The popular implementation of this “learning by repeating” method is flashcards usage. Thanks to the power of technology, flashcard learning is not limited to physical cards anymore. It has been adapted as countless web and desktop applications. One of those online flashcard services is Brainscape. This one is unique because it has a different method of utilizing and presenting the cards.

Deal The Cards

Aside from the standard signup process, Brainscape also allows you to register using your Facebook account. The second option is quicker, but only for those who feel comfortable letting third party applications access their account.  After signing up, you can start using the service by choosing what topic you want to learn.

There are three main groups of topics to start: Test Prep, Languages, and Knowledge Junkie.

For example, you can find flashcards to learn Chinese inside Language.

But my curiosity brought me to Keyboard Shortcuts inside Knowledge Junkie. After choosing the topic, pick one of the available decks to start.

In general, learning a subject using Brainscape is similar to using another flashcard service/application. But the difference is Brainscape only asks users to think of the answers, and doesn’t require users to write anything.

After seeing the question and thinking of the answer, click the “Reveal Answer” button to check to see if you were right.

Brainscape will ask you to rate your knowledge of the answer using a scale of 1 to 5. It will use your rating to determine how often the question will be repeated during your learning session. “Perfectly known” answers will be repeated less often than the “Very well” known answers, and so on.

We can see from the “Frequency of Repetition” pie chart how often each kind of question will pop out. The questions rated as “Not at all” known will appear in more than half of the learning session. This kind of arrangement will help users focus more on their weaknesses and less on the topics that they’ve already mastered.

Create Your Own Decks Of Online Flashcards

While I think Brainscape’s method of displaying the flashcards is great, it’s obvious that its collection of decks is pretty limited. Luckily, the service provides you with the ability to create your own decks of cards with your chosen topics.

• The first step to creating your deck is filling in the deck’s basic information.

• Then click the “Create Cards” button to start. You can fill in more supplementary information if you want to.

There are two ways to create your online flashcards. The first one is by using “Quick Create“. This method is great if you only need to fill in basic questions and answers. The second one is “Standard Create” where you can customize the font style and add images and sound.

This is what the “Quick Create” looks like. First, you write down the “Prompt” which will appear at the beginning of each card. Then you fill in the “Question” and “Answer” fields, and click the “Add these Cards” button to add more cards to the set. If there are cards that you don’t want to keep, you can easily delete them using the red “minus (-)” button on the right of each entry.

The “Standard Create” fields are more elaborate. You will get all sorts of editing options on the toolbar.

And also the option to add images and audio.

You can review the cards by going to the “Review” tab. There are also options to Edit, Delete, Add Note and View Notes.

All of the decks of cards in your collection are accessible from the “My Library” tab at the top of your account’s page. You can see the list of subjects in the left pane and decks of cards under a subject in the main pane.

The subjects are editable. Just click the option button and choose “Edit Subject“. You can also share your subject via email by clicking the button below it.

Going Mobile & Wish List

Brainscape’s flashcards also available as iPhone apps. But the company made their apps different from other flash card apps. Instead of releasing one app with a library of cards, Brainscape has released one app for each subject. Some of the decks are free while others are paid.

The topic that I used as the example above – Keyboard Shortcuts – is available for free.

The app takes a similar approach to its web counterpart: question, answer, and knowledge rating.

The way I see it, Brainscape’s method of displaying online flashcards gives the product a competitive edge against other similar products. Unfortunately, there’s still one thing missing. A flashcard application will only really take off if there are lots of flashcard decks from various topics in its repository, and Brainscape’s repository is rather empty. If this web service want to expand its flashcards collection, it could use the power of community by letting users contribute and share their custom flashcard decks.

What do you think of Brainscape? Will you use it or do you prefer other flashcard applications? Share your thoughts using the comments below.

Today we’ll take a look at some of the better applications with flash cards for Android, which teachers could recommend to students for studying flashcards in their classes. There’s a number of applications out there, so if none of these take your fancy, there’s still plenty more free options to choose from.

When trying to decide which application to write the flashcards for, there’s a number of things to consider :

• How much information can you put on each card?
• Does it allow pictures, videos and URLs?
• How easy is it to write a new set of flashcards?
• Is there a web interface?
• How easy is it to backup your flashcards?
• How easily can students transfer those flashcards to another format which suits them better?
• Is there a client for iPhone, Android and Blackberry?
• Does this flashcard application keep track of your progress and show you the flashcards in an intelligent manner?
• How big is the application?
• Overall, how easy is the application to use?

