There are an incredible number of free sites where you can create and study flashcards online.

In reviewing many of them, I looked at this criteria:

* Is it available free-of-charge?

* Is it easy to use?

* Does it provide some “value added benefit” (besides just sticking a word on one side and a definition on the other of a virtual card) that would make it particularly accessble and engaging to English Language Learners and others?

I was only able to find three sites that met this criteria, and they’re the ones that made this “The Best…” list.

Here are my picks for The Best Tools TO Make Online Flashcards:

Study Stack: The online flashcards are indeed very basic (and very easy for both students and teachers to create). However, in addition to flashcards, you can also make hangman games, word searches, and many more activities.  In fact, it’s also on The Best Sites For Making Crossword Puzzles & Hangman Games list.

Ediscio is the newest addition to this list. You can create, and use, flashcards very quickly and easily, and grab images and videos off the Web to insert them in the virtual cards. 

Quizlet is another addition to this list.  In addition to letting you create and study flashcards, it also lets you study the words in “game” forms. They’ve recently added audio to the flashcards you make. A fairly human-sounding computer-generated voice provides the sound at a click of the audio button. It’s definitely a nice addition.

Memorize.com is not fancy at all, and it’s more complicated than most other online flashcard sites to create anything more than a rudimentary mini-flashcard system. However, it is very easy to make-up a simple series of flashcards and, most importantly, you can do so without having to register.

You might also be interested in Are Flashcards an Effective Learning Tool?, an infographic from Voxy.

Easy Notecards is a new online flashcard-making site. Richard Byrne has a good post about it if you want to learn more.

Word Dynamo lets you easily create word lists and games and flash cards through which to study them. It doesn’t seem to allow the addition of images, though, which reduces its usefulness to ELL’s. It’s one of the easiest tools out there, though, to create flash cards.

StudyBlue lets you create flashcard easily, and one of its main selling points — at least in my mind — is that it allows you grab images off the Web to add to them.

Brainscape lets you add images and allows you to record sound simply by clicking on the “Advanced Editor.” It’s easy to add both, and those features make Brainscape stand out a bit from some of the other sites out there.

Feedback, as always, is welcome.

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