Name: Faculty: Use NotebookLM for Your Research and Course Prep | AI for Students | Google
Uploaded: 2026-01-23T17:43:18.000Z
Duration: 9 min 49 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

I'm Steven Johnson, editorial director at NotebookLM and Google Labs.

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Before I joined Google, I spent most of my career writing and researching books about the history of science and technology and innovation.

And through that whole period, I'd always been incredibly interested in the capability of software to help with the writing and the research process.

So I'd always been an early adopter of new tools to help me organize my ideas, to help me write those books.

And because of that history, about three years ago, Google reached out to me and asked if I would like to join Google Apps to help them develop an AI first tool for research and writing.

There are a lot of different uses for NotebookLM, but

we think it's particularly valuable in the classroom, both for students and for educators.

I wanna walk you through how the product works and give you some advice on the best techniques, both for doing your own research and also helping you with your teaching.

So the first thing you need to understand about Notebook is that it is primarily organized around this concept, logically enough, of notebooks.

So you can organize your projects into specific notebooks on a range of topics.

These could correspond to an essay you're starting to write, a book you're working on, a class you're teaching, or any other project that's important to your work.

In this case, I'm going to show you an example of a research project that actually I'm working on right now, researching the history of the gold rush for a potential book.

So I open up this notebook and you'll see right away one of the most important things that you need to understand in using NotebookLM.

The whole product is designed around the sources that you upload.

This is one of the most fundamental things about the whole platform of NotebookLM.

When you use NotebookLM, all of the interactions with the NotebookLM AI are going to be grounded in the sources that you have chosen.

That means that the model will answer its questions factually, based on the information in that source material that you've uploaded, and

And as you'll see, it will give you citations showing you the original passages in those sources to help you both fact check the model and to explore the sources in new ways.

This is a really important idea for anybody who's doing research, because you don't just want kind of general knowledge about the world, you want very specific knowledge from primary sources or secondary sources, information that you can trust.

Notebook makes it incredibly easy to work with that information.

One thing that's important to understand here is that we are not training the underlying AI model on the information that you've uploaded.

It's like that information gets put into the short term memory of the model and once your session is over, it disappears.

There's no way for that information to then show up in any other knowledge that's shared by any other user across the Google ecosystem.

So in this case, I've loaded in a couple of different sources here.

You can add Google Docs and PDFs, audio files, web sites.

We're supporting more and more of these source types over time.

I've grabbed some quotes from a book that I read, a fabulous book called the Age of Gold.

And I brought those quotes in as part of my research, just kind of pasting them into a doc so that I have this information from a book that I read as part of my research.

I've also uploaded an open source textbook about Manifest Destiny, public domain work from the 1850s about the discovery of the Yosemite, and

Now that I have all this information in this notebook, it's as if the AI is a kind of domain expert in the history of a gold rush.

So, for instance, there's a suggested question right here at the base that says, how did the discovery of gold impact California's population and social economic landscape?

Okay, that sounds like a pretty interesting question.

And what the model will do is go through all these sources that I've collected and create a custom answer based specifically on the information in those sources.

And it will give me citations back to the original passages so that I can confirm that the information is right.

And I can use that as a way of exploring the material and diving deeper.

It's nicely organized, it's in depth, it has really helpful formatting.

I can go through this information, learn about these impacts to the society and the economy.

And if I see something that's interesting, I see this citation here, I can just hover over it and I see the original quote right there.

And if I want to actually go find that part in the original source, I just click on it and it takes me directly to that passage.

So this is almost like having a dynamic index that you can build on the fly for anything you're exploring.

But Notebook is about much more than just text.

You can also generate these other overviews so you can create a study guide or a briefing doc.

You can create one of our popular features, Audio Overviews, which turns the whole information in your sources into an engaging AI podcast between two interesting hosts.

To help you understand the material, listen to it it while you're driving to work or at the gym.

We have an amazing new feature called Video Overview that takes your information and turns it into a 10 to 15 minute lecture with slides.

And one of my favorite ones I think is particularly useful for researchers.

So if you generate a mind map notebook will go through all of the information in your sources and create a nested diagram of all the key concepts that you can then use to explore the material as well.

So in this mind map, with just one click, it has gone through all the material in those sources and basically pulled out these key concepts.

And I can instantly see, oh, I'm interested in the actual discovery of gold.

I click on here that takes me to these subcategories, important people like James Marshall, the confirmation by President Polk, I'm interested in that if I click on that node in the mind map, it immediately takes me over here and and generates a new question in chat so that I can dive more deeply into that particular concept.

So in this case, the confirmation of the Gold Rush by President Polk, it will generate another grounded answer explaining in detail how that happened, giving me all the information I need.

So it's a genuinely new way of exploring and navigating through large bodies of information.

It's really exciting from a researcher point of view.

Now I also want to show you how notebook can be used to actually teach your classes.

So I have a notebook here for a class that I might be thinking of teaching on urban planning inspired by the work of Jane Jacobs.

And I'm still in the early stages of plotting out this class and I'm thinking about what the lesson plan might be.

I want it to be project based, learning based.

And I know that I want to have Jane Jacobs ideas to be at the center of it.

And so in this case, what I've done is I've created a notebook with the following sources.

I have quotes from Jacobs famous book Death and Life of the Great American Cities that I've gathered as part of my research and preparing for the class.

That's kind of the core material at the basis of the class.

There's also a YouTube interview with Jane Jacobs herself that I've uploaded.

And there's a framework for quality project based learning classes that I want to use as kind of guidance for the structure of the class.

And I actually just jotted down on a piece of paper the outline of in my own handwriting for the class itself.

I've got a brief kind of overview of what I want those sessions to be.

And so one of the things that's amazing about Notebook is that it can take all these different kinds of sources and stitch them together into a new document that you can then use and edit and expand on.

It gives you a kind of really quick way of building a rough draft of an idea.

So in this case I'm going to ask prepare a lesson plan for an urban planning class based on Jacob's work, have it follow the project based learning guidelines and follow my outline.

And so Notebook is going to take all this information, stitch together from all four of these different sources and build a draft lesson plan for this class.

For me, it's an example of not just using the sources as a source of truth, but

also as kind of guidance or structuring information that helps you organize your ideas much more effectively.

So you'll see in just a matter of a few seconds, it's creating this lesson plan, Understanding and shaping our Cities Jane Jacobs project.

And you'll see here, it's organized it exactly along the lines of my handwritten outline here.

So session one is the kind of problem the city is.

You'll see here in my handwritten outline, session one, the kind of problem the city is.

So it's reading my handwriting and bringing this all together, talking about her work, quoting from Jacob's citations all the way through the whole thing.

And it even includes that project based learning criteria to explain why this lesson plan fits the guidelines that I've included as sources.

And I think what's so powerful about this is this gets you to that first draft of an idea so much faster than you would normally do it.

Doing this all manually, you can still shape this in all these different ways.

And you've made the core decisions in terms of curating the information.

You've made the core decisions in terms of creating the outline.

What Notebook is doing is filling in the details for you much more efficiently than any other tool out there.

So that's a guide to how NotebookLM can be helpful to you both in terms of your research and writing and in terms of your teaching.

We're really excited about these new features and we hope you'll give it a try.