Ask the Handbook via Gemini Notebook

 

Turning Our Handbooks Into a Q&A Tool with Gemini Notebook

Summer PD at the Local Education Cooperative

Since returning to education over the past year, AI has been quite the topic of discussion. While very proud I had successful collaborations with teachers this past year, I wanted to know more so I could become a stronger AI teaching partner and asset for the learning community. I decided to attend a few summer professional development sessions via Dawson Education Cooperative in Arkadelphia, Arkansas. 

I decided to attend one in person session with Brian Buffington and two virtual sessions with Arkansas' own Dr. Tyler Tarver. I have to admit, I was excited to attend an in person session since it had been so many years since I'd last attended one in person. Brian's session was great! We learned about so many wonderful tools. The ones that stood out to me were Gemini Notebook, Suno (music/ songwriting generation AI tool), and Canva. I had a similar experience with Dr. Tarver's virtual sessions. He took a deeper dive into Gemini Notebook which is exactly what I needed.

I enjoyed learning more about Google's tool for building AI notebooks. It is a tool that is grounded in your own documents, recently renamed from NotebookLM. I'd played with it before for personal projects, but sitting in these sessions with the instruction from Tyler and Brian, it clicked that this was a librarian tool as much as a classroom tool. Curating sources, organizing information, and helping people find trustworthy answers...that's the job description. This is just a different format for it.

What Gemini Notebook Actually Does

For anyone who hasn't used it: you upload documents (PDFs, Google Docs, slides, even websites) as "sources," and Gemini Notebook builds a chat interface that only answers based on what you gave it. It's not pulling from the open internet or guessing . Every response is grounded in your source material, and it shows you exactly which document and page it pulled from.

A few features that make it especially useful for a school setting:

  • Source grounding: answers come only from what you upload, not general web knowledge, so you don't get generic or unrelated information mixed in.
  • Citations: every answer links back to the specific page or section it came from, so you can verify it yourself in seconds.
  • Sharing controls: you can share a notebook with people in your Google Workspace domain, or make it public with a link for anyone with a Google account.
  • Multiple source types: handbooks, policy PDFs, slide decks, even recorded meetings can all live in the same notebook.

What If We Put the Student Handbook and Faculty Handbook In It?

I began to wonder how it might work with a student handbook or faculty handbook. That's the experiment I decided to try. I loaded our student handbook and faculty handbook, both of which are already posted publicly on our district website, into a single notebook. No student data, no confidential records, just the two policy documents every teacher is supposed to know about but rarely has time to actually read cover to cover in August.

Then I tried asking it the questions I remember struggling with as a new teacher to the district last year:

  • "How many sick days do I get as a teacher?"
  • "How many personal days am I allowed?"
  • "I saw a student on their phone in the hall during school hours. What does the handbook require me to do?"

I specified for the program to tell me the page the information is located within the source documents so I could verify. Every answer came back clearly, in plain language, with a direct pointer to the page in the handbook it came from. Instead of a new teacher skimming a PDF hoping they land on the right section, they get a starting answer and a citation to confirm it.

Practical Uses and Caveats

I need to be transparent about the limits here, because I think that's part of modeling good AI use for teachers:

It's not perfect. It's a language model summarizing and pulling from documents, and like any tool, it can misread nuance or phrase something in a way that doesn't quite match the policy's intent. That matters most on higher-stakes questions like student discipline, mandatory reporting, anything with real consequences if a teacher gets it wrong.

So the habit I'm trying to build into how I introduce this tool is: treat the answer as a starting point, not a final ruling. Be sure to always click through and read the cited page yourself. That's not a workaround for a flaw in the tool; it's actually the whole point of it being source-grounded in the first place. The citation is there so you don't have to just trust the AI, you can verify it in one click.

A few other practical notes for anyone trying this in their building:

  • Get sign-off from your administration before sharing it broadly, even if your source documents are public. I checked with my principal before rolling this out, and having that support up front made this an easy yes.
  • Only use public documents as sources if you're planning to share the notebook widely. Anything containing student-specific or confidential staff data shouldn't go into a broadly shared notebook.
  • If your staff and student Google accounts live on different domains, domain-restricted sharing won't reach across that divide. Even attaching the notebook in Google Classroom doesn't get around it. Making the notebook public (shareable by link to anyone with a Google account) is the workaround, since it doesn't rely on domain matching.

Student Uses and Next Steps

Right now this is aimed at new teachers, but the same approach could easily extend to students. Loading a handbook into its own notebook so students can ask their own questions about attendance policy, dress code, or academic honesty expectations, with the same page-level citations built in.


My next steps:

  • I made a video walk through that I've shared on this page
  • After talking to my principal about this, he has invited me to present this and other AI tools to our teachers during startup professional development. I am super excited about this opportunity to connect with teachers!
  • I will keep this squarely in the "librarian as instructional partner" lane as this is less about the specific tool and more about what school librarians are already good at: organizing information and helping people find trustworthy answers to real questions.

If you're a school librarian sitting in your own summer PD session right now wondering what to do with an idea like this, this is your sign to just try it with one small document set first. You don't need district-wide buy-in to start; you just need one notebook and one good question. I think this can easily position us school librarians as instructional partners in the building. AI is here and evolving so fast it takes all of us working together to stay informed. My principal wants us embracing AI when appropriate and showing students ethical uses of the tools. That is exactly what I am getting after in 2026-2027. I want the library program to be part of the solution! How are you helping teachers with technology in your building? Be sure to add your stories in the comments below.


My table of contents for the blog is here!



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