How to use AI to do better at school?

Students' use of artificial intelligence is often criticized; it's true that it's the ultimate cheating tool. But it can also be a great tool for learning and improving. Here's a small selection of apps that help you become top of your class thanks to AI.

We need to stop this somewhat sterile presentation of AI as the absolute enemy of learning. AI is also an egalitarian tool, which allows those who don't understand the course and who don't have the necessary parents or academic support to stay in school.

First, there are all the general tools: ChatGPT, Gemini, Mistral. Whether it's to re-explain a point misunderstood during class or to create small quizzes on specific course points. The problem is that the temptation is great for a middle or high school student to simply ask "write me an essay" or "solve this math problem."

But there are also more specific tools, including French apps like Eliott or Baobab, a kind of AI-powered private tutor based on the French National Education system. For example, you can generate personalized exercises simply by scanning your lessons. All you have to do is take a photo of your notes, even handwritten ones, and the AI ​​will generate a personalized learning path with exercises to complete.

Another option: take a photo of an exercise in a book and the app will not give the answer directly as ChatGPT would, but will guide the student step by step in solving the exercise and help them understand the reasoning.

We can also mention the French startup Concorde AI, which creates virtual avatars of teachers with whom it is possible to interact and ask questions about this or that course concept. This is the strength of AI: offering hyper-personalized exercises and varying the difficulty based on successes or failures, what we call adaptive learning.

A slightly lesser-known but fantastic tool for high school and college students is NotebookLM, designed by Google. It's an app that can analyze, summarize, and render complex documents in seconds. It can process up to 500,000 words from 50 different sources, including PDFs packed with charts and images, course notes, or the address of a particularly interesting YouTube video on a philosophy topic explained by a teacher. The app transcribes the video and summarizes it.

This summary can also be transformed into a podcast with two virtual hosts who discuss the topic in a completely natural way, as if they were two human radio presenters. Saving time and simplifying things, a student can transform their lectures into podcasts to listen to while jogging.

For those with a more visual memory, Napkin, an AI in English, transforms text into a drawing, graph, or diagram for better understanding. For example, a lesson on World War II can be transformed into several graphics to complement the lesson sheets: a timeline with some key dates, a map with the fronts, pictograms representing the forces involved.

Starting this fall, AI will also be introduced into classrooms. Students in grades 8 and 10 will receive lessons on generative AI, awareness of potential biases and abuses, and learning how to use AI.