AI in Education - Notebook LM and Speechify

For this project, I decided to try out 2 tools as they felt kind of similar to me and I wanted to see which I liked better. The 2 tools I tried out were "Speechify" and "Notebook LM".

Last week's lecture could not have come at a better time - I was quite a few chapters behind my readings for another class with an assignment due discussing those chapters and no matter how many times I sat down to read them I just couldn't get through it. After last lecture, I decided to download Speechify - mostly because I figured listening to Snoop Dogg read my textbook to me would be a lot more motivating than me reading it, and I was right. One thing I will note is that you do have to pay to use celebrity voices for your readings, but lucky enough there was a 3-day free trial. I signed up for it to see if it would be worth paying for. I really loved using it honestly. Once I used it for one class, I started using it for all my other classes and was able to listen to my readings in my car on the way to work or while I was cooking which was super helpful. Typically I don't like text-to-speech tools because they have been in the past really choppy and unnatural to listen to which doesn't help at all. None of the voices on speechify were like that - they were all very smooth, which allows you to focus more on what they're saying, not how they're saying it.

Overall, I think if you are constantly needing to read articles or wanting to, this subscription may actually be worth it. Additionally, this could be a really great tool for accessibility in the classroom (with or without the subscription). Some students struggle with reading and reading comprehension and if they have this tool, they may be able to understand more as they read.

Notebook LM is the other tool I tried, as I figured it was similar to Speechify in its capabilities. This tool takes articles or PDFs and turns them into podcasts for you to listen to. It also creates a summary of the document, questions about the document, document "briefs", and study guides out of the document. I think this could be such a great tool to use in the classroom for accessibility or even just to make lessons more engaging. Podcasts are such a huge thing today, so I think students would be able to engage a lot more with a podcast than they would a written article sometimes. The nice thing too is that this gives you options for how you prefer to get the information, which means that some students may choose the podcast, some may use the summary, some may use the original document.

Below, you can see what it looks like when you upload a document into Notebook LM and the features that you can use with that.

I found that while I was in my internship teaching science that I really liked to tie in current events or articles that the students could read so that they got a deeper understanding of the material and were able to connect with it more. However, what I found was that some students would get behind in these types of assignments because they struggled with reading comprehension and just reading in general sometimes. Since I was just starting my internship, I was pretty unfamiliar with the tools they had available to them, so I struggled to come up with tools they could use. These tools can both be so useful in the classroom as they can really help for accessibility purposes - but they also may just make the information more engaging for students.

My Perspective on AI in the Classroom

AI seems to be in a grey area for me in terms of its use in the classroom. I did my internship in a grade 11 classroom for the most part where students are very familiar with technology and the things that it can accomplish. The problem that came with that is they often used it as a crutch for their learning. What I found is that a lot of students would use AI to complete assignments instead of using their actual knowledge. Teaching science and having AI accessible to students was a unique challenge because if they used AI to answer their questions, it would take them much more in depth than we had gone in class. This could be a perk if used correctly, however I think it left them understanding less because the information AI gave them was far more advanced than what we discussed in class. The nice thing for me was that it made it a lot more easy to catch them cheating on assignments because I knew we didn't discuss it.

AI can really be a great tool, and I say that knowing that I have used it in many assignments to help me organize papers, create assignments and activities for students, and reword questions to help me understand more. Teaching students to use it for their benefit without cheating will be an extremely important task in the future. Balance is the tricky part in doing this, because we need to be able to show them how to use it, but still be able to show their learning.