How I Use the NotebookLM Presentation Generator for More Effective Teaching
Google NotebookLM has a new feature once again—an AI-powered tool that acts as a personal assistant and uses only the materials you provide. This time, it’s a slide generator, which can be useful if you need to quickly prepare a presentation, but I use it a little differently to better retain new information.
Creating a presentation in NotebookLM
First, you need to know how to create presentations. If you’re unfamiliar with NotebookLM, it’s essentially the same as ChatGPT, but instead of searching the vast internet for answers, it uses only PDFs, links, videos, and text that you enter as resources. This makes it ideal for working on a specific project or preparing for classes, as you don’t risk accidentally stumbling upon some random, unrelated source.
You can use the chatbot feature in the same way as ChatGPT, asking questions and receiving brief overviews of your materials. You can also automatically create flashcards , videos , infographics , mind maps, mock podcasts, and more.
Creating slides follows the same process as creating regular slides: in the left panel, select all sources from which the tool should read data. In the right panel, select ” Presentation ” from the menu. In a few minutes, you’ll have slides that can be downloaded as PDFs, just like PowerPoint, and uploaded to Google Slides or PowerPoint to create a simple presentation.
Why I love the presentation feature in NotebookLM
I’ve already mentioned that while I love NotebookLM and use it every day for both work and personal use, I can’t stand its app . It doesn’t work nearly as well as the browser version, which is a shame, because the browser version works perfectly . I practically ignore the app and don’t use NotebookLM on mobile devices, or if I do, I do so through the mobile browser, which, as we all know, is an inconvenient workaround that never works properly on a small screen.
However, with a PDF of the slides, I get a ready-made study guide with visual materials that I can send to myself via iMessage and study on the go. When I create my own study materials without NotebookLM, I almost always do it in Google Slides, then download the full PDF and view the slides as a giant study guide, so this new feature makes the process much easier for me.