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:

Number three is 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.

There’s a tie for the number one ranking.  One is an incredible site from Japan called iKnow!.  It doesn’t have many English learning lists already on the site, but you can create your own.  It provides audio support for the text, and you can apparently add images (though I’ve had difficulty figuring out exactly how to do so).  The audio support is a huge plus,  though the fact that it’s not quite as easy to create new cards as the other two sites is the one negative. (iKnow! has begun charging now after a free trial, so I can’t recommend it any longer)

The other site tied for number one is ProProfs, which is also on The Best Ways To Create Online Tests.  It’s very simple to use and to grab images off the web to add to the flashcards.  You can also add videos.  However, the one drawback is that you can’t provide audio pronunciation support for the cards.

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.

Feedback, as always, is welcome.

If you found this post useful, you might want to look at previous “The Best…” lists and also consider subscribing to this blog for free.