StudyDroid

StudyDroid is an easy-to-use flashcard application. You can get started very quickly making your own flashcards by clicking “add“. You can also make your own flashcards on your computer or you can browse the public flashcards at Studydroid to find something you like. When making your cards, it’s easy to change the text size or colour of the cards to make them more memorable.

GFlash+

GFlash+ is my personal favourite flashcard application for Android. I like that I can keep a Google document with the up-to-date flashcard information and occasionally re-sync the phone’s flashcards to the online version. All that’s required is to build (or import) a simple spreadsheet in Google Documents and share it with the email address gwhizmobile@gmail.com, thus sharing it publicly to all gFlash+ users.

The free version won’t allow URLs or embedded media, but it’s still very useful to have control over the public version of your original flashcards, since you can add to them or fix minor errors.

Kaka Flashcards

Kaka Flashcards lets you import public flashcards from Studystack or Quizlet easily via their application, from your SD card, using a QR code and many other ways. You can also quickly export your cards as .csv for later use or for use with other flashcard programs. It’s got a great interface and looks very professional. Cards are shown to learners according to the Leitner system.

More Android Education

If you’re into self-education and want some ideas for edutainment on your Android or online, here’s a few more articles you’ll probably appreciate:

• 5 Cool Android Apps with GPS Activities For Kids
• Top 5 Sites to Help You Find Apps for Your Android Phone
• The Five Best Educational YouTube Channels
• 5 Cool Edutainment Games You Can Play and Also Donate To Charitable Causes

Do you use flashcard apps on your phone? What’s your app with flash cards for Android? Why? Let us know in the comments!

Image Credit: ShutterStock

Fortunately, the situation has slowly shifted for the better. There are several great educational tools popping up here and there, and Edmodo is one of them. Let’s take a look to see how it can help.

The Teachers’s Perspective

If I have to explain Edmodo in one short phrase, it would be: “Facebook for Education” (and you’ll see why shortly). Edmodo describes itself as “Secure social learning network for teachers and students“. They prove it by providing two types of buttons that you can choose: “I’m a Student” and “I’m a Teacher“.

For experimental purpose, let’s look at the service from both perspectives. I started my experiment on the teacher side.

The sign up window looks ordinary with all the usual fields to fill. But later you will see that the student’s version has a distinctive difference.

After signing up, you’ll land in your Edmodo home page. It’s eerily similar to Facebook – with some modifications here and there to make it fit for educational purposes.

The update area is “adjusted” as a tool to send Notes, Alerts, Assignments, and Polls to fellow students or other teachers.

If you are a teacher, you’ll appreciate the ability to easily send assignments. Just write down the title, description, due date and you are ready to go. You can add files, links, or refer some materials from the library. Choose the recipients before clicking the “Send” button. They could be other teachers in your network, or students from your study group.

Teachers also have the privilege to create groups. Aside from “Grade” (e.g.: Kindergarten, 9th, 12th, Higher Education) and “Subject Area” (e.g.: Mathematics, Creative Arts, Computer Technology), the groups can also be based on the classes that you teach, the difference of interest among students, levels of comprehension of a topic, etc.

Then your status will be updated with the group that you’ve just created. One important thing that you should pay attention to is the access code of the group. You should inform your students about the code, because they won’t be able to join the group without it.

At the lower part of the home screen, you will find a few basic things that you should complete to make your account “fully functional”.

The Students’ Perspective

If you are a student, the registration process is a little bit different. Other than your basic personal information, you’ll also need the group code that you are about to join. This is the code that your teacher will get when they create the group.

After logging in, you’ll find a list of groups that you’ve joined right under your avatar. If you want to join other groups, have the access code ready and click the “Join” button.

There are links to “Calendar“, “Grades” and “Library” on the top of the page. While you could easily guess what you would find inside the first two, the third one is a bit unique. Library is the place where you can find all the files and links sent to you or any of your groups.

You could also add files to your library. This is a good place to store all of the materials related to your study.

Another place that you might want to visit is the “Settings“. Here’s the place to complete your personal information, and change your picture. You can choose one of the available images as your picture or you can upload your own.

