XYZebra
Hear Hoofbeats
XYZebra is a low-friction, lesson-to-learning app, designed to make personalised lessons easy. We've built it around one question: can we turn your lessons into learning material you can map and manipulate? We focus on getting the Learner-Tutor partnership working smoothly, and equipped to try your new learning. A learner captures their own notes, and that material moves through five workspaces designed around retrieval and use, not passive review. The app is local-first, so the learning you generate stays genuinely yours, so long as you retain a valid license. Licenses are in place to protect the users and the product.
"Learning something is not the same as knowing it. And knowing it is not the same as being able to use it."
Philosophy
XYZebra is built on modern understandings of learning theory to bring out higher levels of thinking. The lesson begins by adding your notes or photos straight into the app — personalised lessons for exactly what you need to learn today. We help your tutor to make the lesson exactly for you. After their explanations and demonstrations, you can practice together, being guided and enabled towards using what you need.
The point is not to get a Card to the top of a progress bar. The point is to change what you can do with it.
You get to set your confidence — we have suggestions, but it's your learning journey, and that's what we support. Confidence isn't a score to win; it's how XYZebra knows what to bring back to you, and when. A Card moves forward as you pull it back out of your own head, and slides back if you let it go quiet. The stuff you're shaky on keeps coming back around. The stuff you've conquered moves out of your way — and it all stays on your device.
Overview
XYZebra starts in your lesson. As you and your tutor work through it — a tutorial, their notes, a worksheet — it gets captured page by page into the app, in whatever form you actually think in: your handwriting, an example, even a photo you've brought in yourself that connects to what you're learning. That lesson becomes your own personal library, not just something you sat through once.
Then it's yours to take home. Away from your tutor, you work through it independently — searching how it connects, checking what's actually stuck, sorting it out from similar ideas, building with it. XYZebra brings back what you're shaky on more often, and lets what you've mastered move out of the way, so home practice never feels like starting from zero.
We want that follow-up to feel easy, not like extra homework bolted on. That's why there are ready-made lesson plans behind the scenes — a mix of what's worked for your tutor before, and what actually fits how you learn.
Three starter template lesson plans are on their way — check back soon.
Method
Once you're in your lesson, learning moves through five workspaces:
Catch — gets your lesson notes, example photos or tutorial and turns it into a Card. Keep your handwriting, your notes, your examples and your way of recording things. You know how you think better than anyone. Our memories are a complex web of connections. We want to catch those strong connection points.
Search — is where your knowledge is stored away. See how it relates to what you already have. When you find it and link the two together, you are doing more than storing information. You are working out how the pieces fit. As a library, a dictionary, it records your web of knowledge taking shape.
Check — is where you practise retrieving what you know. This is a traditional flashcard environment. We begin to memorise and check our understanding. XYZebra brings weaker knowledge back to you more often and lets stronger knowledge move out to harder tests.
Sort — hides the Cards you've already linked to the one in front of you, so you have to pull each connection back out of your own head instead of just recognising it. Often new connections spring to mind with existing cards; these are quickly added. Perhaps you realise you know a connection and don't have a card for it yet; make the card and connection quickly here!
Build — is where you use the pieces. You've built out your existing understanding, now it is time to test can you use it. Make something that nobody handed you. The point is not simply to recognise the Cards on the screen. It is to put them to work.
Search · Catch · Check · Sort · Build
Recognising an idea and being able to transfer it to a new context are two different competencies — and only the second one demonstrates useful learning. That distinction is what XYZebra is built around, not a stylistic choice.
A Card moves forward because we have evidence of thinking taking place. We want this knowledge to be more than memorised, more than understood, and to become something we can apply, analyse, evaluate or create from. Knowledge that is useful in daily life. If you neglect the knowledge, the confidence level drops.
Progress isn't a rehearsed streak: each Card carries a five-level readiness signal driven by increasingly challenging retrieval practice and the spacing effect — the two most robustly evidence-backed levers for durable learning — rather than passive re-exposure. Search asks for elaborative connection to prior knowledge; Sort asks for cued recall of the links a learner has already made between related ideas; Build requires transfer into a novel product. Together they give you a rolling, low-stakes formative signal of where a learner's independent recall is solid versus fragile, rather than a single end-of-unit summative score. The learner can mark the confidence as they sense it, including down to 1/5 — a clear and searchable need for your help.
As the tutor, you hold a separate access key governing source-material capture (Catch) and configuration, while the learner works independently through the retrieval and application workspaces. Because the method is local-first, none of that diagnostic evidence — a learner's captured material or their progress — is routed through a server or third-party platform you don't control.
Overview
The app is a place to host your lessons, photos and notes so that they can be referenced later. It is set up to take images or PDF and cycle through in order, just like you ordinarily would in a traditional lesson. Now imagine the learner has brought along photos of their home, ready to supplement your long-lasting, tried-and-tested tutorials with their personal experience. All of these can be entered in the same lesson to their personal, learning library.
We want the app to be customisable as far as reasonable, so the settings menu is full of options that either you as a tutor or support@xyzebra.app can help with. The software can aid in creating the card by reading handwriting — but by design it is set up for you to guide the user in creating the cards. Together your notes, voices, and examples are saved away ready to bring the memory to life.
We want to remove friction for the learner, but also for you! So we have provided template lesson plans that allow a hybrid of what has always worked for you, and what makes sense to them. Personalised lesson planning made simple.
Three starter template lesson plans are on their way — check back soon.
