If you’re a teacher who happens to stumble across this post and haven’t yet heard a AI generated podcast from Google NotebookLM, you can be the first in your school or district to impress your colleagues with the AI’s latest shiny thing. History teachers know how bad we are at predicting the future of new technologies, the Pessimists Archive is chock full of them. But I’d still bet that these podcasts are going to flit across you’re awareness soon and make a big splash, then fade into the background of all of the tech tools that we use.
Learning how to use NotebookLM is almost too easy to describe. Access it through your Google account, create a notebook and upload some sources, then use the notebooks guide to “create an audio conversation”. The audio it creates is a NPR-esque podcast with two voices that could be valuable in a few, specific use cases. But before we determine just exactly what those use cases are, we’re going to create a lot of them regardless, because they almost always get a “that’s too cool” reaction. You get to hear the voices of two people talking about your stuff – what’s not to like?
This is what the podcasts sound like…..
Primary Sources: Lincoln Douglas Debate Freeport 1858
This was created by uploaded an abridged transcript of the debate of Stephen Douglas and Abraham Lincoln in Freeport, Illinois in 1858. Any transcript of a speech or a debate, or documents from a DBQ could work like this,
For Administrators – Rolling Out Revised Standards Report Card Statements
The audio was created by uploading the Google Slides presentation along with a two page document that read like an informal script, describing the basic tone and purpose of the podcast. That document helps “tune” the podcast’s language, emphasis and mood. NotebookLM also has a “customize” feature that allows you to bullet point these suggestions, but a document helps create a more targeted product. The audio was then combined with screenshots using Camtasia and voilà!
New instructional technology’s are so good at impressing us with that they produce that we don’t realize whether it’s useful to actually use them for instruction. That takes experimentation and close attention to measured results. Here’s a partial list of use cases that may be worth further explanation
- Create a podcast with graded student work with teacher feedback reflecting on student performance as a class. It might sound like a Monday-morning quarterbacking on a sports talk show, but with school work.
- Create a podcast with selections of two secondary sources, such as Howard Zinn and Gordon Wood’s views on the American Revolution to compliment a reading analysis lesson
- Create a podcast with your syllabus, the students are probably not reading it anyway
- K-3 teachers can create podcasts instead of parent newsletters
- Create a podcast using a study guide. Take the list of term and definitions or identifications, survey students to rank them in order to difficulty – then upload the list and the survey results. Students can listen to the podcast before the next test.
- After scraping the names out of your gradebooks and upload them to create a podcast reflection on student performance throughout the semester.
Only some of these might actually add enough value and to remain in your materials a year from now, but in the meantime, they’ll impress everyone who hasn’t heard them yet. But you better act now, because by January, we’re all going to be sick and tired of these two voices.