This AI Tool Blew My Mind!

I’m Jo Gakonga, English language teacher, teacher educator, CELTA and MA tutor, and I run a website at ELT-Training.com, where I make video-based materials for English teachers at all stages of their careers. If you haven’t seen it, have a look- and if you find this useful, do give it a like and subscribe. I post something new every week.

So, this week, I discovered Google NotebookLM. Well actually my son showed it to me. He’s studying in Taiwan and just casually mentioned it in conversation- and I have to say, I was pretty amazed.

It’s free. You just go in through your Google account and it’s designed as a study tool. You can upload PDFs or other documents and it’ll give you a summary, you can ask it to pull out FAQs or create a timeline of events. My son’s studying history, so that’s really useful for him.

But to be honest, there’s nothing particularly new there. ChatGPT can do that sort of thing too, can’t it?

What really caught my attention was the fact that NotebookLM can turn your text into a podcast. Yes- a podcast! You upload your material and it generates a conversation between two AI voices- a man and a woman- chatting about whatever you’ve uploaded. (they both have rather generic American accents, but we’ll forgive them for that).

I tried this with a paper from Michael Swan - Seven Reasons Not to Teach Grammar. Classic stuff. And the AI pair had a good old natter about it! I’ve put a link to that below if you fancy listening to it. I also gave it a list I’d written about why preparing for CELTA is a good idea and it turned that into another podcast. That link’s down there too if you’re curious and I was really blown out of the water by how natural the conversation style was. It’s very believable.

But that’s not even the cleverest bit! If you click this button here, you can interact with the podcast. It’s like talkback radio. You can click Join, tell them your comment or ask a question and the hosts respond. I tried it out and corrected them when they got the CELTA acronym wrong (obviously, I couldn’t let that slide), and they actually adjusted their conversation. Listen….

So, the question is, how could we use this for English language teaching?

I’m still thinking about this, but here’s one idea. I think it could be really useful for higher-level learners as extra listening practice.

We know it’s easier to understand a listening text when you already know what it’s about- there’s plenty of research on that, it’s why we activate schemata and do warm up tasks before a listening in class and I’ve definitely experienced it myself when learning other languages. So, what about this...

Take a text you’ve used in class- something they’ve read, discussed, done comprehension questions on- could be an authentic newspaper article or even something out of the coursebook- and put it into NotebookLM. Then, generate the podcast and send them the link. It seems to make them about 10-15 minutes long, so not great for the classroom, but fantastic for extra practice at home. They can listen to it on the bus, washing up, whatever. And because they already know the content, they’re much more likely to be able to follow it even though the language is completely authentic.

You could even suggest they interact with the hosts and see how they get on!

So, that’s my idea. Give it a go and let me know in the comments if you think of any other ways to use it. Or if you’re already experimenting with NotebookLM, I’d love to hear how it’s working for you.

And as always, if you’re looking for more ideas and resources, have a look at ELT-Training.com. Plenty there to help you on your teaching journey.

See you next time!