Ixchell Reyes (00:03.014)
What problem does Notebook LM solve for teachers? How can language students benefit from using it?

Brent Warner (00:11.234)
We’re discussing this today on the latest episode of the DIESOL Podcast.

Brent Warner (00:21.646)
Hello, welcome to the DIESOL podcast where we focus on developing innovation in English as a second or other language. We’re on video too. Sorry, I’m getting used to this double format thing. I’m Brent Warner, professor of ESL at Irvine Valley College, and I’m here with the famous Miss Ixchell the famous Miss Ixchell. Everybody knows you.

Ixchell Reyes (00:39.858)
My famous… Miss Ixchell mhm. Please don’t.

Brent Warner (00:48.27)
That’s what you said. said your students came up and said you’re famous, right?

Ixchell Reyes (00:50.887)
Ixchell you’re famous. Famous.

Brent Warner (00:55.009)
Congratulations. All right, so today, how are you doing? Everything okay? Ups and downs? Yeah.

Ixchell Reyes (01:00.775)
I’m pretty good. Yeah, I mean pretty smooth start to the new year solid busy now everything’s in full swing I think Yours

Brent Warner (01:05.004)
Good. Good.

Good, good, good, good, all good. So I accidentally downloaded the new iOS operating system, iOS 26, oh my god, is, Ishell, it is so bad, it is so bad. sorry, I know we’re gonna have some people on there going, I don’t know what the change is, but like, it is real bad, so.

Ixchell Reyes (01:17.735)
Noooo

Ixchell Reyes (01:31.003)
All the Android fans are like rejoicing right now.

Brent Warner (01:33.633)
This is, I will say this is literally the first time I’ve ever, I’ve been using Mac for over 30 years and you know, iPhones since, however long they’ve been out, but this is the first time I’m seriously thinking about getting rid of iPhone and going to a different system because it is truly bad, yeah.

Ixchell Reyes (01:47.751)
Apple, you hear that? Don’t you ever round the corners again or add transparency.

Brent Warner (01:52.332)
It’s that glass, that liquid glass thing. It’s just like, it does anyways. All right, we got to get to the topic. We’re not talking about Apple today. We’re talking about Google. So yeah, Notebook LM. So Ixchell, we’ve talked about this a bit in the past, right? We’ve mentioned it here and there. What is Notebook LM?

Ixchell Reyes (02:00.807)
Notebook LM!

Ixchell Reyes (02:09.644)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Well, it’s been around since 2023, which I actually didn’t know because it became public June of 2025. And I know you probably knew more about it at the time. I don’t often use the Google ecosystem these days. So there was a lot of buzz around it. But if you have not played with Notebook LM, how is it really different than your average AI tool? Because it is an AI driven tool.

Brent Warner (02:21.132)
Mm-hmm.

Brent Warner (02:28.788)
Mm-hmm.

Ixchell Reyes (02:46.702)
⁓ And you’ve got your typical AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Claude and all the other ones. um And those will search everything. Everything. It means you might get sources that are not trusted and you will absolutely have an overload of information because you have to fine tune and tweak your prompts. And Notebook LM is different because you can upload your own sources.

Brent Warner (03:09.482)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Ixchell Reyes (03:15.024)
basically anything that you can put in the drive or you can add links, can add uh videos, slide decks, transcripts, PDFs, documents. And so what that does then is it creates a locked down learning ecosystem without all the other junk that you have to sift through. So it’s only going to search that which you upload. And that means you can use your own trusted and vetted sources, which means it saves you some time.

and well, it saves you time in many ways, but essentially that’s what Notebook LM is.

Brent Warner (03:50.006)
Yeah, yeah. And so the layout of it, so it’s kind of worth explaining a little bit so that people kind of understand, because it does feel a little bit different than your chat GPTs or whatever else it is. And so the layout is in these three columns. On the left-hand side, you can go and add any of the sources that you want it to pull from. So you can go add PDFs, you can add…

Ixchell Reyes (04:00.157)
yeah.

Brent Warner (04:15.178)
you know, slide decks, can go add videos, YouTube videos, of course, because it’s Google, but anything else too. So it’s kind of got that layout for go and show what sources exactly you want it to pull from on the left hand side. And then in the middle is your big chat box, which is kind of the traditional, you know, AI chat bot type of thing. And

Ixchell Reyes (04:36.196)
Hmm.

