Beyond Highlighting — Improving Your Learning with Glasp

8 min readMar 5, 2024

If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by the ever-growing pile of research documents or tired of bookmarking online resources, Glasp is the right tool for you.

Glasp is a web and PDF highlighter designed for researchers and learners. It offers a range of features from making YouTube summaries to highlighting text in web pages or PDF documents.

However, Glasp is more than just a web and PDF highlighter. It’s a knowledge-sharing platform designed to help you capture, organize, and share your insights across the internet.

It’s also a social platform, where you can see what others are highlighting and learn from their insights. You can even follow specific topics based on your interests.

To use this tool, see Sign up for Glasp. Then you can install the browser extension which is available on Chrome, Safari, Brave, Edge, and Opera browsers.

In this article, you’ll explore all the useful features available with Glasp needed to accelerate your learning.

Highlighting Web Pages

Highlight text on any webpage using Glasp’s online highlighter. You can choose from a variety of colors and add notes to your highlights.

Additionally, you can organize your highlights by adding tags, hence making them easy to search for.

Highlighting Text

To use Glasp’s online highlighter:

Open any website containing relevant information.
Drag your mouse over the text you want to highlight.
Select a color for your highlight.

Click the Glasp icon in your browser toolbar to access your highlights.
You can click the Tag icon and enter keywords to categorize your highlights.

Also, there’s a profile page where you can find your highlighted articles and notes collected.

Exporting Highlights to Note-Taking Apps

You can export your highlights and notes to popular note-taking apps like Notion, Obsidian, Roam Research, and Readwise.

To export to Notion:

Go to your Glasp account and navigate to My Highlights.

Choose the webpage highlights you want to export to Notion.
Look for the Copy symbol in the top right corner of the selected highlights. Clicking it will copy the content to your clipboard.

Open your Notion workspace
Create a new page in Notion and paste the copied content from the clipboard using the keyboard shortcut(Command + V for Mac, Ctrl + V for Windows).

Once pasted, you can use Notion’s rich text editor to further personalize and organize your highlights and notes

By following similar steps you can export your highlights to note-taking apps of your choice.

Creating Highlight Images

Glasp’s online highlighter allows you to create visually appealing images of your highlighted text, making it easier to share and engage your audience.

These images are perfect for sharing snippets on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

To create highlight images:

Select the text on a webpage that you want to share as a highlight image.
Locate the Glasp icon in your browser toolbar and click on it.
Click the three dots on your highlight in the Glasp menu. A list of options will be displayed.
From the options, select Create Highlight Image.

Glasp generates an image of the highlighted text and surrounding context. You can further customize it by choosing a background color, resolution, or font style.
Once you’re satisfied with the image, you can download it to your computer or share it directly on social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter.

By trying out this feature, you can create informative and engaging posts to share your insights in a visually captivating way.

Seeing Other Social Highlights

As said earlier, Glasp is also a social platform; It fosters a vibrant community of learners eager to share and discover insights.

You can see highlights from other Glasp users and explore their perspectives on various topics.

To see other user’s highlights:

Click the Home tab on the Glasp homepage.
You can explore highlights by checking out trending topics or topics based on your interest.
Click on any highlighted section to see the specific text, surrounding context, and any notes added by the user.
Depending on the user’s settings, you may be able to follow the user.

Hence with this feature, you can improve your learning using the collective intelligence of the Glasp community.

Highlighting PDFs

Glasp isn’t just a web annotation tool; you can also highlight PDFs, transforming static documents into interactive learning documents.

To highlight PDFs:

Open the PDF you want to annotate in your browser
Click the Glasp icon at the top right side of your screen to activate the extension.

Select the desired text passage with your mouse and choose a highlight color from the pop-up bar over the text.
Click on the Glasp icon in your browser toolbar to open an annotation panel so you can add notes to your highlights.

Click the Tag icon and enter relevant keywords to categorize your highlights.

You can use this feature to add visuals and create room for interactive ways to learn from your PDFs.

