Before my family headed out of the country on vacation, I spent weeks learning Italian using the free and very popular Duolingo app. And now Duolingo lets you practice not only your foreign language skills, but your knowledge in any area you’d like, with their new, free flashcards app, the Tinycards app.
Parents, this one may come in very handy with your middle-graders and tweens when the school year begins.
The Tinycards app for iOS presents bite-sized information on digital flashcards to help you brush up on French vocabulary, your knowledge of the Solar System, or even the parts of the human skeleton. The bright, cartoony graphics on many of the, make the cards pleasant to look at and clear to identify.
Another cool feature that your kids can customize their own decks with your photos (a good Google image search helps with that) around any topic at all, like new vocabulary words or major historical figures. Or, just search a huge array of user-made decks out there to see if the topic you need has already been created.
As this app grows in popularity, the number of available things to learn will increase exponentially which helps explain why I just spent 20 minutes learning about the different breeds of cats this morning.
Just know that this free app isn’t perfect for all subjects; while I think the graphics are very successful in helping kids memorize foreign languages or bones in the human body, when it came to the different planets, I just reminded myself that Uranus was “the green one” in their deck in order to move forward. I doubt that would impress NASA.
The Tinycards apps is rated for ages 12+ and is currently free to download for iOS devices only.
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