As a teacher, I frequently encourage (and sometimes require) my students make Flash Cards to prepare for their Theory tests as there are many questions on their study guides and I have found that the students who score the best have reviewed the questions many times. The easiest way I have found to do that is by making Flash Cards.
I found Flash Card Machine a few years ago and have been recommending that to students ever since. It’s not the most techie site in the world but it gets the job done. Now that my students have gadgets, some are using apps like iFlipr to create cards to use on their mobile devices.
While I love the idea of using flash cards on a mobile device, I don’t have an iPhone (yet, I am very much tempted to get one as teachers get a significant discount on AT&T plans), my Microsoft Zune’s screen is much too small for such a program (and I haven’t found one that would work on a Zune anyway), and I can’t find an app in the Windows Mobile Marketplace that would allow me to create my own flash cards.
I was looking online recently for another flash card program that I might like better than Flash Card Machine and stumbled across a new (to me) Flash cards program the other day called “Flashcards” by Microsoft Education Labs.
It caught my eye immediately because:
- In general I tend to love Microsoft products (I’ll admit it, I do)
- The interface is pretty
- You can have any combination of text, image, and sound on the front and the back ( a lot of programs limit you to making such choices on one side only
- There are three different study modes (most other online programs only have 1):
- Review mode – Where you look at the front and back side by side like this
- Study mode – which, as their Blog states it, is based on the “honor system” and you quiz yourself like this:
- Type It In mode – compares what you type in the box with the correct answer.
- Review mode – Where you look at the front and back side by side like this
- You can swap fronts and backs to have an altogether different study experience.
- If you start practicing your cards on one computer, and continue on another, it will pick up where you left off.
- You can print a report of your progress**(see note below)
- Or you can view your progress by looking at the bottom of the screen where it says Keep trying or Good Memory. As you improve, the cards you know the best move to the right side of the screen where it says Good Memory
**
When I used this with my students I discovered two things:
- Requires Silverlight which isn’t installed on all of the students’ machines. So I had to log them off and log on myself and install it before they could try it out
- The print a report feature only seems to work immediately after you have finished a Study or Type It in Session. Students who didn’t print at that time didn’t have the report later. I wish there was a feature that would enable students to access reports after the study session.
I’m using the flash cards to prep for the GRE exam which is one of my goals for this summer.
