NotebookLM in Teaching and Learning

What is NotebookLM?

Google's NotebookLM: A Smarter Way to Take Notes and Research

Google's NotebookLM is a powerful AI-driven tool that transforms how faculty and students take notes, learn, and write. Acting as a dynamic research assistant, it summarizes sources into text and audio, helping users organize, synthesize, and engage with information more effectively.

How Faculty and Students Can Use NotebookLM

• Faculty can create custom study guides, generate lesson plans, and even use it as a virtual tutor to provide comprehensive answers to students’ questions.
• Students can research complex topics, draft essays, and brainstorm creative writing projects. With its ability to generate structured summaries and detailed reports, NotebookLM serves as a valuable resource for academic work.

NotebookLM on the Union College Plan

• Users can upload up to 50 sources per notebook, with each source allowing up to 500,000 words or 200 MB, whichever comes first.
• Supported file types include PDFs, text files, web pages, audio files with speech in , Google Docs, Google Sheets, and YouTube videos (with transcript extraction).
• NotebookLM works with a snapshot of uploaded sources—it does not automatically update if the original document or website changes.
• 30+ supported languages and growing! Create a custom language learning podcast!

Privacy and Security

• Uploaded files remain private within your Google account and are not used to train the AI model.
• As a best practice, avoid uploading sensitive or anything other than low risk information (as per Union College's Data Classification policy).
• Notebooks can be shared with other Google account holders, but they cannot be made fully public.

NotebookLM is a powerful tool for enhancing research, teaching, and learning—providing structured insights and AI-assisted support to make academic work more efficient and engaging.

Benefits for Students

NotebookLM can significantly enhance a student's learning process by providing tools for:

Research and Information Synthesis:

• Summarizing large volumes of course materials: Students can upload lecture notes, readings, and research papers to NotebookLM and quickly get concise summaries, saving time and improving comprehension.
• Identifying key themes and connections: NotebookLM can analyze multiple documents to highlight recurring themes, relationships between concepts, and potential areas for further exploration.
• Generating questions for deeper understanding: Students can ask NotebookLM to generate questions based on the uploaded materials, prompting critical thinking and self-assessment.
• Extracting specific information: Students can ask NotebookLM to locate specific facts, definitions, or examples within their uploaded documents, improving research efficiency.

Study and Review:

• Creating personalized study guides: Students can use NotebookLM to generate study guides based on their notes and readings, focusing on key concepts and areas where they need more review.
• Generating flashcards and practice questions: NotebookLM can help students create flashcards and practice questions based on their uploaded materials, facilitating active recall and knowledge retention.
• Clarifying complex concepts: If a student is struggling with a particular concept, they can ask NotebookLM to explain it in simpler terms or provide additional examples.
• Comparing and contrasting different perspectives: When dealing with multiple sources, NotebookLM can help students analyze and compare different viewpoints on a topic.

Writing and Project Development:

• Generating outlines and drafts: Students can use NotebookLM to generate outlines and drafts for essays and research papers based on their uploaded materials, providing a starting point for their writing.
• Finding supporting evidence: NotebookLM can help students locate relevant quotes and evidence from their uploaded documents to support their arguments.
• Checking for plagiarism: While not a dedicated plagiarism checker, by having all source material uploaded, it can assist in ensuring that all quotes and paraphrased information is properly cited.
• Brainstorming ideas: By interacting with the uploaded material, students can ask for related ideas, or explore different angles of a subject.

Benefits for Faculty:

NotebookLM can streamline teaching and research processes for faculty by:

Course Material Management and Preparation:

• Analyzing and summarizing research papers and articles: Faculty can quickly analyze large volumes of research to stay up-to-date on the latest developments in their field.
• Creating course outlines and syllabi: NotebookLM can help faculty generate course outlines and syllabi based on their research and teaching materials.
• Generating lecture notes and presentations: Faculty can use NotebookLM to create concise and engaging lecture notes and presentations, saving time and effort.
• Identifying gaps in course materials: By analyzing the uploaded material, NotebookLM can help identify areas where additional resources or explanations may be needed.

Assessment and Feedback:

• Analyzing student papers and assignments: Faculty can use NotebookLM to identify common themes, strengths, and weaknesses in student work.
• Generating personalized feedback: NotebookLM can help faculty generate personalized feedback for students based on their performance and specific areas for improvement.
• Creating quizzes and exams: NotebookLM can assist in generating questions based on the uploaded course materials.
• Analyzing student questions: if a professor uploads student question and answer sessions, or discussion board content, they can analyze common student questions, and then address those common problems.

Research and Publication:

• Organizing and analyzing research data: NotebookLM can help faculty organize and analyze large datasets and research materials.
• Generating literature reviews: NotebookLM can help faculty generate comprehensive literature reviews based on their research materials.
• Finding connections between disparate research: NotebookLM can help find connections between research papers that a human researcher may miss.
• Assisting in grant writing: By uploading past successful grants, and research data, NotebookLM can assist in the generation of new grant proposals.