Brent Warner (04:37.233)
And so you can have your conversations in your chat with that. And then the thing that people really like or are really interested in exploring is the what they call the studio on the right hand side. And so that’s got all these the language they use for this is just so awful. I’m going to say like it’s like why is it’s a studio? like it’s making I know know I’m in a bad mood, right? But like they but they call.

Ixchell Reyes (04:54.565)
You’re grumpy lately.

But no, you’re right. A studio, what can it be like a toolbox?

Brent Warner (05:02.667)
They call it a studio and then all of the things that are inside of there are called artifacts, right? And so it’s like, I don’t understand what that language comes from.

Ixchell Reyes (05:10.788)
They’re trying to be like chat GPT, well, other other other AIs call it artifacts. I think Claude AI or another one calls it artifact or I don’t can’t remember, but it’s like.

Brent Warner (05:15.018)
Is that, I don’t even.

Brent Warner (05:19.623)
Yeah, so it’s like, it would be better just to call it tools or something, toolbox and tools or something like that. Anyway, so regardless, so that’s got a bunch of things and we’re going to talk about several of those because I think everybody can kind of understand the chat box. But the studio and those tools, which are called artifacts, are kind of the interesting things that a lot of people are excited about or wanting to test. So you and I, shall we?

Ixchell Reyes (05:26.533)
toolbox.

Ixchell Reyes (05:46.862)
Right.

Brent Warner (05:47.475)
We built one before this episode based on a few resources, just publicly available stuff that this one, this example happens to be about shopping in a grocery store. several resources about that. But that’s how you and I kind of built this just to play with it and see, hey, what’s going on? What’s happening today in the end of January 26. So.

Ixchell Reyes (06:11.0)
Yeah, the way that I understand, sorry, Brent, but the way that I understand Notebook LM for people who haven’t used it is it’s like a digital notebook where you have your notes and you can interact with the notes and then build things out so that you can, again, interact. We’ll talk about the features, but everything is laid out in one place. It’s not a website. It’s almost like you can be…

Brent Warner (06:14.163)
Yeah, yeah, go ahead.

Brent Warner (06:31.466)
That’s right.

Ixchell Reyes (06:36.899)
talking to it and it’s going to be responding as you’re building things out within this notebook. So let’s go on to the features you’re going to mention.

Brent Warner (06:42.046)
Mm-hmm.

Brent Warner (06:46.793)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there’s a lot of features inside of here. And the first one, the big one, I think this is the most interesting one is the audio overview. So basically what it does is it makes these little podcasts. I think we mentioned this in the past too, but it makes these podcasts and it’s got a male voice and a female voice and they’re kind of going back and forth. sound very natural. sound like they’re kind of, they enjoy each other’s company, all those kinds of things.

Basically, it will make a podcast covering the content of what you’re talking, what you’re asking to talk about. And then the really cool feature inside of there is that you can interrupt the podcast, you can ask it questions, and then they will start responding to you. So it’s like, it’s almost like it’s a call in show and you’re like, hey, hold on a second, I want to talk about this a little bit, right? And so, so you can actually.

based on the content that’s inside of the sources, it will give you conversations back and forth and you can say, hey, wait, talk more about this, or I don’t understand the concept you’re talking about or whatever else it is. And so that is a super cool feature.

Ixchell Reyes (07:53.87)
Yeah, that’s the feature that got the most buzz when it first went public. was a podcast feature.

Brent Warner (07:57.796)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Yeah, the podcast itself first was good. then when they added in that speaking, that speak back and forth, I actually didn’t hear as many people. Yeah, I didn’t hear as many people talk about that part. And I’m like, wait a second, that’s way more valuable than just the, you know, what just the podcast, but regardless, still pretty useful. I thought we kind of talk a little bit about maybe how teachers might use that and then maybe how students might use it. so for me, I play with this a few times.

Ixchell Reyes (08:05.92)
Yeah, the interactive, yeah.

Ixchell Reyes (08:27.853)
Yeah, so build a podcast and so what, right? Click the button and so what.

