Feb 19 2010
Quizlet? No it is not a savoury snack
Have you tried quizlet yet? No it isn’t a savoury snack similar to the disgusting product they call twiglets… Who eats twiglets? They are what they say they are just like eating mouldy tree branches. (I am not slagging off twiglets but in my personal opinion I don’t like them but they have many dietary benefits and are a great product!
Quizlet is a free web 2.0 tool where you can create and generate your own quizzes. It is absolutely brilliant because: 1) It is free (like the best things in life); 2) It is really easy to use (even a monkey can, well I could use it!); 3) It is really quick top set up and last but not least 4) It is an extremely effective learning tool. Have a look at the site by clicking on this link it shows you a very brief and useful video on how to use it: http://quizlet.com/demo/
It has great potential for students to use as a revision tool. The part that my students really enjoyed about it was that it did a lot of the hard work for you. For example it generates all of the games that you can use for revision itself, if you make flash cards for revision then this site will do it for you instantly. In addition to this is that you can then share your flash cards with other people all over the world or even in your class. This means that your revision can also be collaborative which is fantastic, you can share your quizzes that you create by facebook, embedding onto social network sites, twitter, email whatever way you want to do it! You can even create whole class sites for whole class revision.
I think this is a great tool for learning, it has massive potential within languages, but within any subjects, my students used it to learn the keywords in our current unit of work. Here is one of my students:
http://quizlet.com/1804783/keywords-flash-cards/
Do you use similar tools? Please leave a comment and let me know so my students can share in your practice. What do you think of this as a tool for learning?
I completely agree with you, quizlet is such an easy to use site. I like the fact that it is so simple both students and teachers can create quizzes out of it. If I taught more I’d definitely have every class making up cards for their classmates (I teach EFL so it’s great for vocabulary). At the start of the academic year I looked at a number of online ‘flashcard’ sites as I wanted a place to give my students the chance to constantly revise words. I think in the private language school area, when we often see students only one a week, there can be a lack of revision of lexis. Teachers often note down problematic / new words which they then address in the next lesson but that is one week later. Students also dutifully note down in their notebooks words teachers put on the board but then most (sorry to be cynical) don’t actually go home and look at them. Memory experts suggest that this can lead to an 80 percent forget rate.
I decided to use quizlet to give the students an easily accessible way to review, most use the Internet anyway so by using quizlet they can spend 5 minutes day reviewing using the flashcards I make or even better making their own. I started by making a quiz a week based on the ‘boarded’ words of the week then posting the link on my blog for students to follow after a few weeks they then took over and started doing it themselves. You can see an example here – http://shaunwilden.com/?tnsgyabe
Another huge point in it’s favour is that so many teachers use quizlet that I recommend it is as a library of resources to teachers when I doing training sessions– you can find cards already made for most lexical areas.
Your article very good, I am very interested in your story!