Decorative

GenAI: NotebookLM – A Personal Tool for Research & Productivity (Intermediate)

  • Pre-workshop activities: 10 min
  • Introductory presentation: 15 min
  • Active learning time: 60 min

What is NotebookLM?

NotebookLM is Google’s AI research and study workspace. Instead of chatting with a generic model, you load your own sources (papers, PDFs, Docs, Sheets, web pages, videos, notes), and NotebookLM builds a “thinking partner” that stays grounded in those materials.

You can then ask questions, generate explanations, and create outputs (reports, flashcards, slide decks, infographics, audio/video overviews) that are all based on the content you provided. This makes NotebookLM especially useful for courses, research projects, literature reviews, and complex real-world documents.

What does NotebookLM do?

At a high level, NotebookLM lets you:

  • Create notebooks for individual courses, projects, or topics.
  • Automatically cites sources, so you can see exactly where each answer comes from in the documents you’ve uploaded to NotebookLM.
  • Run Deep Research to optionally pull in high-quality web sources and save the structured report back into your notebook.
  • Generate learning tools like flashcards, quizzes, study guides, and concept summaries.
  • Create teaching and communication assets such as reports, timelines, infographics, and slide decks.
  • Produce audio and video overviews that turn long documents into podcast-style discussions or short explainers.

The goal is to reduce the time you spend skimming, copying, and re-formatting information so you can focus on understanding, analysis, and creation.

Responsible and critical use

Throughout the workshop, we will emphasize:

  • Verification – always checking AI-generated text, slides, and summaries against the original sources.
  • Citation and academic integrity – using NotebookLM as a reading and thinking partner, not as a ghost-writer.
  • Privacy and data handling – what kinds of documents are appropriate to upload, and when not to use cloud tools.
  • Bias awareness – understanding that outputs reflect both your uploaded sources and the underlying model’s limitations.

Learning objectives

By the end of this workshop, you will be able to:

  1. Describe the core capabilities of NotebookLM (source-grounded Q&A, summarization, translation, and document synthesis).
  2. Create and organize a notebook with multiple sources (PDFs, Docs, web pages, etc.).
  3. Use Notebook Guides / Studio tools to generate briefing docs, study guides, and short written reports.
  4. Generate and evaluate audio or video overviews, including how to verify their accuracy against the original sources.
  5. Create presentation assistance (slide titles, outlines, and speaking notes) for Google Slides or PowerPoint.
  6. Use flashcards and quizzes to turn your notebook into a study or revision tool.
  7. Summarize qualitative feedback (e.g., survey responses) into themes, insights, and next-step questions.

Generative AI Workshop Pathway

This workshop is part of our Generative AI Workshop Pathway, which offers a progression from foundational to advanced research and productivity skills: