For years I have struggled to teach my students required vocabulary.  In history, I have always had to spend loads of time teaching, talking, and tackling terms.  This doesn’t leave much time to guide students toward critical analysis of the important concepts being covered.  Deeper discussions are sacrificed for basic review of simple content.  

Enter the new digital age.  Quizlet is a vocabulary learning web tool created by a kid.  When a high school student struggled learning animal names in french, he created a web program to solve his problem.  I am so glad he struggled.  Now my students don’t have to.

Quizlet is free, easy, and user friendly.  To get the most out of quizlet, a teacher should create a group and require students to join their group.  When the teacher or a student creates a set of terms, they share them with the entire group.  Then everyone can easily find them for practice.  Quizlet boasts games, flashcards, term lists, and quizzes among many other fantastic features of this web service. 

Quizlet works.  Try it for yourself and watch our digital natives (our students) soar with this simple program.  They will immediately see its usefulness and begin to apply it to other classes.  Who knows?  Maybe learning vocabulary will become the most fun part of any lesson!

Click on the link at the right.  (Web Tool – Vocabulary)