Scenario: Studying for a History Exam with Glasp

Sarah, a college student, is preparing for a difficult history exam. The textbook she uses is dense with information, hence she struggles to remember key details and dates. A friend introduced her to Glasp and amazingly her comprehension and retention have improved.

She used Glasp to highlight key events, figures, and their dates. She also added brief notes to clarify connections between events. This helped her to make sense of the information in her own words.

As she progressed through the chapters, Sarah used Glasp’s tagging system to categorize her highlights. For example, she might tag some events as “political”, “social” or “economic”. This allowed her to connect different historical events and grasp a better understanding of the bigger picture.

Through highlighting and note-taking with Glasp, Sarah was able to consume information and actively engage with her textbook. Hence, improving her chances of success on the exam.

Creating YouTube Summaries with ChatGPT

Watching long YouTube videos to find specific information can be time-consuming. However, Glasp in collaboration with ChatGPT, introduced a feature where you can summarize YouTube videos.

This tool provides you with informative summaries of YouTube videos, allowing you to grasp key points and save valuable time.

To access YouTube summaries with ChatGPT:

Ensure you have the Glasp extension installed in your browser
Open a YouTube video you want to summarize.
You’ll notice a Transcript & Summary pane on the right side of your screen.

Select View AI Summary from the pane. This will create a new tab that opens ChatGPT.
The transcript and prompt for the video summary are automatically copied to your clipboard. Paste it into your ChatGPT prompt bar.

You can jump between timeframes in the video using the generated transcripts.
You can also export the transcripts to note-taking apps such as Notion or Obsidian.
The transcripts also support multiple languages based on the options provided by the YouTube video.

By following this short guide you can create YouTube summaries with ChatGPT using Glasp, allowing you to boost your efficiency and understanding.

Scenario: Learning a New Programming Language

John, a recent college graduate, decided to learn the Python programming language. He finds numerous online resources, including video tutorials. However, the volume of information became overwhelming. He discovered that Glasp has a feature to create YouTube summaries with ChatGPT.

Instead of watching hours of video tutorials, John used Glasp to get a concise summary of the key points. This saved him valuable time and allowed him to grasp the main points before diving deeper into the video.

Impacts On Learning

Glasp isn’t just a highlighting tool; it’s a game-changer for learning efficiency and social sharing. It empowers you to capture, organize, and share knowledge. Glasp has transformed the way people approach information. Here’s how:

Enhanced Efficiency

Streamlined research: Glasp allows you to highlight key points from various sources (webpages, PDFs, and even YouTube videos) in one place. This saves a lot of time and ensures information isn’t lost.
Improved organization: Glasp’s tagging system helps you categorize your highlights, making them easily accessible for future reference.
Easy collaboration: Glasp’s social learning features allow you to see what others are highlighting and connect with like-minded individuals.

Boosting Engagement

Active Learning: Highlighting key points is an active learning process. Engaging with the content and selecting what’s important improves your understanding and retention.
Visual Appeal: With the “Create Highlight Image” feature you can generate visually captivating images of your highlights and make them more engaging on social media platforms.
Eureka Effect: Discovering gems in other users’ highlights on a topic you’re researching can spark excitement as it exposes you to diverse perspectives and new insights.

Deep Learning

Retention: Human brains naturally forget things over time. The good news is that reviewing what you learn can significantly improve your memory. This is called the spacing effect. Glasp helps to review your learning by using a profile page to track your highlights. Also, Glasp sends weekly recap emails that summarize your learning from the past week.
Contextualization: Highlighting text is more than just saving information, it catches your attention and creates a spark in your brain. With Glasp, you can highlight important pieces and add context to them. Hence, helping you to understand better.

Conclusion

In this article, you’ve learned how to use Glasp to boost your productivity and learning. With Glasp, you don’t have to worry about the bulk of information or watch hours of videos to pick up the main concepts.

It’s a game-changer for students, business folks, researchers, or any field that involves consuming a lot of information online.

If you find this interesting or have any questions on Glasp, kindly indicate in the comment.

Follow me on Glasp so we can share insights.