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An excellent education tools : flashcards.

Posted on February 27th, 2008 by Jamy

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When I did my high school in Australia, I did not know anything about flash card. When I took my class here in the US, I found that a lot of students here love to use flash cards. And I personally find flashcard a very beneficial way to enhance subject memory.

I used flashcards a lot with my child when I started him on learning his alphabets and letters. I started him with bright colors and big alphabets and letters and it was a piece of cake to get his full attention with flashcards.

Flashcard Friends is a free website for creating and sharing online flashcards with the ability to include sounds and pictures. In addition the system creates tests for you and corrects your answers. It is THE BEST way to learn and it works for Kindergartners to Medical school students.. The website is free, has no advertising and is safe for kids : http://www.flashcardfriends.com and you might want to read their press release here :

Press Release:

Flashcard Friends Combines Social Networking and Online Learning

Second generation Web 2.0 entrepreneurs create a FREE “social learning” website for students, homeschoolers and teachers

Belmont, CA. – February 21, 2008 – Flashcard Friends combines social networking—a la Facebook and MySpace—with online learning. The inspiration for Flashcard Friends came when the founders of the company, Kendall and Ryan Hogan (now ages 15 and 12) were being forced to create flashcards by their whip-cracking father. They complained that “flashcards are lame…why can’t we do them on the Internet…and why can’t they be fun like MySpace.” Their father, Mike, a web 2.0 entrepreneur, started asking questions about how it might work. Kendall and Ryan described a social network where students could create flashcards and share them with their classmates; or teachers could create flashcards and share them with their students.

With the help of their father, Ryan and Kendall defined what they wanted their website to do. Then their father recruited a top-notch team of developers and got it built. You can now see their website at www.Flashcardfriends.com. Following in their father’s footsteps, Kendall and Ryan are second generation web 2.0 entrepreneurs.

Old school (printed) flashcards are a powerful and proven memorization tool. By using them, Kendall and Ryan were able to substantially improve their test scores. But online flashcards enable a lot of very powerful capabilities. For example, spelling, pronunciation of foreign words, automated testing and correction, images, all of this and more is a snap with Flashcard Friends.

Once the flashcards are in the system, you can share them with friends. The Hogan kids are now looking forward to the day when they return from summer break, only to inherit online flashcards from the class ahead of them. In addition to finding flashcards through friends, you can navigate through flashcard decks by category (e.g. math > algebra), or search by tags, keywords, and more.

Some of the website’s functionality:
• Create flashcards with text, pictures and sounds (ideal for foreign languages)
• Four different learning modes: find one that fits you, or use them all
• Auto-magically creates tests from the flashcards and then corrects them
• Uses social networking to manage sharing card decks
• Find existing flashcards by subject, school, teacher, book and more
• Speak into your computer and add the recording to the cards instantly
• Turns a spelling list into spelling flashcards with a spoken version of each word
• Includes web 2.0 technologies like user ratings, bookmarking and tagging
• …and much more

Flashcard Friends enables students to create flashcards, share them, memorize them and then test themselves. Flashcards can be used at every level, from Kindergarten to post-graduate, and for every topic, from learning colors to preparing for the legal bar exam, learning a language, or studying for the SAT.

Nancy Ferraro 5th Grade Teacher, Granite Bay, CA: “I was very excited to discover Flashcard Friends. I introduced it to my 5th grade students, and we have been using it ever since. The students like how easy the site is to navigate, but they are so jazzed to see their friends’ flashcards. My students have already exchanged flashcards on multiplication, fractions, the 13 colonies, and space. All this in one week! I will definitely use this site for all of my classroom flashcard needs.”

About Flashcard Friends
Flashcard Friends, the social learning website, is pioneering the powerful combination of social networking and online learning. The company was founded by students, for students. The entire website is free to all; students, teachers, homeschoolers, everyone. You can register for free at www.Flashcardfriends.com. For more information call (650) 595-2400, or email mike (at) Flashcardfriends.com.

See web demos of Flashcardfriends.com here: http://Flashcardfriends.com/videos.php

Tags: Personal //

2 Responses to “An excellent education tools : flashcards.”

Dan-yel // Feb 28, 2008 at 12:10 pm

I never used flash cards and attempted to use mind map to consolidate my memory for I find it too time-consuming, and as a degree student, I would have a lot to cover. Using aids such as mind map would somehow discourage me from going beyond the info inscribed in the ‘map’.

Besides, I remembered what one of my lecturer said of mind maps, it gave us the wrong impression that we ‘remember’. I agree, same goes with highlighting, it’s helpful for me when I return to look for specific points in a long text quickly.

I prefer extensive quick reading to construction of visual maps or brief notes. That way I’ll create a whole extensive ‘web’ of info. With this web as a background, my brain finds it easier to absorb new info of a related subject matter; our minds tend to remember better things that are familiar or that we can ‘make sense’. You can prove this by comparing the difficulties at which people from a particular field of expertise tend to find in memorizing a term or concept of a different field. Eg: A doctor trying to memorize legal jargons. It would take time for the him/her to adapt, if you get what I mean.

But for a child like your son, I think flash cards, mind maps would be very useful to create an early substantial bulk of knowledge. Which would be indispensable for future studies. Like me, when I was a kid, I read a lot of stuff related to science. As a result, I found it a lot easier than my peers to understand and remember scientific terminology and concepts.
Jamy // Feb 28, 2008 at 9:09 pm

Daniel,
I have replied in a long comment but the computer wiped off, sigh.
Anyway, I personally believe babies / toddlers are visual learners, so flash cards is an excellent tool to get baby attention.
I started creating my own flash cards for my baby when he was 6 weeks old.
I hang the flash cards that I made to stimulate my baby visual interest. He started learning A, B, C when he was 6 weeks old.
Now he is 4 1/2, he reads and writes like a 7 years old.

And he is writing every difficult Chinese character now :).

A lot of people remark that he is a smart boy. I think both environmental and genetic play in their parts.

jamy