Brent Warner (08:30.503)
Yeah, yeah, right. So yeah, so I thought I’ve done this a couple of times, which is uploading some research. So you and I, like on the show, we try and get like real research on information. So I’ve uploaded some research into it and then just on my drive, like my commute down to work, then I’ll listen to that overview. And they’re not super long. They usually make them like six to ten minutes or something like that. Yeah. OK, yeah, they’re.

Ixchell Reyes (08:52.46)
Six minutes, yeah. And I think you can adjust the length. The last time you could adjust the length.

Brent Warner (08:59.433)
Yeah, there are options to say like, do you want to do a deep dive? It’s actually pretty cool. many of these artifacts, they have an edit button or a pencil button, and then you can kind of choose how you want to customize it. So how do you want long, short? Do you want to do a deep dive? Do you want to do brief? It has an option to critique. It has an option to debate, right? And so there’s lots of different ways you could listen to the conversation. And so what appeals to you might be a good choice. But I think for teachers to be able to hear, you know,

Ixchell Reyes (09:01.366)
Mm-hmm.

Brent Warner (09:29.305)
less of the hardcore academic, just kind of dry way that some of these papers are put forward, and more of like a, hey, this is actually useful, it’s like hearing a good presenter talking about it, or in more practical daily terms. So I think that’s really useful.

Ixchell Reyes (09:50.658)
I am gonna say, Brent, that I notice the voices tend to have, they’re a very podcasty sound tone, and sometimes the female voice has a vocal fry. I don’t know if you noticed that she has a vocal fry.

Brent Warner (09:58.214)
yeah.

Brent Warner (10:05.469)
like, yeah, I try, I tried to get my vocal fry on. it’s not coming out right now. I’m a little, a little congested, but yeah. yeah. So it does have a little bit that going on. and so, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It is pretty good. So for our students, here’s the trick with a lot of this. None of this is built for language learners. Right. And so, so the,

Ixchell Reyes (10:16.811)
But that’s like what people sound like.

Brent Warner (10:28.764)
the pacing, the vocabulary choices, all of these things might be a little too high. And you can go in again with that edit button and say, like, you can actually ask it to say, like, hey, try to simplify the language. You know, I always use when I’m using these bots, I use the sephir scale. So I’d say, you know, use sephir A1, you know, try your best to adjust to that. does some of these works a little better than others. And so it kind of depends, right? So again, as a teacher,

Sure, no problem. understand all this stuff. But for my students, I kind of want to make sure and double check when I create anything if I’m going to share it out with them. But we also have some maybe. So you mentioned that too. What do you think about for students using this?

Ixchell Reyes (11:07.136)
right.

Ixchell Reyes (11:13.749)
think so far when I’ve shown students and I usually they’re my teachers teachers in training, they’re amazed by it and they tend to just use it for listening practice. I don’t know that they’re using anything else, but they’re using more of the academic English. Right now, I think it’s just novel to them. They may not quite be as creative with it. So I don’t know. But again, all of these tools are still again, kind of young tools, I guess.

Brent Warner (11:19.08)
Mm-hmm.

Brent Warner (11:32.231)
Mm-hmm.

Brent Warner (11:40.935)
Mm-hmm.

Ixchell Reyes (11:41.941)
So they’re just going to get better over time.

Brent Warner (11:44.56)
Yeah, and I think right now it’s still one of those things where it’s like, we’re not really grasping what this can do for us at a lot of levels. so, yeah, so. You know, I know, right? So here we go. OK, so that’s one of the tools that audio overview. think it’s a big one. We won’t spend as much time talking about all of them, but but we do want to kind of cover what’s going on. Yeah. Yeah.

Ixchell Reyes (11:51.84)
Other than create, you know, once we feed it all of our information next year, we’ll know what it can do

Ixchell Reyes (12:06.146)
That’s the biggest buzz. Yeah. So there’s a few others that I noticed are new since the last time I played with Notebook LM. And one of those is the video overview, which is pretty cool because again, you can create a video based on the sources that you fed to it. It will create, I don’t know, I think it created a, you and I went in there and you created a six minute video, right?

Brent Warner (12:21.168)
Mm-hmm.

Brent Warner (12:27.847)
Mm-hmm.

Brent Warner (12:34.704)
Yeah.