Method
Once you're in your lesson, learning moves through five workspaces:
Catch — Every lesson you already teach is prep you've done once. Point a camera at the page, or upload the PDF directly — your own notes, a tutorial, a worksheet — and XYZebra turns it straight into practice material, keeping your handwriting, a voice note or an example image exactly as you gave it. You're not writing a fresh set of flashcards on top of your existing lesson; you're reusing what you already made.
Search — Once it's captured, the learner does the work of connecting a new Card to what they already know — real elaborative encoding, without you having to design a "how does this relate" exercise yourself.
Check — This is the part you'd otherwise have to track by hand: knowing what a learner is close to forgetting, and when to bring it back. XYZebra runs that scheduling for you, resurfacing weaker Cards more often and letting strong ones drift to longer, harder-spaced tests — running quietly in the background instead of on your to-do list.
Sort — Knowing a word on its own isn't the same as knowing what it connects to. Sort takes a Card and hides the Cards the learner has already linked to it, so they have to pull each connection back out of their own head — and add new links as they spot them. No extra worksheet from you required.
Build — This is where you see whether it actually landed: not a recognition quiz you had to write, but the learner applying what they've captured to make something new. It's the one part of prep you can't automate away, and the one that tells you, honestly, whether the rest of the session worked.
Search · Catch · Check · Sort · Build
Testimonials
Testimonials are on their way — check back soon.
Author
XYZebra's author — Tommy — is convinced that learning should be personal and more than memorisation. Between degrees, Tommy spent a year in Post-Graduate Teacher Training where he learned about modern teaching pedagogy. These principles have stuck with him in his life as a manager, coach, and father. He now makes a living boiling ideas down to simple, executable principles for others to thrive.
Born abroad, and raised crossing borders, Tommy has spent much of his career designing and building physical and digital infrastructure, running manufacturing teams, and project managing business critical changes, before beginning a life of challenge abroad. He had always wanted to live in another culture and learn another language ever since leaving his birthplace.
While learning the Kazakh language (with its neverendingly cumbersome agglutinatives) he fiddled with countless scraps of paper, notebooks and textbooks. He knew he had to practice applying knowledge upon knowledge to form his thoughts, and he figured:
There has got to be an easier way to practice what I learn!
Flashcard apps were useful but lacked this true practice and adaptability to complex thoughts.
What started as a personal fix has been turned into a platform for you and your learning partner to build a personal journey on.
License
Email licensing@xyzebra.app to request one.
Questions
What is XYZebra?
A local-first learning app built around a single question: can you actually use what you learned, not just recognise it? Learners capture their own notes and move that material through five workspaces — Catch, Search, Check, Sort, Build — instead of just reviewing flashcards.
Who is XYZebra for?
A single learner, with an optional tutor role. The tutor role is access control only, not a separate account or data set — it governs who can capture new source material and change settings, while the learner works day-to-day in Search, Check, Sort and Build.
Do I need an account?
No. There's no account and no server your notes pass through. Everything is stored in your browser's own local storage, on your device only. Access is controlled with a signed license code instead of a login.
How is this different from Anki or Quizlet?
Most flashcard apps optimise for getting a card to the top of a progress bar. XYZebra tracks each Card with a five-level battery that can move backward as well as forward, and spreads the method across five workspaces so you have to retrieve, connect, distinguish and use knowledge, not just recognise it on a repeated flip.
What does "local-first" mean for my data?
Your photos, handwriting, Cards, categories and settings are saved in your browser's own IndexedDB and localStorage, on your device, and nowhere else. There's no database of user content to be breached, sold, or handed over — but you're responsible for backing your own data up before clearing site data or switching devices.
How do I get a license for XYZebra?
Email licensing@xyzebra.app to request one.
How much does an XYZebra license cost?
Pricing isn't published on this page yet, and we'd rather give you an honest answer than guess one here. Email licensing@xyzebra.app and you'll get current pricing and how the license codes work.
Does XYZebra replace what a tutor does?
No. XYZebra isn't an AI tutor and it doesn't teach the material — a tutor (or the learner working from existing lesson material) still does the explaining and demonstrating outside the app. XYZebra turns that material into Cards and runs the retrieval practice around it; the tutor role only governs who can capture new material in Catch and change settings, not who does the teaching.
Can more than one student use XYZebra on the same device?
XYZebra is built around a single learner's set of Cards, stored in one browser's local storage, with license roles for that learner plus an optional tutor — it isn't set up with separate student profiles. If you're supporting more than one student, each would need their own browser profile or device and their own license rather than sharing one. Email licensing@xyzebra.app if you're planning this across several students.
What happens if the AI gets a piece of handwriting wrong?
AI-assisted handwriting reading is only ever a starting point for transcription — it never decides what the material means, that judgment stays with the learner and tutor. Catch's review step shows you the captured material and its transcription so you can correct it before it's saved as a Card, and OCR/AI assistance is optional in the first place, not a required step.
Does XYZebra work offline?
Yes, for the core app. Since it's local-first with no server and no account, capturing, sorting, checking and building Cards all work without an internet connection. The exception is the optional AI-assisted features (like handwriting reading), which need your own Anthropic or Groq API key and a live connection at the moment you use them — skip those and everything else works offline.
How does a tutor see where a learner is struggling, day to day?
Through the same Cards, not a separate dashboard. Every Card carries a five-level confidence battery. The learner sets it as they sense it — down to 1 bar when they need help — and it slides back if the Card is neglected. It is visible on the same device, so a tutor can look for 1-bar Cards or Cards gone quiet and know where to focus, without any of that data being sent anywhere else.