You could also set what kind of notification that you want to receive and what kind of event that you should be notified about. The choices are email and text message. Unfortunately, not everybody can choose text messages as their option as it is only available for users of several major phone providers.

The Social Side

Above all of the features, the strongest point of Edmodo should be its social side. Just like Facebook, Edmodo makes it easy to search and add friends – whether they are teachers or students. If you are a teacher and you’ve defined your school, you might find other teachers from the same institution.

But Edmodo also finds a way to keep users’ privacy. The group concept will limit everything that happens in a group within the group members. And since it’s impossible to join any group without the access code, teachers can keep “unwanted parties” out of the group.

Even at first glance, I found Edmodo fits most of my requirements for a great teaching-learning tool. But you should not just take my word for it. Try the service yourself and share your opinions in the comments below.

Don’t forget to check out our other education-related articles like: 10+ Web Tools To Save Your Butt In School, 8 Awesome Websites to Take Free College Courses Online, and The Five Best Educational YouTube Channels.

Kidblog.org is a service designed by teachers for teachers. They have made the process of creating and monitoring a class blog safe and efficient. Sign-ups are fast and simple, making it easy to co-ordinate a whole class of new students. At the same time, the blog’s privacy and security is protected by default. This makes life incredibly easy for the teacher, allowing you to get straight in to the fun bit of blogging!

The primary differences between Kidblog and any other free blogging platform is the default class-only privacy level and the superbly easy way of bulk-adding user accounts for students without requiring email addresses and confirmation of invites. Anyone who has ever tried to set up a group-run blog can attest that it’s sometimes a little tricky to ensure the technophobes verify their invites. Imagine doing that with a class-full of kids! The Kidblog system means you skip all of that fuss and move on to the blogging straight away. If you have your .csv file ready, you could sign up and have your kids blogging in less than five minutes!

Setting up a teacher account

The teacher account is a straightforward sign-up: choose a password, add a few details and you’re in.

Create a New Class

The blog creation is controlled by “classes”. The theory is that you’ll want the class to collaborate on a blog together, with all members as users of that blog.

The class name is the blog name, which becomes part of the URL for the class blog too. You’ll want to set up initially as one class, even if there’s smaller group projects within the class, since the default privacy level is for students to be able to see other classmate’s work. If they’re not in the same class, they won’t be able to see it (or you’ll need to change the privacy).

You’re limited to 200 kids per class, but it’s suggested that if you need more usernames you simply start a new class, add the new users to that and then invite them to the original class. You can easily keep adding classes every school year and importing the users from older classes. This gives the kids a little continuity, too.

Privacy and Security

Permissions for viewing posts are set by default to “Class members only”, so only the people you’ve added to this class will be able to see posts. It’s also possible to add more teachers to administrate and to add parent accounts as guests if you want to enable parents to see the classwork. Comments are set to be moderated by default, so teachers will be able to block any of the nasty comments made by certain kids. If you do choose to make the blog public, you can continue to filter unsolicited comments.

Add Users

Adding users can be done individually or as a bulk upload, which is recommended.

The bulk upload involves creating a .csv file with just name and password. You can do this easily by using a spreadsheet with a column for name and a column for passwords, then exporting it as a .csv file.

Once the users are added, they can log in and start writing straight away. Don’t worry about the usernames – your kids won’t need to memorise those!

Groups

If you’ve got several groups of kids in the one class all working on different group projects, you’ll want to set up appropriate “Groups” each with relevant names.

Once the groups are set up, kids viewing the blog can look at posts just by one person or filter to show just relevant groups.

For Kids

Tell your students to go to the blog URL (you find your blog URL by clicking on the “Go to Class Blog” link at the top of your dashboard). Kids can click on the “Log In” link and they are given a drop-down list of names to choose from. So, they only need to remember a password!

Once logged in, they can browse their friend’s posts or filter for groups using the drop-down menu. They can write posts which must then be moderated by the teacher before publishing.

Overview

Kidblog is based on WordPress, but has been customised with a teacher’s needs in mind. It’s free, uncluttered, ad-free, easy to set up and private by default. No information is collected from students and the teacher remains in control of all activity. My only request to Kidblog would be to add a few more default themes so that there can be a little more variety!

I strongly encourage all teachers and other facilitators of kids activities to have a go at using Kidblog. The possibilites are endless: writing groups; book clubs; assignments; group work; uploading photos of artwork; team spirit and post-game analysis; practise blogging in a second language; or getting kids to simply list off the most interesting things they learned that day. What will you use Kidblog for?