Ixchell Reyes (12:35.233)
And it was pretty cool. It took the important points of information about shopping at the grocery store and it, you know, pulled out a couple of idioms from there. But the issue we had was that it wasn’t editable and the layout was beautiful. Layout was beautiful. You don’t need to be a designer anymore because AI did it pretty well. But it wasn’t, yeah, it wasn’t editable. And I think that

Brent Warner (12:51.355)
Mm-hmm.

Ixchell Reyes (13:02.689)
That would be an issue because some of the language was not appropriate for, I don’t know, an A1 or depending on what your level of students are. And I thought maybe there was a little bit too much text overload in some of them. Better than humans, actually. Better than humans. I’ve seen some humans that try to kill you with bullet points, but this was pretty good. But it was just not editable.

Brent Warner (13:18.342)
Mm-hmm.

Brent Warner (13:22.619)
Yeah.

Yeah, that’s the big problem. So you can download it as an MP4, you can put it into your LMS, like it’s all, all that’s cool, but it’s like you get what you get. And so it’s kind of like you don’t have a choice. So, you know, it’s like.

All right, well, what if I don’t like it or what if I want to make a change? And we’ve seen this before with AI images, right? Where it’s like, I just wish that one little part changed. And now they have it where you can kind of highlight it and ask for that, but it doesn’t always look great. And it’s going to be that same problem. So what I’m really looking forward to is the day when these things are downloadable as multi-track downloads. And then you could upload it into and edit each item individually, right? That will be there someday.

Ixchell Reyes (13:46.624)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Ixchell Reyes (14:02.612)
can edit the items.

I guess you could, if you’re having, I don’t know, this is just me thinking out loud. You could have a student, if they’re looking for structure, you could see what structure it lays out the information in in the slides, because the slide deck was not overly lengthy. And you could then take ideas from there. I don’t know if that would save time, but for some students, working backwards might work, and then they might decide to actually build their deck somewhere else.

Brent Warner (14:19.899)
Mm-hmm.

Brent Warner (14:35.535)
Yeah, well, so with the videos you can’t really mess with the slide decks, right? Like you can’t do anything, right? Yeah, yeah, sorry, sorry. But yeah, they get overlapped with each other because basically the video is kind of a slideshow with a voice going over the top of it, right? It’s not like people moving around or there’s no motion graphics or anything like that. It’s pretty straightforward. anyways.

Ixchell Reyes (14:39.752)
I’m sorry, we’re talking about the video. Yeah, sorry. I jumped into slide deck.

Yeah.

Ixchell Reyes (14:49.929)
but like voiceover.

Brent Warner (14:57.818)
Kind of interesting, worth looking at. again, broad overview. It is an overview. It’s not going into depth. It’s not gonna go into the focus areas you wanna go to as a teacher. Maybe, maybe it will, maybe it won’t. Like you’re gonna be rolling the dice on that. all right. Quickly, Shel, I don’t think we have a lot to talk about with these two points here, but the mind map is one option, which I kind of thought like, okay, there are some places, like I don’t…

Ixchell Reyes (15:15.775)
Hmm.

Ixchell Reyes (15:20.105)
Hmm.

Brent Warner (15:23.146)
use a ton of mind mapping stuff in my classes a little bit here and there, or I think there’s some interesting ideas with it. like theoretically, if you’re talking about a grammar point, like you could break down the grammar. If you were doing a linguistics class, you could probably do a mind map to do like a, you know, like a actual language tree and build out like, you know, what’s the subject, what’s the verb, maybe, right? That might come out. But again, you know, I don’t know that I have a ton of uses. It’s just like, but

But if you’re out there and you’ve got the creative ideas, share them with us because we’d love to kind of think more about it.

Ixchell Reyes (15:57.309)
Yeah, if you’re using it, yeah, we haven’t played with all of them yet.

Brent Warner (16:01.795)
And then there’s also reports in there. Again, you know, it can make a report on kind of compiling your multiple sources inside of there.

Ixchell Reyes (16:08.586)
Wait a minute, I’ve used the report option. had, so I’ve been recently reading a lot of research on trauma in the adult ESL classroom and I had, I’d already read the articles and I had about 11 of them, some of them quite lengthy and I popped them in there and I asked for a report and it actually did a really good job of compiling the information that I had already started compiling and it ended up being lengthy but useful because now I’ve

Brent Warner (16:11.896)
Okay, what’d do?

