How Students Use NotebookLM—and How Hypothesis Returns their Learning to the Classroom

NotebookLM is a revolutionary tool used by college students and educators across disciplines. During recent Liquid Margins episodes and sessions at AnnotatED, the Hypothesis team learned more about how faculty are using NotebookLM alongside social annotation in their courses. Here are a few of those conversations if you’d like to take a look:

• Michael Thompson, Chabot College in Annotation in Action from AnnotatED 2025
• Diana Fordham, Missouri Southern State University in Liquid Margins 50: Transforming OER with AI and Social Annotation

Building on these conversations, this video-based blog post offers a practical guide to getting started with NotebookLM. 

While NotebookLM excels at supporting student-driven learning, it can also lead to siloed experiences, distancing students from the collaborative context of the classroom. We’ll explore how to bridge that gap by demonstrating how to integrate NotebookLM’s artifacts—like AI-generated podcasts and summaries—into your Hypothesis LMS app, turning individual insights into shared learning opportunities for your entire class.

How to: Get Started with NotebookLM

First, let’s review the basics of NotebookLM. If you’re completely new to the tool, this video will provide a helpful overview of how your students are using NotebookLM. If you’ve already familiar with it, skip to the next video.

How To: Use Hypothesis Social Annotation with NotebookLM 

In this video, we’ll review some options for incorporating NotebookLM artifacts into your Hypothesis LMS app. Keep in mind that we’re only scratching the surface here – this video is not exhaustive, and there are certainly other ways to use social annotation with this technology. 

How To: Annotate NotebookLM Podcasts with Canvas Studio

One downside of NotebookLM’s transcript feature is that it doesn’t timestamp its AI-generated transcript. In our last example for this blog, we demonstrate how to incorporate NotebookLM podcasts into Canvas Studio to enable Hypothesis annotation by timestamp.

If you don’t have access to Canvas Studio, an alternative strategy would be to convert NotebookLM’s .wav file to one compatible for YouTube upload. The YouTube video can then be incorporated into the Hypothesis LMS app for collaborative transcript annotation.

We look forward to hearing about the ways that you are incorporating AI and social annotation into your classroom. Feel free to join the conversation on this page with our Hypothesis web app extension!