Quizlet is a popular learning platform that has a growing classroom presence, both around the UK and abroad. Its multifunctional capability supports teachers by giving them access to a large bank of teaching resources, while for students, it offers a range of study modes to help them learn, revise and test themselves on a wide variety of topics.
One of the most popular features on the platform is Quizlet Live. This collaborative classroom game works by randomly assigning students to teams with each individual working from an internet-connected device. While all the students on a team can see the same question, different answers appear on each of their devices, so it requires team members to communicate with one another before selecting an answer for the team. Teachers can display a leaderboard, so all teams can see their progress; and to avoid fast-fingered random selecting, a team’s score goes back to the start if they choose incorrectly.
For history lessons, Quizlet Live is a great tool to use to revise key terms from topics such as Germany or Russia, and can be used as a formative tool at the end of each lesson to identify misconceptions with dates and definitions. This enables you to easily plan and target your teaching to the needs of the students. You can also play several rounds to give students more practice in areas such as the early years of the Weimar Republic and political change.
If you don’t have the ability for students to have 1:1 access, then you can project the answers on the board instead and either have a buzzer or hand system whereby team members can collaborate and then answer out loud.
The Quizlet Live feature is also a fabulous way to introduce a new topic of study. When starting a unit on industrialisation or the slave trade, students could take a short quiz to look at misconceptions and introduce overview themes, such as countries, key figures and data that can be explored through class discussion. Students often have knowledge of certain topics through prior reading, other subject lessons or television documentaries, but this tends to be piecemeal. A short quiz can promote curiosity and begin to build a more coherent picture of a topic before you begin.
Revision aid
Beyond Quizlet Live, Quizlet has the ability for students to use devices to create their own study sets, including revision notes, flashcards and tests. This would be a worthwhile exercise for students at the end of a depth study, such as Norman England, where students could work in teams to create a study set for each part of the course; for example, conquest and control, or life under the Normans. These could then be shared with the class, enabling everyone to have a complete topic-revision set to use in the classroom or to access at home.
Another great Quizlet feature to hook students into a history topic is the diagrams tool. This tool allows you to create interactive illustrations that you can control and manipulate. A diagram of the medieval feudal system is a visual way for students to understand how society worked. Rather than reading through it in a book or staring at a drawing, you can make it move, get students up to unveil parts and review key aspects of how it worked. Similarly, understanding the causes of the First World War is so much easier when you can display a map of Europe with the countries coloured according to who had aligned with whom in 1914.
For GCSE thematic studies, diagrams would be useful to look at factors such as war, government and religion through the centuries, and, using a timeline, move factors around to decide on their significance and how they interconnect. This visual aid, along with the class discussions in the build-up, could be the basis for an extended-writing exam question that students complete.
Independent study
Independent revision using Quizlet can easily be set up for the classroom whereby students can work quietly and independently on a study module. This would be effective to use summatively at the end of a topic, such as the Holocaust, where the students could then go back over the main themes from the unit (the rise of antisemitism in Europe, Nazi control), revise, and then test themselves. The scores can then be analysed by the students and teacher instantaneously, and further revision and testing completed if needed. If classes don’t have multiple devices, then there’s the capability to print off tests, definitions and key terms in a variety of layouts for students to use.
Quizlet also has novel ways to help students with their history learning outside the classroom. Quizlet Learn allows students to input the date and topic of study for a test or examination, and then it sets up a study plan for the student to best prepare for the test. Not only will it help organise the student’s diaries, who will have tests from other subjects, but using a platform based on cognitive science that focuses on the best ways to learn may provide your students with the guidance they need on their topics of study.
Whatever you may want to use Quizlet for in your history teaching, its engaging variety of uses, both in and out of the classroom, means it can be adapted to form important formative and summative tools as part of your schemes of learning.
Daniel Hartley is headteacher of Danesfield Middle School in Somerset
