Quizlet: 

I have been exploring Quizlet for a few weeks in my classroom.  I started off creating a vocabulary list for my students’ novel unit.  I posted the list as “public” so all the students could use it as a study tool.  For homework, they were asked to play the game “scatter” and bring in their printed scores.  Once the students were comfortable with the tool, I asked them to create their own account and work with a new vocabulary list, creating flashcards of their own.  Within days of doing this, the tool spread like wildfire.  Science, history, and other English teachers were learning how to use it from their students. 

After playing with Quizlet, I learned that you can create your own characters on a type keyboard.  This allows me to paste in Hebrew text, which is not typically recognized by browsers and many other programs.  I look forward to showing our Hebrew department how they can paste in Hebrew vocabulary for future study.

I also find it fun to search other public lists, including many SAT words.  This is a very useful creative writing warm-up activity, where students get a random word on a flashcard, and they have to use it to describe a character or someone they know. The students really enjoyed trying this in their 8th grade Romeo and Juliet unit.

One downside of this tool is that I caught students IM’ing on the Quizlet site to their friends during lab time.  Of course, the students discovered this tool’s communication feature–I did not even notice this was there.  Go figure! 

Gliffy:

I am just starting to play with  Gliffy as a graphic organizer tool.  I can see the potential in creating collaborative graphic organizers for writing, concept mapping, plot mapping, and more.  I think the students will pick this one up easily, as it imitiates their knowledge of Inspiration software.   When will these online tools start to put other software lines out of business? This looks like a potential software industry threat!  I will keep my eye on this in the future.  Why pay for what you can use for free, with an added collaboarative feature?