Brent Warner (16:34.325)
good.

Ixchell Reyes (16:37.215)
I’m going through it and highlighting it and then going back to the source, like the actual source. So actually that it’s pretty good for research.

Brent Warner (16:42.221)
Nice. Great. Yeah, perfect. So again, more advanced for teachers doing research on their work. Wonderful. Beginning level students, maybe not so much, Okay, cool.

Ixchell Reyes (16:54.258)
Yeah, for academic though academic language. Excellent.

Brent Warner (17:00.036)
nice.

Ixchell Reyes (17:03.295)
Okay, so pretty soon in the spring, March 24 through 27, TESOL 2026 is happening in Salt Lake City, Utah. And you know who will be there? Not me, but not me. I know. What the heck? What the heck up? That’s what my nephew says. But Brent will be there. Brent will be there. Mm-hmm. Oh, that’s awesome. Last year was awesome.

Brent Warner (17:09.701)
Mm-hmm.

Brent Warner (17:13.829)
Ooh.

Not you. What the heck? What the heck?

Brent Warner (17:25.943)
I will be there. Yeah, I’m looking forward to it. I had a good time last year. Of course, part of the reason I had a good time was because you were there, so maybe it’s not going to be so great.

Ixchell Reyes (17:35.454)
And also I was in Long Beach. Mm-hmm, that was nice.

Brent Warner (17:39.173)
Yeah, it was close by, that was very nice. For me, anyways. But yeah, the Salt Lake City, I’m kinda looking forward to it, going out there, checking that out. I am going with some of my colleagues, so I will still have a fun time, and of course, any of you listening, I would love to talk to you, I know. But I can’t do a meetup without you, though, like… You can just grab me in the hallways, and we’ll have a meetup. Yeah, you can invite me to the bar, if you want, but…

Ixchell Reyes (17:52.808)
You need to have a meetup. You should have a meetup. No, you can’t. Find him, get some stickers, get some patches, take a selfie.

Bye Brent a drink!

Brent Warner (18:09.1)
Yeah, buy me drink. Maybe I need to buy them a drink for dealing with us. But anyways, yeah, TESOL. Yeah, there’s going to be a lot of good sessions there. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. So cool.

Ixchell Reyes (18:13.31)
Forget, buy me a coffee, buy me a drink. Yeah. So be there, be there or be square.

Brent Warner (18:26.041)
All right, so, Michelle, coming back to it, a couple other features inside of here, there is flashcards. So it can make you flashcards inside of there. Again, editable choices. if you go into the flashcards feature and then you’re going and using that.

the pencil button to make an edit on it. You can actually see like, hey, I want to make more cards or I want to make it easier, more difficult. But there is a thing inside of there. It says, what should the topic be? And so you can go by topic. But again, I did kind of successfully say like, hey, change the level so that it’s easy enough, like not.

Ixchell Reyes (18:56.062)
Mm-hmm.

Brent Warner (19:04.419)
not the difficulty of the questions, but the difficulty of the language. And we play with this in one or two places and we’re able to get some better responses, I think, than were available in the past. And so not perfect, but still like, hey, I want to play with this a little bit and figure it out. So there are some choices there.

Ixchell Reyes (19:08.274)
language.

Ixchell Reyes (19:23.599)
Again, I want to remind anybody who’s out there thinking, how is this different than Quizlet? Remember, you are uploading your own sources. So it’s your own material and you’re pulling out from material that you’ve already been using. So it’s not like you have to go type it into Quizlet or whatever other flashcard service is out there. Everything will be there. Plus you can change the format of whatever it is with all those tools. So it’s already in one place. It’s a notebook.

Brent Warner (19:30.552)
Mm-hmm.

Brent Warner (19:51.575)
Yeah. Can I also add something in here? I think we kind of skipped an important point. So you can actually share the whole notebook with your students or you can share the individual activities like those flashcards or the quiz. So if you have already kind of used it to build something, you’re like, this is really good. And you could just choose to share that one thing, which is really useful. Or you could say, hey,

Ixchell Reyes (19:53.839)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Ixchell Reyes (19:58.91)
yes!

