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This Week's App: Notion AI

What is Notion AI?

If you have been listening to the podcast for some time you know that Josh loves the tool Notion and we run our podcast through the tool. It is a powerful collaborative document and database tool that we believe can really help educators. To learn more about Notion, check out Episode 21 | What Is a Wiki & Notion.

Now on top of all these basic document and database features Notion already has, they have added AI tools called Notion AI. So what is it? Notion AI is a powerful feature within Notion that leverages artificial intelligence to provide you with helpful suggestions and automate various tasks. It is designed to help you organize your notes, suggest related content, summarize content, make content longer or shorter, code, and overall simplify your writing workflows. This feature is particularly useful for those of us who work in knowledge-intensive fields that require frequent note-taking and information management.

What can it be used for?

Notion AI functions similarly to ChatGPT with two major differences. First, it is integrated directly into your writing space, and second, it comes with preconfigured prompts that can help you get started. These prompts include summarizing, translating, improving writing, fixing spelling and grammar, shortening, lengthening, changing tone, identifying action items, and brainstorming topics, outlines, or templates. Now how can this all be helpful for those of us working education? Well here are a few of our ideas.

1. Quickly Create a Starting Place - Starting a project can often be the most challenging part of knowledge work. With Notion AI, you can generate templates for outlines, lesson plans, or any other documents, including contracts. Additionally, Notion AI can be used to brainstorm topic ideas or talking points for a specific subject. By using Notion AI, both you and your students can generate topic ideas to jumpstart your content creation process.
2. Create Scenarios - Have you ever needed to create a scenario for a case study? It can be difficult at times, but with Notion AI, you can input the different things you would like to include in a scenario and what it is for, and it will generate a complete scenario document for you. This can help you quickly produce hypotheticals for your students, allowing you to focus on other work.
3. Create Quick Summaries - As teachers, we often need to create lesson summaries to quickly explain what was taught. However, reducing a whole lesson down to a sentence or two can be challenging and time-consuming. Notion AI's "summarize" or "make shorter" prompts can help do this work quickly by producing a quick summary that can be edited later to ensure that important points are included.
4. Check How Clear Your Writing Is - Josh has found that a great way to check the clarity of your writing is to use Notion AI. Here's how it works: write your content, and then ask Notion AI to provide 4-5 main points. If the points it produces are not even close to your main points, it means you weren't as clear as you thought. Often, when Josh uses this method, he can identify language that took the AI off track. This language will likely mislead our students as well.

These are just a few of our ideas, but we know there are so many other ideas. If you think of any please follow us on Twitter and let us know!

How do I get started?

First to use Notion AI, you need to sign up for a free Notion account. From there Notion will automatically give you access to complimentary AI responses in your account so you can test it out.

To learn how to use it check out our How to type in an AI prompt tutorial.

If you like Notion AI you can then purchase the add on for your account. Learn more about pricing here.