Sharpening and trying out learning tools for 2017 (tonight I tried learning Spanish with Babbel:)), I came across a blog post written by my student assistants that somehow never got posted! Tia and Lizzie will be back in a few weeks to begin their senior years at Carroll. Alison will be starting graduate school. Here is what they so well wrote.
Tia’s Perspective:
Quizlet is a very helpful tool when it comes to studying. Quizlet has many different learning tools which can help each individual learner be successful. When you first start with Quizlet, you must create an account, which is free. As a student you have the option to create your own flash cards, or even use flashcards your professor has created. Within Quizlet, there are four main components for any teacher or student who is creating flashcards. They are the speller, learn, space race, and test options. The speller option gives you a definition and from that you must type in the correct answer. If you do not spell the term correctly, you get the flash card wrong, and it will be put back in the stack for you to try again. The learn option helps you remember the word associated with the definition and is normally done at your own pace and not timed like some of the other options. The space race option is a timed game when defining the definitions in your flash card set. The test option is a multiple choice or matching section of all your flash cards in a certain set. My personal favorite is the matching and multiple choice option because it simulates an actual exam.
When I was in high school my teacher in my College Credit Human Anatomy and Physiology class created flashcards for all her students. The flash cards that helped me the most were with pictures of certain types of cells and what they were called on the back. This really helped with lab practicals when you had to look inside the microscope and recall what the cell was called. By playing the matching game option on Quizlet, it effectively prepared me for the exam, rather than me just staring at my lab manual trying to memorize the different features of each cell. I remember more by being quizzed in part by learning from my mistakes. Quizlet identifies which flashcards you do not understand, and then you can focus on these flash cards until you master them. At Carroll, when I was taking my Anatomy and Physiology class, I reused the flashcards my professor in high school created for me. With Quizlet, you have access to any flash cards on the website as long as the publisher makes them public. Quizlet is a very useful study tool for all types of learners, as well as saves the environment by using no paper when creating these flash cards.
Lizzy’s Perspective:
I agree with Tia in that Quizlet is a very helpful tool when it does come to studying for an exam, a test, or a quiz. Dr. Simpson gave us a link (an example is here) in his Statistics and Experimental Design class telling us that those were the terms we were going to need to know for our exam. I looked them over and they were very useful in the sense of not having to make my own cards, but instead using the ones on Quizlet to study the terms. The Quizlet tool helped me figure out which terms I didn’t know and which terms I really did know. Quizlet is a very useful learning tool and very convenient to use.
Alison’s Perspective:
I have always been a big fan of using the old flashcard method for studying for my classes but slowly I have been turning my study habits over to the internet. For my Spanish classes, other students in previous Spanish classes from around the United States have posted their vocabulary, grammar, and cultural sections on Quizlet. This allows my classmates and myself the opportunity to use these Quizlet flashcards to help prepare for our tests and final exams. It is convenient because I can access these Quizlets on multiple devices any time that I may have during the day.
My nursing major friends find Quizlet convenient when preparing for large final exams. These exams usually include many nursing terms, so one of the students will make a Quizlet with all of the vocabulary and then share the Quizlet with the rest of the class. This allows all the students to benefit from having access to Quizlet to help them study for their exams.
Lizzy and Alison made two quick Quizlets to test out some of the features. One Quizlet was about the top learning tools that our research team has written about in previous blogs and the other Quizlet was about some quick facts about Carroll University. Let’s see how well YOU do!