Ixchell Reyes (20:03.554)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Brent Warner (20:16.085)
I want everybody to be looking with the same materials and playing around with their own things and so the sharing option is a big deal and I think we kind of skipped over it at the beginning.

Ixchell Reyes (20:18.662)
Mm-hmm.

Ixchell Reyes (20:24.605)
Yeah, absolutely. And I was going to say that another thing that maybe it’s very useful to know is that even though you may have loaded, let’s say 50 sources, right, you can ask it to only look at three or all 50. So again, you can customize how much information you want it to search. also have the quiz function. And again, this one is customizable.

Brent Warner (20:36.419)
Mm-hmm.

Brent Warner (20:39.884)
Yeah, yeah.

Brent Warner (20:44.897)
Yeah, there’s a lot of stuff in here.

Ixchell Reyes (20:51.92)
You’ve got to use the little pencil icon to ask for it to simplify the language. It also does have a explanation icon. So if your student gets the question wrong, it’ll guide them back to the resource where that information was. And we also noticed that it it knew when a source had a video. So then it pulled from the the transcript of the video and it asked the student from the video.

Brent Warner (20:56.45)
Mm-hmm.

Ixchell Reyes (21:19.163)
Why did this character have trouble such and such, et cetera, et cetera. So now the student can go to the video. And of course, you can customize it to only ask questions from a video.

Brent Warner (21:30.198)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I like that they have, yeah, they have a little hint button there at the bottom. And so really good for formative assessments, like just like, just check for yourself, see what you’re doing, see how well you got this, right? So I like that a lot. They also, this is the recent big one, Ixchell that’s been all over LinkedIn is the infographics. Have you seen some of those pop up online?

Ixchell Reyes (21:31.92)
Pretty cool.

Mm.

Ixchell Reyes (21:53.218)
No, I have not.

Brent Warner (21:55.2)
Yeah, I know you’re not as active on there, but like there’s there was this wave of everybody just making infographics on something, right? Like they were uploading their course content and like they’re they were uploading their syllabus. Yeah, putting it and then it was like maybe it’s really, really cool infographics. You maybe saw some. Mm hmm.

Ixchell Reyes (22:03.472)
You know what, may have, yeah, I may have seen the, mm-hmm.

Ixchell Reyes (22:11.142)
Did it look very AI-ish or was it professional?

Brent Warner (22:14.657)
It looked more arty than than like a traditional layout, right? So it was like it was that AI art style that you kind of see. But you know, you can you can still customize a little bit. But again, infographics to me, I love the idea of students building infographics because they’re thinking through the content and figuring out what it does as they’re doing the design. And so to me, like building a quick infographic is kind of.

Ixchell Reyes (22:34.683)
Mm-hmm.

Brent Warner (22:41.419)
beats the point in some ways, but it can be useful just to show some basic information and make it in a more visually appealing way. So there is an option for that as well.

Ixchell Reyes (22:52.732)
still like building my own. All right, and of course I mentioned the slide deck earlier. It is another version of the video except without the voiceover. But what we said was that it’s not customizable and that’s maybe a drawback,

Brent Warner (22:54.144)
Yeah, me too.

Brent Warner (23:05.856)
Mm-hmm.

Brent Warner (23:10.325)
Well, this can I, can I point out something that’s real weird about this? Why isn’t it just built in Google slides? Right? Like it, it makes a PDF and it’s like, it’s like, come on, guys. Like, well, it’s like, it’s like, it’s, it’s almost shocking. It’s like, how could you possibly have missed that this should be built like right into Google slides? Because then it would be fully editable and you could, you know, mix around the little parts and change little bits. And that would be wonderful. And instead it makes beautifully designed.

Ixchell Reyes (23:18.465)
Yeah, what the heck? Google, you listening? Google, you listening?

Ixchell Reyes (23:31.13)
Right.

Ixchell Reyes (23:35.739)
Mm.

Brent Warner (23:39.894)
but it makes a PDF that you cannot mess with at all, right? And so it’s like, well, all right, like fine. And what the heck, right? It is kind of my thinking with it. But it’s cool, again, beautiful, like pretty, but again, it might not be the exact parts of the things that you wanted to talk about. And so then again, you have to kind of play that cat and mouse game, like that dance of like, am I gonna get it to say what I want it to say?

Ixchell Reyes (23:41.051)
PDF.

