NotebookLM as a Study Buddy
I’ve been doing a lot of studying over the last few months - for a couple of certification exams. Cybersecurity Information Security Manager (CISM) was the first of those and I got that done recently. I’m still working on the second one.
My approach to exam prep has always involved taking a copious / maybe ridiculous amount of notes, with the idea being that that will get all that noted information cemented into my brain :)
Over recent years, Notion and Obsidian have been my most used notes apps for all purposes, including study and exam prep. Now all of a sudden it looks like NotebookLM might excellent as a tool to use in final review and prep stages, and maybe also just to help check on and help with deeper understanding of the domains covered for an exam.
This is because NotebookLM keeps adding new features that look great for study, for students. I’m especially interested in its ability to create flashcards, quizzes, and mind maps. I tried creating flashcards with Obsidian “callouts”, but they are more “pay attention to this” than true flashcard. I also tried with Notion and with Claude.AI - both produced decent results, but they still weren’t real flashcards. NotebookLM does them just as I tend to think of what a flashcard looks like - as you can see in the pair of screenshots above that show the question and then answer sides of the card, where you just click on the question when you’re ready to see the answer. Here’s another pair:
It’s a similar story with quizzes. Claude and Notion made good efforts to generate quizzes based on my study notes, but they were a little awkward to use (for example, I still had to figure out how to hide the answers as I worked through them), even after some back and forth trying to explain what I wanted. NotebookLM does this very well right out-of-the-box so to speak, with no guidance. The “Explain” part of this is excellent. Hopefully you can see a bit of that here:
Rewinding a little, if you haven’t used NotebookLM, you could take a look at one of my early posts about it for a quick intro - that’s from back in late 2024, and it has improved and added several features since then. Here’s a screencap of the main body of my notebook for CISM in NotebookLM. which shows NLM’s overview and the Studio area where it can generate reports, audio and video overviews, flashcards, quizzes, and mind maps based on the sources you have added to a notebook:
Along with flashcards and quizzes, I think two other elements/artifacts from NLM will be very helpful in study and exam prep. Those are the ability to chat with NLM about the sources in a notebook and mind maps. Mind maps feel like a good fit for refreshing the 20,000 foot view of topics covered and then drilling down on them, and of course that’s useful across notebooks on any topic you’re interested in learning more about.
Finally, chatting with NLM about the notebook contents looks useful for focusing in on a particular section or item within study material to make sure I feel I’ve really got to grips with it.
Flashcards and other Studio created elements are meant to sync to the mobile version of NotebookLM, but this came via a recent update to the mobile app and it’s not working yet on my Andoid phone. When it does, that will make all of these elements even more helpful.
NotebookLM is definitely going to be big part of my final study prep for my next exam. For any of you who are studying for a particular exam or for and learning initiative really, what are your favorite apps, AI tools, or non digital tools to use?