📚 Your midterm study plan needs a study plan

😅 📝 Midterms are coming. Your laptop has 26 tabs open. And your study strategy is in shambles. Let’s get organized.

👀 What’s on tap today:

Up first…

😖 Sometimes, the hardest part of being a student isn’t the course material, group projects, or ~sigh~ 7 a.m. lectures. It’s keeping track of all the stuff. The notes. The PDFs. The research. The handwritten page you photographed during class and immediately forgot about.

Enter: Student Spaces in Adobe Acrobat. This free, AI-powered study hub brings your class notes, documents, research, and other study materials together in one organized place.

Here’s a little tutorial on how to get the most out of it.

😵‍💫 Instead of bouncing between your downloads folder, Google Drive, email, and that one Notes app folder called “School,” bring your course materials into one hub. Put the notes, PDFs, and “important” screenshots somewhere you can actually find them. Student Spaces lets you gather the documents you’re already using to study, including handwritten notes.

Think of it as the digital equivalent of clearing everything off your desk before you actually start working.

🧑‍🎓 Once everything’s in one place, it’s time to actually study.

Student Spaces can turn your course materials into something a little more useful than 47 highlighted pages: personalized flashcards, quizzes, and study guides, so you’re not just rereading the same chapter and hoping the information sinks in through sheer proximity. You can also generate customizable half-page, one-page or two-page summary sheets for a quick overview of the most important information.

Fine-tune your study tools based on what you need to work on and how you learn best. Want to see how concepts connect? Try a mind map. Prefer to listen while you walk to class? Create an editable podcast-style or video summary tailored to your course material instead.

And because your study session should ideally tell you something about how you’re doing, you can track your quiz and flashcard performance to see what’s sticking — and where you might want to spend a little more time.

⚒ AI is a lot more useful when you can see where the answers are coming from.

Student Spaces’ AI Assistant references the documents you provide as its sources and includes clickable citations, so you can check the original material behind a response instead of taking an AI-generated answer at face value.

That means your own course materials stay at the center of the conversation. Ask a question, follow the citation, and see exactly where the information came from.

Basically: AI can help you study without making you play a guessing game about what it’s talking about.

🌟 “But what if I don’t have an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription?” You don’t need one. Student Spaces is free and ready to use at a moment’s notice. Get started now.

📔 If your idea of studying is reading the same chapter until the words start swimming, we have some news: testing yourself may actually help you remember more than simply rereading.

It’s called active recall — basically, making your brain come up with the answer instead of just recognizing it on the page. Flashcards and practice quizzes are both ways to put it into action.

So next time you’re tempted to highlight another paragraph for emotional support, close the book and see what you actually remember.

Your brain may prefer an active challenge over passive studying.

— written by Tori Waltz, Studio/B, Boston Globe Media’s branded content studio (The editorial team was not involved in the creation of this B-Side Extra Edition).

✏️ Thanks for reading! And if your midterms are looking particularly brutal this semester, godspeed 🫡

💜 Special shoutout to today’s sponsor, Adobe Acrobat, for sponsoring this extra B-Side send and helping students get their academic chaos together.