Debbie Chikousky is an agricultural columnist that has combined her love of farming with her love of homeschooling.  Her writing allows her to be a stay at home farm mom with four children ages 20,19,17 and 15.  Although the two oldest went through public school, homeschooling has always been her preferred method of education.  Combining homeschooling with a busy day of farm chores and teenage life can be a challenge but it is always fun.   She utilizes free tools as much as possible in her endeavors to keep learning connected to life.

Glossary/vocabulary in my house has always been a nightmare, and to be honest, a fight. I wasn’t sure why I was engaged in it since the children rarely absorbed much of what we had fought so hard to memorize.   But then I found Quizlet.

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“Browse and use millions of flashcards created by other students and teachers, or create your own.”

“My mission for Quizlet is to make learning vocabulary not a chore. I know a lot of teachers assign vocabulary to students, but few students actually “absorb” words into their vocabularies after they take their test.” - Andrew Sutherland, creator of Quizlet, president of Brainflare, web developer, and high school student.

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From the moment I hit the homepage I found the Quizlet site easy to navigate.  New visitors have the options of a written tutorial “quick guide“  or a “video tour“. I was pleasantly surprised that even on dial up connection the video loaded quickly and was thorough.

While I was touring Quizlet I noticed that although the pre-made vocabulary lists are for students from grade 8 - college, there are many shared lists for younger students that have been posted by teachers.  This in itself makes this site a valuable tool for homeschool parents that are searching for the knowledge of what teachers are doing in their classrooms.

Nonmembers (FREE) are allowed to create their own sets of virtual flashcards either by creating their own questions, by incorporating other people’s sets, or by creating their own unique study cards. The subjects encompass a wide variety of public school courses and also includes preparation lists for many standardized tests such as the SAT’s.

Signing up for a FREE membership was simple and doing so unlocks many features to help both the student and the teacher.  An account enables you to share your vocabulary cards through email, Facebook or Myspace.  As a member you can also create a Quizlet forum, create your own flashcard sets, and set up study groups.

Once our account was established we clicked on Create Set. We followed the video tutorial and went to work creating our first set of virtual flashcards.  We used Quizlet to study glossary for our current unit on Cellular Reproduction.  We could have used the option of importing data from the Internet or off of a document stored elsewhere on our computer, but I decided to type the definitions directly from my sons textbook instead. TYPE IN DATA.  Beside each entry there is a “?” that allows you to either give your own definition or choose from an extensive list of choices already on the site.

This:

becomes this:

Once we made our flashcard sets we worked our way through all of the learning modes.  First is the Familiarize Mode which is basically an overview of the material to be covered.  By clicking on Learn mode you will have the ability to track scores, retest, pause and resume the study session if you desire. Test mode supports short-answer, matching, multiple choice and true/false testing, in any combination.  Test mode also has the ability to score the answers and provide easy-to-read corrections.  Not only does this tool reduce my lesson planning time, it also helps decrease my marking time and gives me with more teaching time!

There is also Scatter Mode where the students can play a timed matching game which lets you drag and drop questions and answers with the mouse.  Last on the list is the Space Race. In this mode students play a timed video game in which you type the vocabulary word that matches the definition as it moves across the screen. This mode was hard for my children because they do not have fast typing speeds so I did the typing while they yelled out the answers.  We have found that by the time we make our way through all these modes the vocabulary is truly learned!

The sharing feature includes finding a group for networking.  You can browse all the groups, search for groups, or create a new group (only available to members).  I found the topics widely varied from fans of Christian rock bands to people that don’t like big words.  There is also a “report as inappropriate button” on every page.  I didn’t see anything that would have made me feel insecure in letting our children use this site.

This site is useful for both student and teacher.  Using Quizlet will streamline my lesson planning time because there are word lists for every subject material imaginable. I will no longer have to pour over texts for glossary lists or read dictionaries for ideas. The student and teacher can both have accounts in which they can track their progress throughout the year.  For the home school family with more than one child this feature will help keep their progress easily available.

Overall we found Quizlet to be easy to navigate, free, and very useful for our family.