Google’s NotebookLM can produce genuinely impressive slide decks. The design is clean, the layouts are polished, and it pulls together source material in a way that would take a teacher a good chunk of an afternoon to replicate manually. There is, though, one fairly significant catch: you cannot edit the slides it produces. The text and graphics are baked together into a single image on each slide. If you want to change a word, correct a label, or adapt the content for your class, you are stuck.
Unless, that is, you have access to Canva Pro. There is a workaround that gets you from a locked NotebookLM PDF to a fully editable set of slides, and it is more straightforward than you might expect.
Here is how it works.
What You Will Need
You need a NotebookLM slide deck that you have already created, and a Canva Pro account. If your school uses Canva for Education, check whether your account includes access to premium features (those marked with a small crown icon). Most full Canva for Education accounts do include these, but it is worth confirming before you start.
Step One: Download Your NotebookLM Slides as a PDF
Open your slide deck in NotebookLM. Click the three dots in the top right corner of the presentation and select the option to download as a PDF. The file will save to your device in the usual way. This is your starting point.
Step Two: Import the PDF into Canva
Switch over to Canva. You do not need to create a new project first. Simply drag your PDF file directly onto the Canva home screen or into an open canvas and Canva will upload and open it automatically. Each slide from your presentation becomes a separate page within Canva.
Step Three: Use the Grab Text Feature
This is where the Canva Pro account earns its place. Navigate to the page you want to edit and click on it. Along the left-hand panel, select the option to see all tools. Scroll down until you find “Grab Text.” This is a premium feature, so look for the crown icon to confirm it is available to you.
Once you click Grab Text, you have two options. You can click on individual blocks of text to make just those sections editable, or you can select “All Text” to convert every piece of text on that page at once. Click Grab and Canva will separate out the text elements from the background graphic, making each one independently editable.
From there, you can click into any text block and change it as you would in any design tool. Correct a label, update a date, swap out a term that does not quite match the vocabulary your class has been using. Any changes you make are saved within your Canva project.
A Note on the Process
This works on a page-by-page basis, so if you have a long deck you will need to apply the Grab Text step to each slide individually. It adds a little time, but for a deck you are planning to use more than once, or one where accuracy really matters, it is well worth the extra few minutes.
It is also worth noting that the underlying graphic on each slide stays intact. You are editing the text layer on top of it, not redesigning the slide itself. The visual style of the NotebookLM output is preserved, which is actually one of the advantages of this approach.
Classroom Application
1. Adapt slides for your specific class. NotebookLM generates content from your sources, but the vocabulary or level of detail might not be quite right for your year group. Once your slides are editable in Canva, you can adjust the language to match what your pupils have already encountered, without starting from scratch.
2. Correct subject-specific terminology. AI-generated content occasionally uses terminology that is slightly off for the UK curriculum, or that does not match the phrasing in your scheme of work. This workflow gives you a quick way to fix those inconsistencies before the slides go in front of a class.
3. Create differentiated versions. With editable text, you can duplicate your Canva project and produce a simplified version of the same slide deck for pupils who need more accessible language, or an extended version for those who need more detail. One source deck, multiple outputs.
Notebook LM slides finally editable with Canva
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