Sunday 25 November 2012

Using Quizlet with MFL Classes

This year I have swapped back to teaching some French, and I was keen to try to use some of the ICT knowledge I've accrued over the last 9 years to make up for the French I've lost! The last time I taught French it was with an OHP and tape recorder.

Of course, the interactive whiteboard is a great replacement for the OHP, and all the listening tracks are now online (a mixed blessing if the internet is down, or if you need to find a place within a track).

The main thing I was keen to improve on was vocabulary learning and testing. I believe if students really put the time into this it makes a huge difference, and there simply isn't enough time in lessons to do it together. I had a look at various sites for creating flashcards and testing yourself and settled on Quizlet: it's very nicely designed and easy to do neat things like copy another user's set (no need to type avoir in yourself). I set up my GCSE class and got them signed up during a lesson, so I could make sure they all knew what they were doing. With hindsight, I wish I'd made them pick uniform usernames, but I've learnt them all now! They have new sets to practice each week for homework, and my expectation is that they spend 20 minutes 3-4 times a week.

I was able to show parents at the last parents' evening exactly which sets their child had been studying, and how often they were using the site. I got lots of promises of support, which could make all the difference.

There is an iPhone app, and several unofficial Android apps the students can use to download sets from Quizlet to practice.

If you want to copy my sets (including the AQA specific GCSE vocab for the first two units in our scheme of work - more to come) the link is here.

Finally, the only frustrating thing for me (and my colleague, Lindsay) was that there was no easy way to get details of how long students were spending on the site, or indeed what they had studied, without going into each individual profile. Happily, Quizlet provides an API which publishes each user's last 100 study sessions in JSON format, so I knocked together a Google Spreadsheet & Apps Script solution that pulls in the detail for each user in column A, then puts a total study time in column B, study time in the last 7 days in column C and a potted summary of each session in the cells to the right. At a glance, you can see who in your class has been spending "enough" time on Quizlet. It's not perfect, and I can't see an easy way to publish it without making my API key visible, but if you're a teacher who would like a copy drop me an email and I'll happily share it.