Thoughts on Google Notebook LLM from an Instructional Designer and Learner
Practical Insights on Using Google NotebookLM for Teaching, Learning, and Personal Knowledge Management
As an AI-curious instructional designer with a PhD in Instructional Technology, I’m always looking for ways to explore new tools and their potential in education. I work in higher education, where I help faculty develop engaging and accessible online learning experiences. I love testing out different technologies, identifying both their benefits and drawbacks. Recently, I spent time diving into Google NotebookLM, and I want to share my experiences and thoughts on how this tool can be useful for both faculty and students.
What is Google NotebookLM?
Google NotebookLM is a tool that allows users to apply a language model to a curated collection of information — whether it’s PDFs, websites, or videos. You can then ask the model questions about the topic, and it generates responses, study guides, practice tests, timelines, or even podcasts that sound shockingly realistic. One of the major benefits of this tool is that it’s currently free, though premium features may be introduced down the line.
My Personal Exploration
In preparing for a professional exam to earn a certificate in accessibility, I found Google NotebookLM to be incredibly helpful. The exam required absorbing a substantial number of supplemental resources, which was a challenge. I uploaded about 40 resources into the tool, and it helped me create personalized study guides based on my practice test results. For example, when I needed to compare international laws on closed captions, Google Notebook found the relevant legal documents in my collection, summarized them, and provided a link to the full text. It was a game-changer, and I’ve even shared my notebook with a colleague who’s taking the same exam.
Affordances for Faculty and Students
I see Google NotebookLM having a lot of potential in both classroom and research settings:
Faculty Use: If I were teaching right now, I would use this tool to load all my course readings, which would allow me to quickly identify connections between materials. It would also be useful for keeping notes on the readings to guide class discussions.
For Students: While I’d hesitate to recommend the tool at the start of a course, as I’d want students to engage with each reading on its own first, I can see it being beneficial for exam preparation or final projects. For supplemental materials or independent research, it could be a powerful tool to help students integrate sources and collaborate on group projects.
As an authentic assessment: One of the types of authentic assessment products that I like for pre-professional courses is for students to curate a list, trifold, presentation of tools that they or others could use in their career. One of the issues with these lists is that they can be hard to share with others, and they are not always living tools. I am currently working with social work students, and I can imagine them producing a set of sharable notebooks that provide evidence-based strategies for dealing with a specific problem of practice.
The Blog AI for Education provides a really great video overview if you would like see a demonstration of how Google NotebookLM works.
Exciting Potential for Research and Learning
I can see a strong potential in helping me with literature reviews. It allows me to consolidate and query my notes, reducing the frustration of wondering, “Where did I read that again?” Beyond personal learning, this tool could facilitate collaboration in higher education. Imagine a shared notebook for coding strategies for researchers in your discipline, accessible to your entire community of researchers.
What about our Personal Knowledge Management?
I am on platforms like medium to read as well as write. I often get great ideas from the articles I read, but like many of us, I struggle with effectively managing that knowledge. I tend to add notes to my OneNote or bookmark the page, only to forget to revisit them. With Google NotebookLM, I see an opportunity to take personal knowledge management to the next level. By adding resources to a notebook on a specific topic, I can easily revisit the documents later and, more importantly, draw insights across multiple sources.
This potential extends beyond academic and professional use. Recently, I’ve been inspired to create a notebook for my watercolor hobby. The ability to combine videos, webpages, and documents in one place and pull-out relevant information is remarkable. It not only keeps my learning organized but also allows me to make connections I might have otherwise missed.
While Google NotebookLM offers impressive capabilities, there are a few concerns to consider:
Academic Integrity
One of the positives is that the tool doesn’t seem to produce ready-made academic writing, so there’s less risk of students using it to bypass their own critical thinking and writing. However, it could still be used to find answers for multiple-choice exams or pull information from sources students haven’t fully read. Dr. Sarah Elaine Eaton helpfully shared a test run of Google NotebookLM with one of her own papers in the blog Exploring Postplagiarism Using Google’s NotebookLM. I recommend checking it out so you can see what Google Notebook LM produces based on academic literature.
Over-reliance on Summaries
In research, the tool can help synthesize large volumes of literature, but I worry about the potential for over-reliance on article summaries instead of engaging deeply with the full texts. A friend’s student recently asked if using Large Language Model tools to summarize their readings would violate academic integrity policies. My response was that this is not so much an academic integrity issue as it is doing oneself a personal disservice by shortcutting the learning process. However, in research, it is an unfortunate fact that some people cite papers based solely on the abstract, resulting in poorly researched academic work. I worry that tools like Google Notebook LLM could make this trend even stronger.
Privacy and Copyright Concerns
I think it’s important that you take the privacy of the documents you upload into Google NotebookLM seriously. While Google has stated that they will not use your data to train their model, notebooks are sharable, which raises copyright concerns. You should be cautious when uploading and sharing copyrighted or personal information. Additionally, Google has noted that human reviewers may access content reported as offensive or infringing on copyright. For more details, you can refer to Google’s privacy and copyright FAQ.
Final Thoughts for Today
Google NotebookLM offers incredible potential for both personal study and professional development. While there are some concerns about academic integrity and over-reliance on summaries, its capacity to help faculty and students make meaningful connections across resources is undeniable. I’m excited to continue exploring its uses and share more insights as I experiment further.
What about you — how are you using this tool personally or with your students?
What concerns are nagging you?