Riding the AI Wave: Teaching with NotebookLM and Grammarly Authorship
You’ve heard the saying, “If you can’t beat them, join them.” That’s pretty much where I’ve landed with AI. Students are already using it, sometimes clumsily, sometimes brilliantly, so rather than pretending we can outsmart the bots, I’ve started figuring out how to make them work for learning instead of against it. Two tools I’m using this semester are NotebookLM and Grammarly Authorship.
NotebookLM has become a surprisingly effective tool for essay revision. Students upload their drafts and my feedback, then use the AI to ask targeted questions about how to improve their writing. Because NotebookLM only works with the sources they upload, it doesn’t pull anything from the internet, it stays focused on their words, their structure, and their feedback.
I give students simple prompts to get started:
- What changes could strengthen my thesis or organization?
- How can I make my evidence clearer or more convincing?
- What patterns do I notice in my instructor’s feedback?
What happens next is the part I love most: instead of relying on vague advice like “add more detail” or “work on transitions,” students begin to engage in their own revision process. NotebookLM gives them an accessible way to talk through the “why” behind my comments and to see their writing from a more analytical perspective.
Grammarly Authorship, on the other hand, helps me confirm that students’ writing actually sounds like them. It builds an authorship profile that tracks writing style and habits across drafts, which can be useful when a submission suddenly feels suspiciously polished. I use it less as a gotcha tool and more as a way to encourage students to develop and maintain their unique voice.
If you want to experiment with NotebookLM, you’ll need to use a personal Gmail account for now. It’s not yet available through Maricopa’s system. Go to notebooklm.google.com, create a notebook, upload a few documents, and start asking questions. You’ll get a good sense of how students can use it to think more critically about revision once it becomes available in our district. And I created a video for my students explaining how it works and how to get started with their revision assignment.
AI isn’t going away anytime soon, but tools like these can help us use it with students rather than against them. In other words, if you can’t beat the AI wave, you might as well ride it. Get it? Ride the wave. ?
Resources:
TYCA West Presentation: The Not-So-Distant Education – Blended Comp Courses That Rock!
Many community colleges have experienced a growth in students over the past few years, and with a limited number of classrooms available, many colleges are trying to find a way to accommodate the needs of all of these new students. We’ve managed to meet this need by offering more online and hybrid freshman composition courses. Online courses obviously are not for everyone, but what about blended learning? This presentation will demonstrate how I created and now teach blended composition courses that meet the needs of all types of students (dev-ed to honors) by incorporated good course design, gaming, challenged based learning, self directed learning and multimedia elements. I will discuss basic design steps for developing a blended course, as well as discuss the pedagogy and tools necessary to make it a success.
Tools discussed: Canvas, Connect Composition, Google+, GoSoapBox, Tegrity, YouTube, Piazza, SoundCloud, Camtasia Studio and SnagIt (Jing).
Topics Discussed:
- Course Design
- Gaming
- CBL
- Self Directed Learning
- Multimedia
Presentation Slides: TYCAWestBlendedCoursesRock.pdf
Students are Loving the Network
I’m trying out a social network in my ENG101 and ENG102 courses this spring. I’m trying to make English fun, but there are also some very useful features built into the Ning social network. So far I’m loving just about everything but the adds. I’m not ready to fork over cash to get rid of them, but if I can make a compelling enough argument, make my division chair might consider picking up the tab. We’ll see.
One thing that is really neat is that the students just naturally pick up on the fun things there are to do in there. I instructed that there were only two required parts: discussion forum and personal blog posts. Everything else they do is just for fun and up to you if you want to participate. Well, it didn’t take long for them to fill up the site slide show. It’s neat to see all their faces and their families too!
Find more photos like this on Freshman Comp
I’ve been using it to post my weekly podcasts too. It has an embeddable player that I can add mp3s to. I can either upload to the site or upload via a web link. I like to upload my content on my own servers and then link to it. This will save me later with having to deal with bandwidth and file size. Here’s our podcast player from the network.
Find more music like this on Freshman Comp
In case you’re wondering, most of the content in our class network is private, so content that students create for the class and a grade is private – only members can see it. But adding photos and videos is optional, not class related, and acknowledged that it will be public because it shows up on the front page. I could make the whole site including the front page private, but then my announcements won’t have a RSS feed and I won’t be able to subscribe and feed them into Blackboard or offer email subscriptions. So I leave the front page public, and protect the rest.
I’ll post more about this experiment as we play with it more. So far we’re all loving it.
