If you need to memorize facts, Quizlet is your tool. Encourage students to use Quizlet on their own time as homework or to create their own custom flash card sets for Quizlet Live competitions. You might also encourage your students to create flash card decks to share with the class; this could be a nice way to help students collaborate as they prepare for a cumulative exam or an AP test.
Unlike with traditional flash cards, Quizlet could be a great study tool for subjects with a lot of visual or auditory content. Art and science teachers can create detailed diagrams or add supporting photos to data sets using their own images or with Quizlet's large pool of licensed Flickr photography. Music and foreign language teachers (with the Plus/Teacher subscription) can attach live audio recordings to flash cards.
In addition to review, Quizlet Live is also a great way to introduce new content. Because it requires students to collaborate with their teams to select the right answer, students can pool their collective knowledge to deduce the answers, or you can encourage them to do research as they play the game. As your students learn new information, push them to move toward higher-order thinking, using what they've learned from the flash cards to apply, analyze, question, and create.
Continue readingQuizlet is an online database of nearly 300 million study sets created by students and teachers. Data sets include both text-based and visual study materials. The range of topics covered on Quizlet is pretty amazing. Students can remix existing sets or create their own. For each study set, Quizlet offers up to nine study activities, including matching and fill-in-the-blank games and timed quizzes. Adaptive learning technology helps students study effectively by offering more difficult questions as mastery increases.
While students can browse for study materials from users around the world, many teachers make and share custom study sets just for their classes. Verified Creators such as curriculum publishers and educational institutions also offer content on Quizlet, including featured pay-as-you-go premium content. There are other great features for teachers, too, including Quizlet Live, a team-based quiz competition that turns study sets into a collaborative classroom quiz game. For $35.99 per year, the Quizlet Teacher subscription offers student progress tracking and a variety of customization tools.
Quizlet is super simple, but that's part of its appeal. Teachers and students can browse existing content or upload their own. Just like real flash cards that you make or borrow from a friend, quality can vary, but on the whole, the public content is pretty good. Quizlet is a good tool for any classroom; not only does it work well on any device, but it offers a variety of supports for English language learners (ELLs) and students with learning differences. You can click on a word or definition to hear it read aloud or attach voice recordings to flash cards (with Plus/Teacher upgrade). For visual learning, you can add images to definition cards or create custom diagrams.
Quizlet's Learn mode takes data from millions of anonymous sessions and uses study techniques to generate an adaptive study plan to improve learning. If students use Learn in addition to the timed games, they'll likely stay engaged for longer than with traditional flash cards. Plus, students will enjoy competing for high scores in the timed study games and against classmates in Quizlet Live. At its core, Quizlet is for memorization, so its impact as a transformative learning tool is likely limited. But if you use Quizlet's many features thoughtfully, this is a worthy, flexible site to add to your teacher tool belt.