planning).
Notebooks are shareable! Click the “Share” button to share a notebook with an individual — and give them viewer rights or editor rights.
Imagine this as an AI-powered collaborative lesson planning space …
- Create a notebook for a chapter or unit you’re teaching
- Upload all of the sources you’ll need to it
- Share it with colleagues
- Create resources that any of your colleagues can access
- Type and create notes — and edit resources created by NotebookLM — to co-create plans