If you want more to read, here’s some articles you’ll love:

• 10 Online Learning Tools
• 2 Sites for Teachers to Download Teaching Resources
• Make History Fun by Teaching CSI Style
• 5 Free Online Encyclopedias Suitable for Kids

Image Credit: Shutterstock

Today’s set of tools will make anyone’s learning super-engaging: whether you have (or plan) kids or you want to earn some cash by tutoring someone, the tools will come in handy.

ProProfs, the site we have mentioned a couple of times on MUO already, has a variety of free educational apps and games which need a closer look. The toolset has been featured on various powerful educational portals including TheJournal, Assett and Profy.

Unlike our previous reviews of the tool features, this one will focus on the educational value of the free web apps.

1. Quizzes

Apart from creating fun personality quizzes to engage and entertain your blog visitors, ProProfs Quiz Maker can be used for educational purposes.

Idea: The tool is perfect for assessing people’s knowledge of the topic as well as identifying “weak” areas: where most people tend to err.

Sample educational quizzes:

• Are you smarter than a 5th grader?
• Can you identify these historical landmarks?
• SAT Improving Sentences Quiz I

Creating a quiz might take you a bit of time (simply because you need to provide questions and several answers for each). So before creating the quiz using the tool I usually draft the quiz structure in Excel and once I have all the info, complete the form.

The very first step is to provide the quiz name, description and your questions (with answers). The quiz allows to choose between various types of question types: “Multiple answers”, “True/False”, “Fill in the blanks”, “Essay type”. The best thing is that you can make each question interactive by adding images or embedding video:

Then you will need to set the result type; the tool supports:

• Pass / fail result;
• Letter grading;
• Good / excellent result;
• Customized result (where you provide the scoring system of your own).

Here’s an example of letter grading settings (you can also set the max time and configure the certificate settings):

2. Flashcards

Flashcards section allows to create your own flashcards as well as browse through already created ones in various categories.

Idea: Easily summarize and organize complex material to let kids always have it by hand (print and download your flashcards for further reference).

Sample flashcard: French verbs

Creating a flashcard is fun: you can use images, formatting and various colors to visualize your data sets more effectively:

3. Brain Games

Besides interactive fun games, ProProf’s Brain Games section allows to create several types of fun word games including:

• Word search game;
• Crossword game;
• Word scrample game.

Idea: You can get your kids easier remember the spelling of new words by creating a crossword and letting them take it several times in a row. The crossword will vary the words each time it’s reloaded.

Sample crossword: Superheroes

Creating a word game really takes seconds. All you need is the concept and words in mind. After that it’s just the matter of copy-pasting: the software will create a puzzle of that itself:

And here’s our cute little MUO-authors crossword which took us two seconds to create:

Do you think tools like that could make learning (as well as teaching) much more fun (and thus much more enjoyable and effective)?

With summer break winding down for many students, it’ll be time to get back to their studies soon. With that comes the responsibility of registering for classes for the new semester and maybe some burning questions in the back of your mind.

“Is this class going to be hard?” “What’s the professor like?” With the Web, it’s easy to find out what other students think of the teacher before you take the class. Read up on their reviews and check out how others rate college professors so that you can be better prepared, have an idea of what to expect, and know who you may want to steer clear of.

Don’t wait until the first day. Here are the 4 best sites to rate and review teachers or professors.

Rate My Professors

Rate My Professors is one of the most popular professor review websites on the Web. The site boasts more than 10 million opinions of over 1 million professors from students like you. The ratings cover more than 6,000 schools across the United States, Canada, England, Scotland, and Wales.

Just search by professor or just find your school first by entering in its name. Displayed on every professor’s page is the overall rating, followed by ratings on helpfulness, clarity, and easiness.

Below that are the actual reviews, showing the class, how the users rate college professors, and any comments.

RateMyTeachers

RateMyTeachers is another popular review site. This time, however, the focus is on elementary and secondary school teachers only for the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand.

Again, here you can search for your teacher by name or search for your school for the full list of teachers. Once on the teacher’s page, you can rate your teacher right there. It’s another simple 1 to 5 rating system, with the categories including easiness, helpfulness, clarity, and popularity.

Ratings and reviews are displayed just below that. If you’d like to know when the teacher is commented or rated on, just hit the “Follow” button and type in your email address to receive updates.

