AI Tool Demo: Generating Podcasts About Class Content With NotebookLM

What if you could quickly make an audio overview for students to listen to that covers specific class content? Better yet, what if you could make it interactive? In this short demo, Edutopia’s assistant editor Daniel Leonard shows how educators can do exactly that with a tool from Google called NotebookLM—using a feature that essentially creates a podcast.

When a user provides NotebookLM with sources (PDFs, Google Docs, links, or raw text) about a particular topic, the platform can automatically output a full podcast episode on the subject—complete with two human-sounding AI hosts—in just a matter of minutes. In a newly developed “interactive mode,” listeners can even join the AI hosts’ conversation in order to ask them a question directly, which the hosts will then answer in real time.

Many educators are putting this tool to use in their classrooms. History teachers, for instance, can provide the bot with sources about a particular moment in history, then automatically generate a podcast for their students to listen to—and interact with—as a form of review. Since the bot can still make errors, other educators are having their students take notes on any gaps or inaccuracies they hear in the conversation between the two AI hosts. In fact, some teachers are even slipping errors into the sources they provide to the bot, to see if their students will catch the mistakes when they’re repeated by the AI.

Meanwhile, other educators are having their students create their own AI podcasts as an exercise in finding reliable sources to use when training the bot. And teachers and school leaders are finding fun nonacademic applications for NotebookLM as well—such as principals creating podcast versions of their schools’ strategic plans for staff to listen to.

To read about other compelling ways that educators can leverage AI, check out edtech specialist Eric Curts’s article for Edutopia, “5 Teacher-Tested AI Tools for Beginners.”