Ixchell Reyes (23:48.985)
Yeah.

Ixchell Reyes (24:05.422)
Yeah, so, slide deck.

Brent Warner (24:07.457)
Yeah, but it is cool, right? Like again, all of these are cool, a little creativity, yeah, possibilities, really interesting things, and real places to play with it, for you as a teacher, and for your students. But let’s do just a couple takeaways Ixchell. I’m gonna start with some of mine. So number one, I think it’s useful, right? But like I said, I think one of the big problems is that not everything is customizable. I am…

Ixchell Reyes (24:24.526)
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, go for it.

Brent Warner (24:34.911)
very sure that’s gonna be in the future. Like it’ll just be, yeah, obviously you can go and mess with this and change what’s going on, what’s creating. It’s just not there yet. I would also warn my students that this is kind of, know, like if they’re gonna be playing with it, if I’m not putting the materials in there, even if I am putting the materials in there, it’s still not fully got, it’s AI generated, right? And right at the bottom of it, there’s still that note that says,

Ixchell Reyes (24:58.137)
Right?

Brent Warner (25:00.83)
Notebook LM can be inaccurate, please double check its responses. Even if it’s controlled of the content and information that we have, it still makes things like, like you put into our shared notebook, you said, hey, give me some idioms. And it just kept getting stuck on that deer in the headlights idiom.

Ixchell Reyes (25:18.404)
deer in the headlines and then then added something like a dozen which is not an idiom. It should have said a baker’s dozen perhaps. Yeah, so it’s still.

Brent Warner (25:24.201)
Yeah, Baker’s dozen or something. Uh-huh. Yeah, so it’s like a little funky, right? But it kept going back. It’s like really wanted to push that deer in the headlights idiom over and over again. It’s like, all right, well, I would probably say that once, you know? And like, it’s fun, but anyways. So yeah.

Ixchell Reyes (25:36.73)
Ha

Ixchell Reyes (25:42.66)
and also at the grocery store.

we’re talking about grocery store vocabulary.

Brent Warner (25:47.088)
Yeah, well, well again, yeah, so the AI logic, it does clarify, it says you might be in the store and looking at so many choices and feel like a deer in the headlights. And I’m like, okay, yeah, you would say that, right? Kind of, but it’s not really a shopping idiom. Anyways, so I would share parts of this with students. I would probably go in and do sharing individual.

Ixchell Reyes (25:56.395)
Yeah.

Ixchell Reyes (26:01.634)
All

Brent Warner (26:09.578)
Parts, like these tools or the artifacts that they call them, right? And say like, hey, here’s something for you to work with, here’s something to play with. You know, of course I can’t, you my students are welcome to use anything that’s available to them, but if I was using it proactively with my students, I might kind of focus in on the parts that I really think I like the control, like little quality control for it. That would probably be my approach.

Ixchell Reyes (26:34.424)
Yeah, and then my takeaways would be that I really, really, really like Notebook LM for exam prep where students have to review tons of information and retain their notes in one place. I actually think this would be excellent, especially for those students who have multiple modalities of how they review. I think it’s just great to have it all in one place. I also think it’s definitely more of a safe feeling because you know that it’s only looking at sources you put in.

Brent Warner (26:44.095)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Ixchell Reyes (27:03.669)
And again, sources must be vetted if the students are building their own, as Brent said. But that said, you definitely as a user need to spend time exploring before deploying. Because while this tool does save time, you still need to know the ins and outs, especially at the beginning, learning curves and stuff.

Brent Warner (27:16.415)
Hmm.

Brent Warner (27:27.284)
Yeah, spend a couple hours playing with it before you just say, hey, I’m going to open up in front of my class. But this should always be the advice, guess, right? Don’t just go blind. Yeah, we always say that, right? But jump into it. Give yourself the time because it is fun, right? It’s tons of fun. And especially if you kind of choose something like, hey, I’m actually studying this thing separately for myself. I’m going to test it out, play with it. I think there’s a lot to see here. So yeah, give it a try.

Ixchell Reyes (27:35.703)
Yeah, for anything. We’ve said this from the beginning. Poke the buttons, break everything.

