Thursday, September 07, 2006

Study Skills Tools

The new school year often generates good intentions of trying to instill "good" habits in our kids. Today, I want to once again mention some free study skills software that can help with organization as well as studying. Are you tired of having your kids lose their study notecards? Don't have enough time to go through the flashcards with them when they are studying? You will definitely want to look into Cue Card and Study Stack. These aren't your mother's notecards for sure!
Here is a description of Cue Card from the download site:
CueCard is a simple and intuitive flash card program. Just make up cards for what you want to memorize, and CueCard will quiz you on them. CueCard features smart testing, which automatically focuses on the cards you are having trouble with. It also offers printing (including custom page layouts and sizes), pictures and sounds on cards, Unicode support, card formatting, a multi-lingual user interface, Import/Export, a study time.
And here is a description of Study Stack from the website:
StudyStack strives to help people learn what they want to learn. The StudyStackTM concept was designed to help people memorize information about various subjects. Using the StudyStack web site, you use your computer to display a stack of "virtual cards" which contain information about a certain subject. Just like flashcards, you can review the information at your own pace discarding the cards you've learned and keeping the ones you still need to review. However, unlike traditional flash cards, each card can show multiple pieces of information; and the whole stack can be automatically sorted by any one of the pieces of information. Also, when you enter the data for a studystack, the same data can automatically be displayed as flashcards, a matching game, a word search puzzle, and a hangman game. You can also export the data to your cellphone or PDA so you can review it when you are away from the computer.
I love the accessibility and customizability features of these tools! Great tools for differentiated instruction!

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