Read these scenarios and consider whether they reflect any moments in your own classroom:


Te students are studying vocabulary while the teacher is checking that they have made their flash cards. She realizes that many flash cards contain mistakes, and now the students are drilling themselves on incorrect material.


By the time the teacher has written the full problem on the board, some students have turned their attention to less productive pursuits. Now more time is wasted while the class settles back down.


If either of these situations seems familiar to you, then maybe you could use an alternative to physical flash cards, or a way to get problems on the board faster. We would like to introduce you to Study Blue (www.studyblue. com), a great way to incorporate technology into secondary education, both in and out of the classroom.


What is it? Study Blue is a Web 2.0 tool for making and studying flash cards. Anyone can create a free account and either make sets of flash cards, or search for sets that others have made. If you want to prevent the frequent mistakes that oſten appear in flash cards that students create, then you can create one set of cards for the class, and each student can create an account, find the set you have made, and study the terms. Tey can even send flash cards to their smart phones, so they can study on the go. Under a free account, Study Blue will even send scheduled e-mail and text reminders (up to 30/month) that prompt the student to study their flash cards.


What else does it do? Other than the standard option of quizzing users on the full deck of flashcards, Study Blue can help streamline the process of studying by narrowing down the cards to only include those the user marked as


Saving a deck to your account is easy! MACULJOURNAL | FALL 2012 | 25


incorrect during the previous study session. Te student can use this function to review only the terms with which he or she is struggling, or reset the deck to review all of the cards again. Users who want to switch up the way they are studying can print out the terms and definitions in a review sheet, or have the site shuffle them into a multiple choice, true/false, or fill in the blank quiz.


Classroom Time-Saver Study Blue is an excellent in-class tool for a room equipped with digital projectors. Te teacher can project a flash card with a problem (a math problem, a sentence to translate, a question about types of government) onto the whiteboard or wall, and students write down their answers. Te teacher can then flip the card over to quickly reveal the correct answer, and the students can compare it to their own responses. As soon as the class is ready to move on, the next card is immediately available. Tis process eliminates the time that is usually wasted erasing problems and writing new ones on the board when there is no more space leſt, thereby increasing the amount of time in a given class period that students can be engaged with the content.


Tis sounds interesting. Give me more details! Each time you create a deck of flash cards, you can decidewhether it is public or private. For example, you may decide that you will make public decks for students to study at home, but private decks for in-class review sessions. You can change a public deck to private or publish a private deck. Tere is no limit on the number of decks you can have, and you may edit your existing decks at any time. Students do need to create an account and log in to use Study Blue, but the process of creating an account only requires a valid email address, and filling in the fields for first and last name. Te student can choose to use initials or a pseudonym to increase privacy.


When a Study Blue user finds a useful deck of flash cards that was created by someone else, she can save it to the backpack on her account, where it will stay up to date with any future edits the owner of the deck may make. In addition to providing a backpack for efficient flash card deck organization and retrieval, Study Blue allows its users to create classes. If you create a class, other users can choose to subscribe to it. When you add a new deck of flash cards to your class, it automatically appears in your subscribers’ backpacks. Once your students subscribe to your class, each new deck you add to it will automatically appear on their accounts, eliminating one more step that typically stands between your students and an effective study session.


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