NotebookLM Is Now Gemini Notebook. I’m Confused

At Google I/O in May, I lost track of whether Google was announcing new products or renaming old ones.The announcement of Google Pics was a good example of this. Was it an evolution of Google Photos? A replacement for Google Images? Neither. It was a new tool that sounded similar and also overlapped on some functionality. I was confused. To be honest it doesn’t take much.Today Google has renamed NotebookLM to Gemini Notebook. At the same time, Gemini already has notebooks. A notebook inside Gemini is not quite the same experience as the standalone NotebookLM product, now Gemini Notebook, but the two are connected and synchronized. So are they different products or do we now have Gemini Notebooks and Notebooks in Gemini. I’m confused again. But I think renaming NotebookLM is ultimately a good move.The Tool Formerly Known As NotebookLMI think NotebookLM, sorry Gemini Notebooks, is the most useful AI tool available to educators.I start almost every workshop with it. Teachers and leaders tend to understand its value quickly. They bring their own material, ask questions about it and follow citations back to the original sources. It feels less like asking a chatbot to know everything and more like working through documents with a capable research assistant.I have seen educators use it to build courses, examine school data, learn unfamiliar topics and turn existing material into resources for students. The uses vary because the starting point is whatever the educator already has.That helps explain why Google says more than 30 million people and 600,000 organizations now use it. Audio Overviews widened the audience by turning source collections into conversations between two synthetic hosts. Strange at first, but often useful.Notebooks With Cloud Computer AccessGoogle is also giving each notebook access to a secure cloud computer. Gemini Notebook can write code, run it and use the results to analyze the sources inside a notebook. It moves the product from...