Back-to-school BYOB

Hello there, fellow learners and educators!

It's that time of year again. Back-to-school season is in full swing, and whether you're a student cramming for exams or a teacher prepping lesson plans, we've got something game-changing to chat about.

Today, we’re highlighting some practical, no-fluff AI tools that can supercharge your learning and teaching, without just leaning on a chatbot to answer your homework questions.

In this age of AI, why settle for the same old grind when you can leap ahead of 99% of your peers?

Think of this newsletter as your cheat sheet to turning AI into your ultimate study buddy.

If you appreciate the help, consider upgrading to a paid subscription.

Let's dive in, shall we?

First off, let's tackle note-taking because, honestly, it's the backbone of any solid education journey.

I’ve learned to love and appreciate note-taking as more than just a way to not forget, but a way to make it easier on myself later. This quote from Tiago Forte, founder of Forte Labs, comes to mind a lot:

Spot on, right? As a student, you've probably drowned in messy notebooks or scattered Google Docs. Teachers, you know the pain of grading disorganized student work.

Enter Notion, your super flexible, all-in-one powerhouse to build your second brain.

Notion has been adding some AI features lately, but its real value is as a customizable universe for your brain. A simple way to start is with their template store for ready-made setups tailored to students, teachers, or others.1

I love Forte's Building a Second Brain (BASB) system — it's all about capturing ideas, organizing them, and retrieving them effortlessly. Or check out LifeOS templates for a holistic life management vibe.

Part of the magic of saving all your notes in Notion is its universal search. Imagine having years of notes you can effortlessly search through! It’s been life-changing for me.

Notion is also meant to be designed in your own way. From nested databases, linked pages for project overviews, embeds for videos and also custom stylizing — you can make Notion into a learning headquarters that is personal and truly yours.

Students, imagine reviewing for finals without flipping through paper chaos. Teachers, use it to share interactive syllabi and associated material.

Pro tip: Start with a simple 1 database with daily notes if you are brand new. It’s simple and it's free to start, so no excuses. It’ll level up your study game.

Some of us need to see ideas before they click in our heads.

Globe.Engineer auto-builds a visual map the moment you type a topic, then peppers each branch with royalty-free images and diagrams. Type “plate tectonics,” and voilà: a canvas of related images to all topics in and around tectonic plates and movements. You still see the nested topics on the left and the actual images explaining them on the right.

Unfortunately, the company never made much money and is shutting down on September 1. But you’ve got one month to pull a bunch of cool images to populate your lesson plans.

I’m also on the lookout for a new visual topic exploration tool. If anyone has a good one they’re using, drop it in the comments section.

Raise your hand if you highlight half a PDF, promise to revisit it, and never do. That used to be me.

I now use Readwise to scoop highlights from PDFs, books, web articles, and even scanned papers, and then use their summaries and flashcard features to remember the information better.

It also pipes everything into Notion automatically, so the quote you grabbed from Brave New World shows up right beside tomorrow’s biology notes.

If your YouTube “Save for Later” list is a black hole, NoteGPT is the escape pod.

Paste a video link and the tool whips up a transcript, key-point summary, and a friendly chat interface so you can ask, “Explain that proof again but simpler” or “Give me three real-world examples.”

It’s a frictionless way to harvest lectures, conference talks, or that 90-minute economics explainer while you walk the dog.

It’s also a Chrome plugin that you can add to your browser, and it shows up right inside YouTube. It’s a real game-changer for us YouTube university students.

OpenAI’s new Study Mode flips the script: Instead of spitting out the answer, ChatGPT leads you step-by-step toward the answer, checking your understanding as you go.

Start by telling it, “I’m a 10th-grader who struggles with logarithms,” and it will build a custom curriculum, complete with practice problems and tiny “mini-quizzes” that adapt to your mistakes.

Teachers, think of it as differentiated instruction on autopilot that you can still supervise.

Google’s Gemini team rolled their best generative models right into Classroom and Workspace.

Highlights:

For homeschool parents, Gemini can scaffold an entire semester, complete with assessments and even class-wide “chatbots” trained on your own curriculum.

Here’s a lightning workflow you can steal:

Total setup time: maybe an hour.

Time saved (and headaches avoided) over the semester: priceless.

AI can feel overwhelming; there’s always another buzzword to learn, another account to create.

But think of these tools as extensions of classic study hacks: spaced repetition, visual mapping, active recall and differentiated instruction. The tech just shrinks the friction to nearly zero.

So whether you’re diagramming cell structures, writing your first AP History lesson, or plotting a PhD lit review, try slotting one (or all) of these apps into your routine. You’ll spend less time finding information and more time making sense of it.

And that, friends, is how you lap 99% of your peers without pulling an all-nighter.

Good luck, have fun, and may your coffee be strong and your Wi-Fi stronger.

Big-time investment: Pinal County could soon be home to Arizona’s largest data center project, the Arizona Republic’s Corina Vanek reports. The land development company Vermaland announced plans for a “data center corridor” between Tucson and Phoenix, starting with a $33 billion project that would cover 3,300 acres near Eloy, including huge tracts of land set aside for solar arrays to power the data centers, KJZZ’s Greg Hahne reports. Those solar arrays are a key piece of the puzzle as the national conversation about AI turns toward how much electricity data centers use. Axios Phoenix tracked the rising cost of electricity around the country and Arizonans had one of the smallest increases in their electric bills, but the Arizona Corporation Commission and other state officials are preparing for costs to spike. Meanwhile, the Tucson City Council unanimously rejected a plan to annex 290 acres to welcome Project Blue, a proposed Amazon Web Services data center project, after the project became toxic with voters in town, the Tucson Agenda writes.

Hold, please: AI could help elections officials reach voters, Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said at a conference in Mississippi this week, per Stateline. He pointed to saving staff time on answering phones, for example, and avoiding missed calls from voters. His office’s chatbot interacted with voters 655,000 times about the 2024 elections, answering questions about early voting, in-person voting locations and other voting issues.

Quite a gamble: Former White House correspondent Jim Acosta “interviewed” an AI-generated avatar of Joaquin Oliver, who was shot and killed in the Parkland high school mass shooting in 2018, the Washington Post reports. Acosta published a video of the interview in his Substack newsletter, saying, “I really felt like I was speaking with Joaquin.” Oliver’s father asked Acosta to do the story as a way to keep the memory of his son alive, but Acosta took some heat from critics who called it “ghoulish.” Earlier this year, the family of a Chandler man who died in a road rage incident created an AI avatar so he could “speak” at a sentencing hearing.

Taking stock: More than a dozen researchers at the Brookings Institution weighed in on President Donald Trump’s AI Action Plan. They analyzed the “free speech” clause in the plan, how the plan would affect financial markets, and the impact of gutting National Science Foundation grants as the U.S. tries to win the AI race, among other issues. Over at the American Enterprise Institute, they organized a panel of experts to dissect the AI Action Plan. The general vibe was “bullish,” with a side of concern about how it all would actually be put in place.

OpenAI has just gift-wrapped two new “do-it-yourself” AIs for the public: a big one and a smaller one, both free to download, tweak, and use however you like.

Think of them as ready-to-go digital brains. The larger model tackles tougher problems if you’ve got a beefy computer, while the lighter version can run on a decent laptop. Because they’re released under an open license, schools, small businesses, hobbyists — anyone — can experiment without paying per chat or worrying about restrictive fine print. In plain English, this means you could build a custom chatbot, homework helper, or brainstorming buddy that lives entirely on your own machine, keeping costs and data-privacy worries low.