Tuesday's Tech Tip!

Quizlet.com is a free website which enables teachers and students to create digital flash cards. That’s not where the magic stops, however. Quizlet can automatically generate interactive games and even tests of the material you enter into it. Five or ten minutes of typing (or pasting!) up front can yield literally hours’ worth of automatically-assessed activities inside and outside of the classroom, on computers, smartphones, tablets, and even pencil-and-paper printed exercises. Second through Fifth grade students can add the shortcut from the Chrome web store. Interested? Read on!

How do I make a set of flash cards for my students?

Luckily, Quizlet already has wonderful resources available to help first-time flash card creators. Once you get the hang of it, it takes only five or ten minutes to upload even large sets of materials to Quizlet. In particular, see their tutorials on:

• Creating an account
• Creating a new set
• Convert a MSWord document into a Quizlet set

Quizlet has text-to-speech capabilities in eighteen languages as of 2013, and more are on the way.

In the “Speller” studying mode, students hear the target word spoken out loud and see a written definition on the screen. Their task is to type the target word using its correct spelling. If they make mistakes, Quizlet visually corrects the error, re-reads the word, and reads the spelling one letter at a time. For students who particularly struggle with spelling, such as Arabic-speaking learners of English (Martin, 2011), this specific, multi-modal feedback is a wonderful resource.

In the “Learn” mode, Quizlet tests students one item at a time. The items a student performs more poorly on are brought back for further review to help students focus their efforts on items which they have not yet learned or which are more difficult to remember. This adaptive training method increases the efficiency and effectiveness of students’ studying.

Quizlet can generate tests involving written, matching, multiple choice, or true/false questions, orany combination thereof. The tests may be taken on a computer or smartphone and automatically graded, or they may be printed out and distributed in class. This is useful for students’ self-assessment, but the actual learning benefits of this activity cannot be overstated. Self-testing is critical in building robust long-term memory of learned materials (Karpicke & Roediger, 2008), so the more your students test themselves, the better their performance will be in the future.

The “Scatter” and “Space Race” games use the word/definition pairs you entered to help your students study in a more interactive and competitive fashion. Students can compete in teams against one another to see which group can complete a Scatter game the fastest or which group can keep up a Space Race the longest.

As long as students have links to your course materials on Quizlet’s website, they can study independently at home or else use Quizlet’s excellent, full-featured mobile website or free iOS app to study on the go

Once you have your list of words and definitions uploaded to Quizlet, there are several printing options. You can use these printed materials as handouts for your students or else use them to create physical games and warm-up exercises to play in class. (For example, you might print out words in the “small flashcard” format, cut out all the words and definitions separately, scramble them up, and hand one slip of paper to each student, either a word or a definition. Then, students would need to find the other person in the room whose slip of paper completes the word/definition pair.) To quote from Quizlet’s website, the printing options include:

• Glossary: terms and definitions side by side — good for cramming lots of info in your pocket.
• Table: terms and definitions in a table — great for studying line-by-line with a covering piece of paper moving down the page.
• Small: 10 flashcards per page.
• Large: 5 flashcards per page.
• 3×5 Index Card: double-sided index cards.

One of the most underappreciated features of Quizlet is that anyone can create a hybrid deck of cards by copying other people’s decks, combining multiple different sets together, throwing out unwanted cards, and perhaps adding new extra cards manually

It’s easy to find flash card sets of just about any subject material imaginable. Of course, it can be difficult to monitor quality and accuracy with an open, user-curated resource like Quizlet.com, but it’s highly unlikely any given cardset will be intentionally or maliciously flawed; mistakes, if present, will tend to be small

Luckily, it is simple to export a Quizlet.com set into a format which other websites or computer programs can read. The export format can be configured in several different ways to ensure compatibility with your target website or program, so you never get “locked in” to Quizlet.com.