Eric Curts has produced a whole series of graded readers for learners of English (25 to date) by giving very detailed instructions to NotebookLM.
You can access them here Control Alt
Achieve: Making Graphic Novels with Gemini and NotebookLM
As you will see Eric Curts has produced and shared a wide
range of other resources for language learning, but for the moment let me just show
you a short extract from the instructions for NotebookLM:
The Indestructible Moss Piglet
[COVER PAGE]
- Title:
The Indestructible Moss Piglet
- Visual
Description: A stunning 16:9 wide composition. A split background: The
bottom left is a lush, green, textured moss forest painted in soft gouache
strokes. The top right fades into a deep, velvety dark blue space with
soft white splatter stars. In the center, bridging both worlds, is Terry
the Tardigrade (a chubby, squishy, microscopic water bear, painted in soft
pastel teal and mint green with visible brush strokes, eight stubby legs,
and a round snout). He looks happy and is floating as if swimming. The
title is written in playful, hand-cut paper letters with soft edges.
- Style
Note: Soft Gouache & Pastel, textured collage, visible brush
strokes, no hard black outlines, dreamy atmosphere.
I’d be interested to know how Gemini can help drafting these
very detailed prompts! If you want to see the complete instructions. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aQgasTqUvQGubFJIu-8zVbvCuHWMV7H9k0mUn43EUwk/edit?usp=sharing
Teachers of English are lucky that, as Eric says, there are
hundreds of professionally written, illustrated and published readers, but in
many less studied languages there are far fewer.
For example, in Catalan, although there are some excellent
publishers of graded readers, there are nothing like as many as there are for
English. So, I wondered if Eric Curts’
readers could be repurposed for learners of Catalan.
Here is his original https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PHPk9kBJ5owGAG93XZ9-pIHdcJJHihTI/view?usp=sharing
Here is the result of asking NotebookLM (Studio - Slide
Deck), “Can you make a version in Catalan? Using the same graphics” It produced
a pdf file like the original, but I am sharing it as a 30-second video
crediting Eric Curts
