Friday, February 22, 2013

I LOVE Quizlet!

Have you heard about Quizlet? It's a very powerful tool all teachers should know about! Basically, Quizlet is a website that allows you to create flashcards in many languages. Students can access the cards you've created and play games and even take tests in order to learn the words on the cards.  They can also listen to any word in French and hear how it's pronounced.  And it's FREE.
I decided last year to make Quizlet flashcard sets for every unit for each level of French that I teach.  That was a lot of flashcards!!  I put links to all the sets on my class web pages, and now students can go there any time they want to and study for any unit they want to, which I think is a great resource for a teacher to provide.  If you would like to see the sets I've made, or even use them, you can search for my user name (madamermwood) at the Quizlet site.

The questions becomes, however, how to integrate this tool into a world language classroom.  If you ask students to complete an activity on Quizlet during your class time, how do you hold them accountable to do so?  There is a very easy solution to this, and I learned it from my friend Joanne Thomas.  She published a fabulous new French program for middle school which I'm using, and she has integrated Quizlet into the whole program.  Joanne asks her students to complete an activity and then provide proof of completion by sending her a screen shot of the final "page" of the activity.  Here's an example of one:



Students can't get to this view until they've completed the whole activity, so this works very well.  A word of caution, however.  If a student clicks out of the activity, they have to start again at the beginning of the activity. 

I've seen how well Quizlet works to help students learn by using Joanne's middle school program, so I've begun to use it in my high school classes as well.  I've been assigning Quizlet activities during class as review before a test or quiz.  I sometimes give students part of the hour to complete the activity, which I can do easily since I'm lucky enough to be in a high school that has a 1:1 iPad program.  I'm happy to report that Quizlet works well on iPads!  Students can complete the activity in class and send me a screen shot from their iPads.  I can easily see how everyone is progressing by walking around the room and looking at the blue progress bar you see in the upper left hand corner of the screen shot. 
    
Obviously, it would be easy to assign these activities as homework as well.  There are many ways you can use Quizlet, and it really does help students improve their mastery and even their spelling of the vocabulary words.  My favorite activity is the new "Speller".  In this activity, students hear a person say the vocabulary word in French, and then they have to type it correctly with accents included.  The screen shot above is from a "speller" activity.

If you haven't tried Quizlet, I encourage you to check it out!  You won't be disappointed :).




4 comments:

  1. Love Quizlet! Feel free to check out the activities I've set up there & see if there's anything you could borrow, although I don't use the same resources as you do!

    That's really cool that Joanne has integrated Quizlet into her middle school program - thanks for the tip.

    Mme Aiello @ Teaching FSL

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    1. So nice to hear from you again, Madame Aiello! You are very welcome for the tip, and Joanne's middle school program is excellent! I wrote a post about it...I would highly recommend it :). Thanks also for access to your Quizlet sets as well, I will check them out.

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  2. Bonsoir! I do love Quizlet.com!! Great blog, Renée. You mentioned a word of caution that if your students click out of a learn mode, it doesn't save. That's only true if the student is not logged in. If he's signed in then Quizlet remembers all learn modes he did. Have you played with the new "cards mode"? You can star the ones you don't know and then specifically study the ones you starred. I talked to the Quizlet team and asked that they replace the stars with a smiley, smurky and frowny face to label the cards you know, sort of know and don't know. What an awesome way to practice. I added your Discovering French sets to my high school wiki http://high-school-french.wikispaces.com/ Make sure you label yourself as a teacher in the profile. You get extra perks, like when you search for sets, the teacher-made ones come up first. Here's my username on Quizlet http://high-school-french.wikispaces.com/ I love presenting Quizlet at FL conferences http://i-heart-quizlet.wikispaces.com/ I'm making new videos to keep up with their newest feature, "cards".

    Thanks again Renée!

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    1. Thanks for the tips, Joanne. I didn't know about the new "cards" feature, but I will be checking it out! I will also check into having my students create accounts for next year. I'm going to go change my profile to include that I'm a teacher right now. Merci beaucoup!

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