I teach AI and digital skills to students in Sri Lanka, and the same thing happens every exam season. Students have plenty of material (lecture PDFs, slides, recorded classes) and very little time. Most of them read the same notes again and again, which feels productive but isn't the best way to remember anything.

This is the workflow I recommend now. It's built from free tools, and it has four steps:

  1. Capture: get all your material into one place.
  2. Summarise: turn it into short notes you can actually read.
  3. Active recall: test yourself instead of re-reading.
  4. Spaced review: come back to the hard parts at the right time.

AI helps with steps 1–3. Step 4 is where you do the remembering.

Step 1: Capture everything in one notebook

I use Gemini Notebook for this. Until July it was called NotebookLM; Google renamed it on July 16, 2026, and it's the same standalone product, now also available inside the Gemini app.

Create one notebook per subject (or per unit) and add your sources. It accepts a lot of formats:

  • PDF, Word (docx), PowerPoint (pptx), text and Markdown files
  • Google Docs and Slides
  • web URLs
  • public YouTube videos that have captions (it imports the transcript)
  • audio files, which it transcribes on import (Sinhala and Tamil are both on the supported list)

Free users can add up to 50 sources per notebook, and each source can be up to 500,000 words or 200 MB.

Tip: one notebook per unit works better than one giant notebook for the whole year. Answers stay focused, and it's easier to see what's missing.

Step 2: Summarise, but ask specific questions

Each source gets an automatic summary in the Source Guide. That's a good start, but the real value comes from asking narrow questions in the chat, for example:

  • "List the 10 key definitions in the 'Unit 3 lecture' source."
  • "Explain the difference between X and Y using only my sources."
  • "What topics in this unit appear in more than one source?"

Because the answers are grounded in your own files, you can check every claim against the page it came from. Do that. AI summaries can miss things or get them wrong, and your exam is based on your syllabus, not on what the model thinks is important.

Write the final short notes yourself, even if you copy most of the structure from the chat. Rewriting is part of learning.

If you study in Sinhala or Tamil: this is a gap I kept running into with my own students, so my team and I built shortme.lk. You upload a lecture PDF and get short notes (or a practice question paper) in English, Sinhala or Tamil. The free plan covers 3 AI documents a day, up to 10 pages per PDF. Use whichever tool fits your language. The workflow is the same.

Step 3: Active recall with flashcards and quizzes

Reading your notes tells you what's on the page. Testing yourself tells you what's in your head. That's the whole idea of active recall.

In Gemini Notebook, open the Studio panel and choose Flashcards or Quizzes. Before generating, you can:

  • pick the difficulty (easy, medium or hard)
  • add a prompt, e.g. "focus on definitions and formulas from Unit 3"

While you study, you can mark each card "Got it!" or "Missed it!", ask for an explanation, and at the end practise again with only the cards you missed. Quizzes give you hints and explanations too.

Then do one more thing: download the flashcards as a CSV file. That's the bridge to step 4.

Step 4: Spaced review in Anki

Anki is a free, open-source flashcard program. When you review a card, you rate how well you remembered it, and Anki schedules the next review for around the time you're most likely to forget it. Easy cards come back rarely and hard cards come back often.

  • The desktop app (Windows, macOS, Linux) is free.
  • AnkiDroid for Android is free.
  • AnkiMobile for iOS is a paid app (the purchase funds Anki's development).
  • AnkiWeb sync between devices is free.

Anki can import any plain-text file where fields are separated by commas, semicolons or tabs, as long as it's saved as UTF-8. So the flashcard CSV from step 3 goes straight in: File → Import, choose the CSV, map the columns to Front and Back, and pick a deck.

Tip: don't import 300 cards the night before an exam. Import a unit at a time, and do your reviews every day, even if it's only 15 minutes on the bus.

The weekly routine I suggest

When What
After each lecture Add the PDF/recording to that unit's notebook (Step 1)
Same week Ask 3–5 specific questions; write your own short notes (Step 2)
End of the unit Generate flashcards and a quiz; download the CSV (Step 3)
Every day Do your Anki reviews (Step 4)
Before the exam Retake the quiz with only the questions you missed

A few honest warnings

  • Check everything against your textbook or lecturer's notes. AI tools make mistakes, especially with local syllabus content and non-English terms.
  • Only upload material you're allowed to use. Google's own help page says to avoid uploading documents you don't have rights to.
  • The tools are the easy part. The improvement comes from testing yourself and reviewing regularly, not from having the perfect app.

If you try this, I'd like to know which step you skip most often. For most of my students it's step 4.

— KD Jayakody