The Intelligent Notebook – Become a Knowledge Expert with NotebookLM

By Robin Leung, Educational Media Strategist, Kwantlen Polytechnic University

On October 8, 2025, I had the pleasure of partnering with BCcampus to deliver an interactive workshop, The Intelligent Notebook – Become a Knowledge Expert with NotebookLM, as part of the 2025-2026 EdTech Sandbox Series. The goal was to introduce and demonstrate progressive and free/low-cost educational technology tools that can enhance learning environments while aligning with B.C. Post-Secondary Digital Literacy Framework.

In this 90-minute interactive session, I engaged with a diverse group of educators and ed-developers from across Canada. The group was split equally between having and not having used NotebookLM before the workshop. Together, we explored the following themes:

How to setup and navigate NotebookLM
Discussing NotebookLM’s never-ending new features, and how they work in the educational context
Coming up with personalized use cases on how NotebookLM could be used in their own line of work
Creating effective prompts using the TOCD (task, output, context, data) template to enhance results from AI

Participants engaged in:

Interacting with NotebookLM’s sources
Creating their own Notebooks and exploring the platform’s functionalities
Using prompting to come up with their own use cases and sharing them with peers in a Padlet

There are three main takeaways when it comes to fully understanding the usage of this tool:

Takeaway 1: It’s a Personal Expert at Your Sources, Not a Know-It-All

The most critical difference between NotebookLM and other AI tools is the foundation of trust. Instead of drawing on large language models or scraping the Internet for sources, it’s grounded exclusively in the sources that you upload such as PDFs, Google Docs, websites, videos, etc. It becomes a personal expert of your trusted sources – that’s why I often compare it to having a second brain! When it provides an answer, it cites the exact source passage, allowing you to instantly check its work. To demonstrate, we did a fun activity where participants got to try this out for themselves using a Notebook I shared.

Takeaway 2: It Supports Multimodal Learning and is an Expert at Active Recall

NotebookLM understands learning isn’t one-size-fits-all. It not only gives you a Coles Notes summary of your sources, but it converts them into a variety of formats to suit different cognitive and sensory preferences (Hu, 2024).

Audio overview: a human-sounding, interactive podcast between two hosts that breaks down your sources. You can join the conversation at any time to ask clarifying questions. Many participants took this feature for a test-drive, and this is what one had to say: “I joined the podcast and asked it pretty quickly if they could refocus the discussion on education uses and how to support student success with this tool. It did!”

Video overview: generates a Khan Academy-like video and creates a visual slideshow that walks you through the main points. This is perfect for visual learners.

Mindmap: visually summarizes your sources into a branching diagram. While it’s not truly a mindmap, it does reveal key ideas, rather than hidden connections, between your sources. This was noticed by a few participants who were intrigued by this tool.

Flashcards, quizzes, and study guides: a suite of tools that help learners by generating active recall questions to help understand key ideas from its sources. This is particularly useful for helping learners understand and recall materials.

Takeaway 3: NotebookLM Challenges How We Learn and Assess Knowledge

Tools like this aren’t there just to make our work easier; they fundamentally shift the cognitive tasks we focus on. We learned that this tool excels at analytical aspects of work like summarizing and finding interesting connections between the information provided. These tools free up our bandwidth for high-order thinking.

For education, this shift is paramount. It shifts the focus towards evaluating the learner to use the AI’s output critically, synthesize insights, and create new knowledge out of it. It also forces us as educators to think critically and re-evaluate our assessment strategies to ensure meaningful learning outcomes (Reyna, 2023).

Using NotebookLM in an Educational Setting

Lastly, we talked about a broader aspect–the skill of prompt engineering, which refers to how the way we craft our inputs matters. It helps the AI understand and produce more useful, accurate, and relevant outputs. One powerful framework for this is TOCD method developed by Zi Zhou.

I provided the opportunity for another activity, which was more personal and relevant to the participants. I asked how they would apply this tool in their line of work with a use case or an activity that they would give to their learners, utilizing the method that they just learnt.

Here’s a few examples that they came back with that I thought were pretty clever:

I’m an academic coach at a post-secondary institution and I support students with study skills and academic success strategies. The students that come and see me are often struggling in class and don’t have much time left to develop study strategies that will help them meet their goals. What are some use cases that would support the work I do?
I am an instructional designer for a community college. I work with instructors who might want to use NotebookLM as a case study generator for their subjects. What would be the most useful documents for them to upload? What would be a good prompt for them to provide?
The task is to have student teams act as subject experts and create a comprehensive NotebookLM notebook on their given topic to share with the general class to learn from. All the studio tools should be utilized. Outline a step-by-step plan for the student teams to follow to create this notebook. (This produced a pretty good play-by-play for students to follow for a group assignment.)

The possibilities are endless when it comes to use cases and how you use this tool in your learning environment. Participants left with new ideas on how they can implement this in their own practice. It allowed those who had previously explored the tool to dig deeper and share their knowledge with others. Most participants who had generated outputs from NotebookLM or played with its features were either satisfied or semi-satisfied with the responses that the AI provided.

I’d like to extend my thanks to BCcampus for organizing this safe learning environment for us to play and experiment in. I’m excited to see how people will engage and use this tool in their work and with their learners. One thing I am certain, participants came out of this session more empowered than before.