MyEdu

The academic website MyEdu also features how students rate college professors. What sets this site apart from others is that it claims to be the only community that works directly with universities to post the actual end-of-semester course and even the professor evaluations that students fill out in class.

The only catch is that you have to sign up to the site. With a free account, you’re limited to only the latest three reviews (if there are any). Upgrading your account gets you in-depth information about not only the professor but also the class in general, including grade history, drop rate, and more.

Professor Performance

For the United States and Canada only, Professor Performance is another useful review site for colleges and universities. Just browse by schools or search by professor to get started.

The rating system is a bit more unique than others, with letter grades, comment, and simple positive and negative columns.

Do you use any of these websites and have they helped you at all? Let us know in the comments.

Image Credit: marc buehler

Here at MakeUseOf, we’ve covered a variety of choices for when you want to find resources for online learning, like Einztein online study courses, Justin’s review of free online college courseware, and of course there’s FreeVideoLectures, where you can watch videos on over 700 course topics.

However, there is one online learning resource that goes beyond all of those sites, by providing not only online course materials – such as lessons and tests – but you’ll also find an entire community of like-minded students with a thirst for knowledge. Nuvvo is an online learning community that offers all of those things and more. Whether you’re a student or a teacher, you’ll want to check out this creative learning resource.

Creating Your Account & Profile

Signing up at Nuvvo is free and easy to set up – all you need is a valid email address. Nuvvo combines online learning tools with the look and feel of a social network, however it is primarily for creating online learning areas where students can read lessons, take tests, and participate in discussions about the subject with other students.

You can judge the credibility of an instructor, or the activity level of a student, by their “authority” level. Authority is broken down into both teaching activity and student activity. To improve your curriculum and teaching authority, simply get active in the many areas of Nuvvo.

Finding Topics To Learn About

Just about everyone has a subject that they are very interested in learning more about. For me, those include blogging and web design, computer programming and investigative journalism. Brainstorm the subjects that you’d love to learn more about, and start typing in keywords into the search bar on Nuvvo’s “Learning Communities” page.

I’ve always wanted to learn more about the Java programming language, so I decided to searching for Java learning communities, and discovered several. The “Java/J2EE Development” learning community had 70 other students participating and looked pretty interesting.

Joining a learning community, you’ll discover lessons, tests, trivia, discussions and more. These communities are created and run by experts who love the topic so much that they offer free lessons and other learning tools, so you’ll discover that there’s a lot of very useful information embedded into each of the lessons. For example, the lesson on basic Java concepts was detailed and provided a decent background on Java basics.

Once you’re done studying the lessons, you can take the tests that instructors created for the material, try your hand at answering some of the trivia questions, or discuss specific questions you have with the instructor and students in the discussion areas.

Becoming A Nuvvo Instructor

Now, if you have an area of expertise that you’d love to share with interested students, you can create your own learning community. I decided that I would create a learning community about how to blog, so clicking on “Start a Community” in your workspace takes you to the area where you can set up your learning area and associated subdomain.

Creating your first lesson is as simple as using any WYSIWYG web page editor or blogging platform. You can format headers, add bullet lists, include pictures and more.

When you create a lesson, you have the option to offer it as part of your overall learning community, or you can attach it to a “course” as part of specific courseware. You can do this in the right menu bar by selecting to publish the lesson privately in your courses.

Creating a course is an excellent way to offer a targeted lesson plan following a structured outline of lessons. If you plan to put a lot of effort in creating high-value courseware with instruction videos, lessons and more – you can opt to charge students for the course. Students pay (and you receive payment) through Paypal. Or, if you simply want to include free courses as part of your Nuvvo learning community, then leave the cost at $0 and select the community you want to attach it to under “Course Material.”

In the course area that students gain access to, they will see you as the instructor, as well as the curriculum you’ve created and a discussion area for students to ask you (or eachother) questions. Courses are similar to learning communities, except they are more focused on a particular sub-topic, and they include an outlined curriculum students can follow to learn new skills.

Whether you decide that you want to be a teacher or a student, Nuvvo is a very cool online community devoted to people with an interest in education and a thirst for information and new skills.

Have you ever tried taking lessons on Nuvvo? Do you know of similar online learning communities? Share your insight in the comments section below.

Image Credit: Harrison Keely