Anki, as described on the developers’s website is a programme, “Which makes remembering things easy” Therefore it comes as no surprise that Aki is Japanese for memorisation.

The programme is flashcard based, you can create your own decks of flashcards containing the information you wish to learn, or you can download already existing decks.  The information on the flashcards though is not restricted to one type of content as it supports audio, images, and scientific markup (whatever that is).

The video below gives an initial demonstration of how Anki works, there are more useful tutorials on the developers website cited above.

To be able to create your own decks or download others, you need to create a free online account and ideally download the software to your computer.  For a portable option where you may not have good internet coverage on your smartphone toaccess this resource online, you can download the application to your smartphone (I recently paid £17.49 from the iTunes store for this option).

In your online account, select ‘create deck’ to begin and you will be faced with the following image:

Let’s say we are doing Spanish numbers from 0-30, you would begin by typing ‘cero’ the box entitled front and either the number ‘0’ or the word ‘zero where it states back, then add.  You then continue until you have all of the numbers up to 30.  You can then test yourself on this deck as the video above describes.

As you have probably gathered, this is a very simple flashcard.  As previously mentioned you can use sound for practising listening skills, or images to make a traditional type of flashcard.  Furthermore, you can make the content more complex such as asking how to conjugate specific verbs in certain tenses, memorising phrases, or even paragraphs for a controlled speaking or writing assessments.

More importantly, as language teachers, we always set the students learning homework i.e. vocabulary, but do we always give them available methods of learning?  If you have the time, I would recommend showing your students at least the online version of this programme to aid with their language development and to aid them with their independent learning.

I currently have made decks for all of the vocabulary in Mira 1 Spanish and hope to add Mira 2 before the summer holidays are over, I will be adding them here.  I am currently unsure I can share my decks with non-Mac users – but will definitely try.  For this you will need to have Anki installed on your computer.

Any questions, don’t hesitate to ask :0).

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 23rd, 2011 at 9:53 pm and is filed under Educational Technology, Resources. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.