With so many AI tools for educators appearing on an almost daily basis, it is easy to miss out on some of the heavy hitters. Google NotebookLM has added new features to its free option. This blogpost will serve as a quick intro to this tool based on my own experience.
The basic functionality of NotebookLM is similar to many AI tools in the education space. The upload drag-and-drop field accepts PDFs, TXT files, as well as common image and audio file types. It will not play nicely with Microsoft file types. You can upload from Google Drive, a website or YouTube link, or copied text from another document. There is also a Discover Sources option, which takes you into an embedded Google search. A new feature is Deep Research, an agentic tool that can automatically browse up to hundreds of websites on your behalf, think through its findings, and create multi-page reports in minutes. The best part: the report is not the end of the process. You can import the entire briefing — including sources — directly into your NotebookLM workspace and continue analysing, summarising, or transforming the content with any of the app’s tools.
The interface is easy to use, as it is divided into three main sections: Sources, Chat, and Studio (the outputs). The outputs can easily be used in an educational setting. Teachers should enable the Learning Guide option within the Configure Chat settings, as it enables scaffolding for learners with formative questions and suggestions to review the content.
- Audio Overview: Creates a podcast where two AI hosts discuss the topic
- Video Overview: Creates a video walkthrough of the information, although it can be quite slow to generate — imagine a presentation with a voice-over
- Mind Map: Creates a mind map from your sources, useful for quick overviews
- Reports: Create your own, or choose Briefing Doc, Study Guide, Blog Post, Glossary, etc.
- Flashcards: Creates interactive flashcards from the content
- Quiz: Creates an interactive quiz covering the content
There are some limitations with the free version of NotebookLM: a limit of 100 notebooks and 50 resources per notebook (200 MB in total), with a limit of 25 million words per notebook. The 200 MB limit is a bit sneaky, as some PDFs or video files can be quite large, which caused a bit of frustration at one stage when I could not work out why I was having difficulties uploading.
How I am using Google NotebookLM
I am using it to streamline how I manage my reading and listening sources into an organised, searchable knowledge hub. Instead of juggling PDFs, bookmarked websites, podcasts, and meeting notes, I store them all in one place and let the AI automatically generate summaries, key themes, and connections across sources. It is great at pointing out nuggets from the amount of information it has digested. I don’t know how much of a game changer this is but it will change the way learners can manage their own learning with the ability to create additional content like podcasts, mindmaps on the fly. AI has crowed about AI making learning more personalised and I have to say it has a little bit in my mind. The next evolution of NotebookLM in education is already on it’s way with Google Learn your way in experiment mode
It is a tool you will need to play around with to get a handle on what it is capable of doing. In my role, I am playing around with all the new tools so it kind of fell down in my todo list but it resurfaced to the top of the list after the Google Leaders event in Dublin back in Sept. What I like about it is “that is a strong tool, easy to use” which is a big thumbs up for those in education. It has become probably the most personal AI tool I have used as I treat it as a second digital brain and I have always wanted a second brain. It is make my life a lot easier and manageable, it might even make me a bit smarter.