http://quizlet.com/

The basics

Quizlet is a very well organised flashcard production and use system, with inbuilt group and collaboration features and some innovative ways of testing knowledge.

Slides

Presenting the key affordances and possible uses of Quizlet:

Video

Discussion and live demonstration of slides:

What is great

Quizlet has a few great features: first, you can place images into flashcards sourced directly from Flickr’s CC3.0 licensced collection; second, the collaborative features are easy to use and varied. It has recently become integrated with Facebook.

However, more than its technical affordances, Quizlet (and, of course, similar programs) is brilliant because the digitisation of information frees Flashcards from their rather limited, simplistic uses for memorisation and so on. Anything digital can be shared across the network, developed and altered, can be offered in partial or scaffolded forms. Thus, the greatness of Quizlet is not in offering something dramatically new, but in remediating a traditional, well established learning activity in a way that makes it more about creativity and collaboration rather than rote learning.

Scenarios for using this tool

Education for education

Students in primary childhood education unit are required to create a set of flashcards of the kind that they would use in class with the primary school students they will soon be teaching. Students work individually at first, but then must comment on the card sets created by others. Utilising the inbuilt image function, students must create the graphics which are used inside the flash cards, as well as basic text. Since there are four subject area specialists in the unit together, each forms a sub-group to create a combined flashcard set for their area. Each of the other specialist areas must take the test as well. Students also write a short report on the problems, values and uses of flash cards in education.

Quizlet:

• utilises a realistic classroom tool for learning about classroom teaching;
• enables individual work to be performed and then shared at the right moment; and
• has excellent groupwork tools built in.

Get the facts right quickly

30 third-year students in an African history unit begin their studies in the first two weeks by having to use a pre-arranged flash card set listing key dates, places, people, geographic features and similar items to learn basic material with which they are not familiar. This work is undertaken online, outside of class, and is also used to generate a sense of collective endeavour (students are encouraged to work together and share ideas and comment). There is no assessment of this material directly, but a short in-class test in Week 3 of semester is used to assess the degree of learning, utilising both simple and more complex questions which begin to draw out the way individual items of knowledge (dates, places, names etc) work together to constitute a more significant whole. As well as other assessment tasks, students are then required, during the semester, to create an additional set of cards covering material that is specific to the topics they are working on individually. These cards can then be used by the unit controller to expand or refine the set used on the next iteration of the unit. Students can also test themselves and learn more informally by looking at what others are contributing.

Quizlet:

• is great for factual learning – use it for its strengths;
• distributes learning to places and times which complement, rather than compete with, the classroom; and
• can be closely integrated with assessable work.

Scaffolding

In a large first-year marketing class where one of the main goals is to ensure students learn the history and current validity of key concepts in marketing, selling, consumer behaviour and the like, the teacher prepares in advance a set of flashcards that, on one side, have a key concept; students then copy these cards digitally and fill in the other side with the appropriate information sourced from textbooks, readings and lectures. The flashcards provide an active form of scaffolding, giving students a cue, each week, to review their traditionally delievered materials and complete the cards. At the end of the semester, prior to the exam, students then have a set of cards from which to study.

Quizlet:

• allows teachers easily to give ‘partial information’ prompting student cognitive activity;
• works well with definitions and basic details of key concepts; and
• can be used in ways that leave the sharing up to students, if they wish to use that facility.

Alternatives

There are many free flash-card web applications to choose from: Headmagnet and Memorise offer a slightly more uptodate interface but are not as well established.

Further discussion and concepts

Gruenstein, A et al. 2009. A Self-Transcribing Speech Corpus: Collecting Continuous Speech with an Online Educational Game. Published via CiteSeerX.