#339 – NotebookLM, Three Powerful Updates

Transcript

Paul Beckermann 0:01
Welcome to Tech Talk for Teachers. I’m your host, Paul Beckermann.

Student 0:06
Check it out. Check it out. Check it out. Check it out. What’s in the toolkit? What is in the toolkit? What’s in the toolkit? Check it out.

Paul Beckermann 0:16
The topic of today’s episode is NotebookLM, Three Powerful Updates. A little less than a year ago, I did an episode of Tech Talk for Teachers on NotebookLM, Google’s AI-powered notebook. As you’ve probably discovered, a year in the development of any AI tool is like a lifetime. So I decided to revisit this powerful and free resource, and I discovered some really great upgrades. Before I dig into the changes, let me provide a quick recap of what the tool is.

Student 0:48
Here’s the, here’s the, here’s the tool for today. Here’s the tool for today.

Paul Beckermann 0:54
Google describes NotebookLM as, “Your personalized AI research assistant powered by Google’s most capable model, Gemini, 1.5 Pro.” While that’s a good description, I also think of it as an online interactive notebook with an AI assistant built in. When you set up your free account, you can create multiple notebooks inside the NotebookLM online space. If you were a student.

For instance, you could create a notebook for each class you have. Or maybe you would choose to create a notebook for each unit of study in a class to keep the content a bit more focused. You might even make a notebook for a research project you’re working on. However you decide to organize it, NotebookLM can help you engage with the content within your notebook.

And that’s really the beauty of NotebookLM. It lets you leverage the power of Google’s Gemini AI assistant to interact with the data in your notebook. Wherever you are in the notebook, you’ll find an AI chatbot at the bottom of the screen, which allows you to ask questions about one source in your notebook, or even the entire notebook at once. It’s a lot like having a helpful study buddy who knows your notebook information inside and out, and you can ask it questions anytime you’d like. Now as powerful as all that is, there have been some significant upgrades in the past year that have supercharged NotebookLM even more, including one feature that honestly sort of blows my mind. I’ll save that one till the end.

In the episode today, I’m going to highlight three new features and capabilities that I find really helpful in NotebookLM, and I think you’re going to like them too.

Student 2:33
Let’s count it. Let’s count it. Let’s count it down.

Paul Beckermann 2:36
Number one additional resource types. You now have the ability to add even more types of digital resources into your notebook, making it more powerful. So in addition to PDFs and text files, you can now add audio files to the notebook. I uploaded the audio of a couple podcasts to a notebook, and then I was able to ask questions about anything in either episode. NotebookLM would respond to my questions with information from both shows, and it even merged them together in meaningful ways. If you’re a Google user, you can also now add both Docs and Slides right from your Google Drive. And maybe the most powerful new resource type that you can add are links to websites and YouTube videos. All you have to do is add a link to an informational video on YouTube and NotebookLM learns the contents of that video and allows you to ask questions about it. It does the same thing with website content. It’s pretty awesome.

Number two, there are additional preset action menus available. Sometimes you have a pile of information in front of you, and it can be really overwhelming. It’s hard to know where to start analyzing and making sense of it all. Well, to help you with this process, NotebookLM offers suggestion action menus almost anywhere you click, offering default ways to process the information, which is really helpful. When you open a notebook, you’ll see a text field at the bottom of the page that’s the AI chatbot, and you can type in any question you’d like into that text box. This chatbot will return an AI generated answer based on the contents of your notebook. Now that part’s not new.

What’s new are the suggested questions and answers that are embedded into the notebook on really almost any screen. These presets can help you jumpstart your thinking and help you process the information in your notebook. Let me give you some examples of what you find. Now the most obvious place I found these suggestions was directly above the chatbot text field. For my notebook about blended learning, NotebookLM suggested I ask, “How do playlist models benefit students in blended learning environments?” That was really great question, and I could just click on that question and get a response. This can really be helpful for students who are stuck and aren’t sure what to ask.

Now, if the questions above the text box don’t appeal to me, I can click the notebook guide link next to the chat bot. When I do that, I get an expanded screen of great options. It includes a short summary of my notebook, which is very helpful, more suggested questions and five preset document types that it can generate: an FAQ, a study guide, a table of contents, a timeline, and a briefing doc. I won’t go into depth into all those types here, but essentially, if I click one of those options, like the FAQ, for instance, I immediately get a new note placed in my notebook with that resource in it, in this case, an FAQ. When I took a look at the FAQ, I was really impressed that the AI’s ability to select relevant and important questions with concise and informative answers listed below each question. What a great study guide, it seems.

Anywhere I click inside of NotebookLM, I get options that I can choose. When I click the source from my main list on the left, I get a list of keywords pulled out of the document. They’re listed right beside the source. If I click any of those keywords, the AI produces a response detailing that keyword in the context of the larger resource. And it does it complete with footnote references to the other resources in your notebook. You can then even click one of those citations, and it’ll take you to the text that the reference came from. So cool.

