One of the best educational tools that you can try either you are a teacher or a student is Microsoft Education Labs Flashcards. You can build memory and recognition skills with a modern twist on the classic learning tool of flashcards. With Microsoft’s Flashcards application, teachers and students alike can create, share and study flashcards online. Flashcards provides a unique experience for everyone, enabling students to learn at their own pace so they can build confidence and stay engaged. You can create your own decks, or use an existing deck from the community website. Teachers and parents can access student progress reports, and students can self test to get instant feedback.
Flashcards decks can have up to 300 cards, and each card can have any combination of text, image, and sound on the front and the back. To maximize learning, Flashcards helps students by providing visual and auditory clues, while keeping track of progress. It also matches the difficulty of the deck to each individual student using a memory optimization algorithm. Flashcards keeps track of how long it’s been since the student saw the card, and whether the student knew it previously. It then uses this information to determine which card to show next.
Microsoft Education Labs Flashcards is an online application that you can use by visiting their website by clicking Here.
Basic Features
The Following images show the basic features of Microsoft Flashcards:
Flashcards is a web application where you can create, share and study online flashcards. This is the home page of the Flashcards application:
You can use one of the 3000 decks already available in the community, such as these:
or you can create your own deck using text, pictures or video clips:
Decks can have up to 300 cards, and each card can have any combination of text, image and sound on the front AND the back. This image shows the Review mode, where you can review your cards if you don’t know the content:
This image shows the Study mode, where you can practice guessing the answer. Study mode is based on the honor system:
This image shows the Type It mode, which requires you to type in the answer:
Teachers, tutors, or parents who want to track a student’s progress can even have the student print a report of their progress in a specific study session:
System requirements
To play Flashcards
- Operating System: Windows 7, Windows Vista; Windows XP Service Pack 2
- Processor: Intel® Pentium® III 450MHz or faster processor (or equivalent)
- 128MB of RAM
- Silverlight 3 or higher
- Web browser (Internet Explorer 8 or above)
To upload files to the Flashcards site
- A sound editor for any audio (Microsoft recommends Audacity, a free, cross-platform sound editor)
- A Silverlight-compatible MP3 encoder (Microsoft recommends the free LAME for Audacity MP3 Encoder)
- The technical specifications of Silverlight-compatible MP3 files are:
- Input: ISO/MPEG Layer-3 data stream
- Channel configurations: mono, stereo
- Sampling frequencies: 8, 11.025, 12, 16, 22.05, 24, 32, 44.1, and 48 kHz
- Bit rates: 8-320 kbps, variable bit rate
- Limitations: “free format mode” (see ISO/IEC 11172-3, sub clause 2.4.2.3) is not supported.