Gemini

If your notes are handwritten, your lectures are slides, and your assignments live in Google Docs and Drive, Gemini removes the copy-paste step entirely. Its two standout student features are Deep Research for building a sourced overview of a topic and camera input for turning anything you can photograph into something you can question.

Deep Research browses dozens of pages, then returns a structured report with links. Treat it as a map of the territory that points you to the real papers to read. It is never as the finished literature review.

1. 1

   Give it a scope, not a topic

   'Climate change' returns mush. 'Peer-reviewed evidence since 2020 on heat stress and cognitive performance in students' returns something usable.

2. 2

   Review the research plan before it runs

   Gemini shows its plan first. Edit it. Add the angle your assignment actually needs and delete the sections you don't.

3. 3

   Harvest the links, not the prose

   Open the cited sources, read the real abstracts, and build your notes from those. The report's wording is not yours to submit.

4. 4

   Export to Google Docs

   One click sends the report with links into Docs, where you can start annotating what you have actually verified.

Do deep research on: [topic].
Scope: peer-reviewed sources from [year] onward, focused on [discipline/context, e.g. Southeast Asian higher education].
Structure the report as: (1) definitions and key debates, (2) the strongest evidence for each position, (3) the main criticisms and limitations, (4) gaps where research is thin, (5) a table of the 10 most cited sources with author, year, method and main finding.
Flag anything where the evidence is weak or contested. Include working links.

Point your phone at a slide, a whiteboard, a textbook page, a graph or your own messy handwriting. Gemini reads it and works from it.

This is a photo of my handwritten lecture notes.
1. Transcribe them faithfully and mark anything unreadable as [unclear].
2. Reorganise into clean headings and bullet points.
3. Add a "gaps" section listing what my notes clearly missed for this topic.
4. Turn the content into 10 flashcards in Question | Answer format.

Explain this figure to me as if I am seeing it for the first time.
Cover: what each axis or element represents, what the main trend or relationship is, what the author wants me to conclude, and one limitation or thing the figure hides.
Then give me a one-sentence version I could say in a tutorial.

This photo shows my attempt at a [maths/physics/accounting] problem.
Do not give me the final answer yet. Find the first line where I went wrong, explain the misunderstanding behind that mistake, and give me a hint so I can redo it myself.

Canvas opens a document beside the chat so you can edit and re-prompt on the same text instead of scrolling through a conversation. Combined with Gemini in Docs, Drive and Gmail, it becomes the drafting side of your workflow.

• Draft in Canvas, own the words. Use it to restructure yourparagraphs, not to write new ones from nothing.
• @-mention a Drive file in a prompt to make Gemini work from your actual assignment brief or dataset.
• Gems are reusable custom assistants. Make one per subject with your level, module outline and preferred explanation style baked in.

You are my tutor for [module code and name] at [university/school level].
Always: explain with a concrete example first, then the formal definition; use terminology from my syllabus below; end every answer with one question that checks my understanding.
Never: write assignment text for me, or give me an answer before I have attempted it.
Syllabus and assessment: [paste module outline]