Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Making Electronic Flashcards

Flashcards are a great way for students to memorize vocabulary. In the old days, we'd make flashcards by cutting up slips of paper and writing the English word on one side and the target translation on the other side. These days it's easy to do the same thing online.

CueFlash is one site that makes it fun and easy to make flashcards. You can search for an existing deck of flashcards, like this one for Coushatta tame animals. Or you can make your own flashcards by signing up for a free account. CueFlash allows special characters, but it isn't easy to enter them. The simplest way is probably to find the character you need on a website somewhere, and then to paste that into CueFlash.

CueFlash is designed for use on the web. If you're willing to download a program, you can make more sophisticated flashcards. One of the best free programs is Anki, which allows you to use images or sounds instead of words as the cues. The instructor could prepare decks of cards, and students would have to download the Anki program and the prepared decks.CueFlash and Anki both use programs that repeat flashcards based on how well you know them. The Anki system is more advanced, but CueFlash is more convenient.

Learning a language requires a great deal of memorization. Flashcards are an old-fashioned memory system that, with a few updates, still serves a useful purpose.

3 comments:

  1. Hi. You can also try another free online flashcards service http://mymentor.ru

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  2. Another site for this is quizlet.com -- they also have some fun learning games built into the site.

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  3. biki.com has a free system too - I'm using it here in Cambodia to teach French and English... It allows for recordings of voice, images, even video...

    The only drawback is that it is geared to allow english learners to learn the other language and not the other way around...

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