Imagine this: your Spanish II students are listening to a podcast explaining La Tomatina, filled with humor, authentic vocabulary, and a clear summary at the end—all created in minutes with free AI tools. Or your newcomer multilingual learners are tuning into audio summaries of social studies content in their home language, building confidence and comprehension simultaneously. This is not a futuristic fantasy—this is what’s possible now thanks to the latest updates in Generative AI!
Podcasts, when thoughtfully designed, provide students with rich, scaffolded input they can return to again and again. With Generative AI tools like Briskteaching, Google’s Notebook LM, and Illuminate, language teachers can now generate their own multilingual audio content—and empower students with access to high-quality, comprehensible input based on how they prompt.
Let’s explore 🎧
1. Briskteaching – Chrome Ext – https://www.briskteaching.com
Brisk’s “Podcast” tool under “Create” allows you to upload a single source (think: article, YouTube transcript, or PDF) and turn it into a podcast-style audio file.
- Choose the language of output—Spanish, French, Italian, Mandarin, and more.
- Prompt the AI to make it engaging—you can add jokes, casual tone, or specific voice styles.
- Edit the transcript to ensure comprehensibility and i+1 language use, making it just the right level for your language learners
Ideal for: World Language teachers creating cultural episodes, or ESL/ML teachers simplifying one key resource in students’ home languages.
2. Google’s Notebook LM – https://notebooklm.google
Notebook LM introduced audio overviews in over 50 languages, with interactive features in beta! Educators can:
- Upload up to 50 different sources (slides, PDFs, Google Docs, websites).
- Synthesize them into digestible notes and now audio episodes for students.
- Use interactive mode to pause and ask the AI clarifying questions mid-audio.
Ideal for: ML teachers curating background knowledge across content areas, or WL teachers building thematic units with multiple authentic texts.
3. Google Illuminate (Beta) – https://illuminate.withgoogle.com
Illuminate pulls from URLs only (not files), so it’s great for current events or websites. While the default language is English, you can interact with the audio hosts by clicking a hand icon to ask questions live.
Ideal for: High school MLs developing academic listening skills, or enrichment opportunities in ELA or history with teacher guidance.
Creating the podcast is just step one. With this content, let’s break down a few pre-during-post interpretive listening activities for our language learners.
Before Listening
- 🔍 Prediction Prompt: “Based on the title and keywords, what do you think you’ll hear?”
- 🧠 Word Cloud Warm-Up: Use key vocabulary from the transcript to build background knowledge.
During Listening
- 🎧 Transcript Match: Give students a transcript with missing words or mixed-up phrases to follow along.
- 🖐️ Pause & Reflect: In interactive modes (like Notebook LM), stop and ask, “What would you ask the speaker now?”
After Listening
- 🎙️ Create a Summary: Students record their own 30-second TL summary of the podcast.
- 🗺️ Visualize It: Students draw a graphic organizer to include main ideas and supporting details OR students can create a three image visualization highlighting the beginning, middle and end of the podcast they heard.
- 🤝 Peer Interviews: In pairs, students create T/F statements based on the content and/or questions to ask. Turn this into “Quiz-Quiz-Trade” for some movement!
Essentially, any type of scaffolded, comprehensible input rich resource you are looking to create is now easily possible. Whether it’s a comprehensible text, reading, song, images, podcast – there are so many amazing possibilities to customize your creations and better fit the needs of your language learners. With multilingual podcast creation at our fingertips, we have a new way to differentiate instruction, support diverse learners, and embed culture-rich, meaningful input into our classrooms.
Have you created an AI-generated podcast in your classroom? Drop a comment below!
You can also access an array of helpful Generative AI tutorial videos by subscribing to my YouTube channel! https://www.youtube.com/@team_lologramosAnd! Dive deeper with me by becoming a member of the AI Innovator Community for Language Educators, with a special kickoff event — the AI Summit for Language Educators on August 6th, 2025. It’s an event designed for collaboration, conversation, and real classroom application, and I’m excited to lead these incredible learning opportunities specifically for language educators. We will offer a digital swag bag for all attendees and have a concluding prize raffle. The best part is our summer learning event is donation-based, and we are raising money to help support students in public education! I can’t wait to learn, grow, and S.O.A.R with these new possibilities, together!