And that’s not all. If I select a note by clicking the checkbox on it, I get even more options, like help me understand, critique, suggest related ideas, and create an outline. To test this out, I clicked on the study guide option, and I got a short answer quiz, with answers, essay question prompts, and a glossary of key terms from my notebook. That could be really helpful, both for a teacher creating a learning experience, and a student studying for a test or planning to write a paper. So upgrade number two is big and includes lots of new interactive options for processing notebook content.

As impressive as numbers one and two are, the third upgrade is the one that’s truly mind-blowing. It’s called the deep dive conversation feature, and you can find it by clicking the same notebook guide menu that gave us the summary and set of suggested questions to explore. On the top right side of that menu is the deep dive conversation option. Google describes the feature this way. “With one click two, AI hosts start up a lively, deep dive conversation based on your sources. They summarize your material. Make connections between topics and banter back and forth. You can even download the conversation and take it on the go.”

Alright, I had to try this out. So in my blended learning notebook, I clicked the generate button. I was politely then told that this may take a few minutes. No need to stick around. I timed it, and it took 9 minutes to generate a 9 minute-audio file for this notebook of five main resources that included Google Docs and Slideshows. I guess in this age of instant gratification, that might seem like a long time, but when I think about how long it would take me to create a 9-minute podcast, taking 9 minutes to create it is really fast. When I finished generating, I had the option of listening to it on the embedded audio player, sharing it with others, or downloading it as a .wav file.

What I got for audio was impressive. It was a very natural conversation between an English speaking man and an English speaking woman about the content in my notebook. If I didn’t know it was an AI generated recording, I don’t think I’d be able to tell that it wasn’t just two people speaking to each other in a conversation. It was very conversational, informative, pleasant, and entirely believable. It even included the sounds of human breaths, conversational phrases like, “Okay, hold on, you’re making me hungry.” And, “It’s like they’ve got a co pilot in the cockpit only for learning.” There were internal summaries and restatements, and the voices spoke with natural and interesting vocal emphasis. There’s nothing monotone or boring about it. You’re probably really curious to hear it now.

So to help you fully understand what I’m talking about, I downloaded the clip that I created, and I’ll include a short excerpt here for you to listen to. All right, take a listen.

AI Speaker 1 9:15
Alright, let’s dive into this blended learning thing. You’ve given us a ton of resources to unpack here, slideshows, templates, even some real world examples from Schoology and Minnewaska. Someone’s serious about shaking up their classroom.

AI Speaker 29:30
And You’ve come to the right place. It’s exciting to see this much enthusiasm. You know, blended learning, it’s not just another fad. This is about really rethinking how we approach learning at its core.

AI Speaker 1 9:41
I like that, though, looking at these slides some dive right into the details, maybe we should take a step back first. For someone totally new to this, what is blended learning? What makes it different from, say, just using PowerPoint in class?

AI Speaker 2 9:53
Oh, that’s a really important question. You’re right, sometimes it does just get lumped in with any kind of tech use. But the Christensen Institute definition, that’s key here. Think of it as a program, a formal one, that deliberately blends the best of digital learning with the irreplaceable power of face to face interaction. And here’s the important part, students get a say in how, when, and at what pace they learn, within that structure, of course.

AI Speaker 1 10:19
Okay, so it’s like having your cake and eating it too. Structure and flexibility. No wonder everyone’s talking about It.

Paul Beckermann 10:28
To my ears, this is incredibly impressive, and could be a great study aid for students who just don’t process written content well. They could generate this audio and then get this engaging summary and overview of the information in a notebook.

Alright, I have to point out there were a couple of areas that could be improved. At one point, a sentence was repeated twice in a row. In the clip I played, the man said I S instead of is, and some of the information was inaccurately attributed to the school that was listed on the title slide of a presentation in the notebook. The school actually was the audience and not the source of the content. Still, despite those minor flaws, the results, I’d say, were about 99% accurate and really engaging.

If NotebookLM was a child last year, I think it’s at least grown up to be a teenager or young adult this year. It was impressive to start with, and has gotten even more powerful. This tool has a potential of redefining what we mean by interactive notebooks, and it’s free. I suggest you take a look at it and see if it’d be useful for you in your classroom.

To learn more about today’s topic and explore other free resources, Visit AVIDOpenAccess.org. Specifically, I encourage you to check out our collection of articles about AI. You can find it by going to AVIDOpenAccess.org and searching for AI in the K–12 classroom. And be sure to join Rena, Winston, and me every Wednesday for our full length podcast, Unpacking Education, where we’re joined by exceptional guests and explore education topics that are important to you. Thanks for listening, take care, and thanks for all you do. You make a difference.