NotebookLM with Purpose: A Community-Centered Course for Organizing Knowledge, Memory, and Voice

Objective

Program

• Module 0: Welcome to the Course This module introduces the course, its purpose, and the learning journey. Participants understand what they need to begin, how the course is organized, and why NotebookLM can be useful for community work, documentation, and collective memory.
• Module 1: What Is NotebookLM and What Is It For? Participants learn what NotebookLM is, how it works, and what makes it different from a search engine, word processor, or social network. The module explains how NotebookLM can help transcribe, summarize, organize, ask questions, and create content from uploaded sources.
• Module 2: How to Create Your First Digital Notebook This module guides participants step by step in accessing NotebookLM, creating their first notebook, naming it clearly, and understanding the main interface: sources, chat, and workspace.
• Module 3: How to Upload and Organize Your Sources Participants learn how to upload different types of sources, including documents, PDFs, audio files, videos, links, Google Docs, and pasted text. The module also covers source limits, summaries, renaming, deleting, and organizing materials.
• Module 4: How to Have a Conversation with Your Documents This module teaches participants how to use the chat to ask questions about their sources. It covers content questions, summaries, comparisons, writing requests, organization prompts, source references, and how to verify where information comes from.
• Module 5: Creating Good Prompts — The Key to Better Answers Participants learn what a prompt is and how to write stronger instructions using the formula: context, clear instruction, expected format, and style or condition. The module includes before-and-after examples and prompts for different community needs.
• Module 6: Organizing Your Ideas Visually This module introduces NotebookLM’s visual and study tools, including concept maps, timelines, and automatic study guides. Participants learn how these tools help them see relationships, sequences, key concepts, and learning questions.
• Module 7: Notes, Citations, and Advanced Organization Participants learn how to create notes inside a notebook, save important quotes, organize multiple notebooks, use clear naming systems, export work, and manage information more effectively across projects.
• Module 8: From Your Voice to Your Podcast — Audio Overview This module teaches participants how to record and upload audio, generate an Audio Overview podcast, customize tone and audience, download the audio, obtain transcriptions, and use scripts in other voice tools.
• Module 9: How to Protect What We Share Participants reflect on privacy, cloud storage, sensitive information, consent, anonymization, and ethical use. The module offers concrete practices for protecting people, communities, and collective memory when using digital tools.
• Module 10: Facilitating Sessions with Other Women This module prepares participants to share what they have learned with others. It covers how to plan a session, create a safe learning environment, facilitate with care, support different learning rhythms, and follow up after a workshop.
• Module 11: Community Use Cases — Real Examples Participants explore practical examples of how NotebookLM can support community work, including documenting testimonies, preparing workshops, systematizing meetings, creating radio content, supporting research, advocacy, legal defense, and preserving ancestral knowledge.
• Module 12: Closing — Your Journey Continues The final module reviews the full learning journey, invites personal reflection, helps participants define next steps, and closes with a commitment to continue practicing, sharing, and using NotebookLM with purpose, care, and community responsibility.
• Course certificate