A common challenge that faculty members face is supporting students’ engagement with course material, whether it’s complexity, volume, or some combination of the two.

John FitzGibbon, Director of Digital Learning Innovation & AI at CDIL and part-time Instructor of Political Science at Woods College, has previously discussed how he uses Gemini Notebook in his course to help students comprehend dense research articles and apply political science concepts critically in “Scaffolding Success: Using Gemini Notebook to Support Learning in Political Science.”

Here are a few other ways that faculty at BC are using Gemini Notebook in their courses. If you’re interested in thinking through how to use Gemini Notebook in your classroom, you can register for upcoming sessions here.

Patricia Reid Ponte

Associate Professor of the Practice, CSON (recently retired) & Part-Time Faculty, Master of Healthcare Administration (WCAS)

I’ve created about ten notebooks with resources for two graduate-level courses I am teaching now and in the fall (NURS7006, the Role of the Professional Nurse in Diverse Healthcare Environments, and ADHA7040, High Reliability Healthcare: Quality Improvement Methods and Tools).

I have used Gemini Notebook in a synchronous Zoom session for student groups to create a teaching activity for peers using a Notebook I created with resources. This Notebook includes resources on Ethics and Moral Reasoning, Moral Courage, Social Justice, and Inequities, as well as the Nursing Code of Ethics and several papers assigned to students for this two-week module.

This course has 50 students, and they work in groups of five. I have shared the notebook with them using the course registration email. I ask them to access and open the notebook for a group learning activity during a Zoom session in breakout rooms. Notebook LM takes five to ten minutes to produce an artifact, so I inform the students and give them a bit more time than usual during their breakout session. Given that it takes about 10 minutes for the Notebook to generate an output in the “studio,” and given that the sources used to generate the output are all the same, it makes sense to direct groups to generate different types of output or generate outputs based on different requests.

They then work together in groups to generate a teaching sheet, a slide presentation, or talking points on a specific subject matter related to the current learning module.

Andrea Buenaño

Part-Time Faculty, M.S, in Sports Administration (WCAS)

I initially started using Gemini Notebook as a supplementary tool for my students, giving them access to articles, websites, and other resources beyond what’s covered in the textbook, especially since the world of sports is constantly evolving and textbooks can quickly become outdated. Last summer, Gemini Notebook was still quite new, but I saw it as a fantastic way to quickly upload diverse materials and give students a mind map and a concise overview of the readings.

What I found especially valuable is how students can interact with the tool in various ways. For example, they can listen to a podcast feature, which is perfect for those times when they’re commuting or otherwise unable to sit down with the readings. This allows them to get a solid overview on the go, and later, if they’re interested, they can look up the specific articles the information comes from. Or even interact with the audio overview in real time.

This summer has brought some exciting upgrades. Now, I’m able to add students to a Google group and grant them access all at once, which is so much easier than the previous process, where I had to share access individually. The ease of sharing has really cut down on the time students spend tracking down readings, and it allows them to use the notebook as an external resource for their assignments and discussions. Personally, I’ve even started uploading some of my own articles just to create audio overviews for myself, which I find useful during my commute.

One of our ongoing professional development offerings at CDIL on GenAI is Gemini Notebook Sandbox, where participants explore different teaching and learning applications of Google’s Gemini Notebook. Please check out our website for more information on different programming here.