Ixchell Reyes (27:56.546)
All right, it is time for our fun finds. And this time I have a flower. So Brent, have you ever heard of the kalina flower? Okay, so this kalina flower, can you pop a picture in there for people to see? So the kalina flower is this flower that looks like red berries. It almost looks to me like cranberries, but it is a Ukrainian flower.

Brent Warner (27:59.891)
Yay!

Ooh.

I have not heard of the kalina flower.

Brent Warner (28:11.987)
I believe I can.

Brent Warner (28:21.896)
Hmm.

Ixchell Reyes (28:25.753)
Right now it’s snowing in Ukraine and so these red flowers against the snow look quite beautiful. Scroll up, scroll up. It’s the first one. And yeah, and it’s just really, really pretty. And it stands for the resiliency of Ukrainian people and a lot of other things. But I just thought it was really cool because the name Kalina sounds really cool. So Kalina flowers. I don’t think we have them here. I know.

Brent Warner (28:34.213)
there you go. That one.

Brent Warner (28:50.526)
I would not have thought that’s a flower if I looked at it, but we’ll have a link to it, picture in the show notes. Cool. Very, very nice. I have a raspberry pie. So the little computer. And so I got this raspberry pie. know, everybody was doing raspberry pie stuff about

Ixchell Reyes (28:55.16)
It is. Yeah. What do have?

Ixchell Reyes (29:04.338)
no, no Raspberry Pi! dessert?

Brent Warner (29:19.519)
10 years ago, think. That was popular, but I didn’t really get it. I got it for, I mean, I did, but actually I’m interested in this tool that you can install on it called Home Assistant. So basically it automates all of your home stuff. You might have this set up with Alexa or Apple HomePod or whatever else it is, like some of the automation stuff, but.

Ixchell Reyes (29:20.066)
Ten years ago. That’s what I wanted! I wanted a raspberry pie!

Ixchell Reyes (29:43.394)
Home pod.

Brent Warner (29:47.177)
But basically this is a computer that does it separately and does not send all of your information and everything you’re saying to Jeff Bezos, which is kind of nice, right? He doesn’t…

Ixchell Reyes (29:55.222)
You know, as you’re saying this, Alexa just reminded me to go to bed. Really.

Brent Warner (30:01.342)
You know that Jeff Bezos actually just sits at a computer and he speaks everything and it just goes through Alexa’s voice. It’s pretty amazing. Anyway, so if you’re not aware, Alexa, for example, last year basically said, no, your information, whatever you’re saying in your house is not private, it’s going straight up to the cloud, all these kinds of things. And so I’m like, I wanna get away from these corporations kind of controlling and having all this data on me. And so there’s a big kind of open source community on this thing called Home Assistant.

Ixchell Reyes (30:04.247)
hahahahah

Brent Warner (30:30.268)
very basic and forgettable name, anyways, you can install it on a Raspberry Pi, have it all run out of your house. And so I am interested in that. And then there’s also another feature in there, which is you can turn on an ad blocker, which means that like anything that goes through your streaming services, if you have commercials coming up on your, you know.

Peacock or your Hulu or whatever that will just block those commercials out. I haven’t tried it yet So I’m it’s all got to get installed and things but it’s pretty interesting Yeah for sure Yeah

Ixchell Reyes (30:56.343)
Huh.

Ixchell Reyes (31:00.215)
We’re going to have to follow up on that. Very cool.

Ixchell Reyes (31:07.521)
Alright, for the show notes and other episodes, check out DIESOL.org slash 132. You can find us now on YouTube. Follow us, like us, we do respond. We actually respond a lot more on there. And thank you to everybody who sat through the last episode and listened to the tip on potatoes. We’re on most socials at DIESOL Pod.

Brent Warner (31:13.277)
Woo. Yay.

Brent Warner (31:22.383)
Yes, well…

You can find me on some of the socials at Brent G. Warner.

Ixchell Reyes (31:36.214)
And you can find me at xt underscore pixie, that’s I-X-Y underscore P-I-X-Y underscore. Two underscores guys,

Brent Warner (31:43.165)
Double underscore at the end, right? Yeah. All right, everybody. Thank you so much. It’s been a good time to learn a bunch of new things. And so get out there, check it all out. And, Ixchell, we’ll see you next time. February? Yeah, we’ll see you in February. right. Bye.

Ixchell Reyes (31:56.704)
See you in February.