Wednesday, October 3, 2012

One small victory for SRS!

Today, in one of my classes, IT finally happened...

In our first meeting the week before, I introduced SRS studying on smartphones to the tiny class of four students.  The one Android smartphone student dowloaded the AnkiDroid app, and the two iPhone students downloaded the Flashcard Elite app.  The non-smartphone student used my netbook to create an Ankiweb account.  Quickly, they started making their own cards from the class material.

In class today, we spent some time practicing correct usage.  I put a Anki deck of class materials up on the television and quizzed an individual student.  Then I asked the other two students to play the role of teacher and evaluate the answer.  Then I asked the answering student to evaluate his or her own answer.  The students really concentrated and seemed to grasp the idea of the importance of honestly evaluating their own answers.

After that, I set them loose to study.  After awhile, I circled around to check on the students' progress.  One of them was busily pecking away at his smartphone, with a piece of paper on his desk that I did not recognize.

"What's that?" I asked.  He replied, "It's my paper from my other English class."

Without my prompting him to, he had created a brand new deck and was making new cards to study.

I swear, I almost hugged him.

That is what I have been trying to do in my class: create empowered and independent users of SRS.

That's one - only three more to go...

No comments:

Post a Comment