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Sure, your phone plays music, surfs the Web, sends email, and has GPS capability (and you can, you know, talk to people with it, too). That stuff is cool, don’t get me wrong, but we’ve only scratched the surface of what these handheld powerhouses can do. Now, with one simple download, you can give your phone some extra power you can use in the classroom thanks to gWhiz.

gWhiz is a suite of mobile learning tools that includes a powerful graphing calculator, a personalized reference library, and a flash card application. If Little Johnny wants to email his friends the graph of a tricky equation, he can do it straight from his phone. Create custom reference guides for an upcoming test on state capitals. Students will be able to get a lot of mileage from these apps, and they’ll always be within easy reach.

Now, the bad news. Right now, gWhiz is only available for BlackBerry phones. They’re working on adding more phone compatibility, though, including Google’s upcoming Android mobile phone platform. Maybe by the time summer vacation is over I can add gWhiz to my Motorola Razr (or maybe not). If you don’t have a BlackBerry, you may want to check back in a few months to see when gWhiz will be compatible with your phone.

Schools can really benefit from enhanced phone technology, since these devices are small, increasingly powerful, and within the price range of many students’ families. Applications like gWhiz can leverage this technology to create a powerful learning tool within the palm of every student’s hand. -BILL FERRIS

gWhiz

Within five years, every freaking site on the Interweb will have a social networking component to it. Flashcard Friends, a site where you can share flashcards with online friends, is proof that you can add a social component to darn near anything.

Flashcard Friends works a lot like Flashcard Exchange and cueFlash in that you or your students can upload and share cards for review. However, Flashcard Friends does those sites one better by letting you interact with other educators and students looking for/offering cards for review. It’s actually not a bad idea when you think about it - if you know one of your friends always makes the best flashcards, you’ll be more likely to go to that person in the future. Who knows? Your shared interest in Revolutionary War battles may kindle a lasting friendship. -BILL FERRIS

Flashcard Friends

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I have always depended on the kindness of talking cartoon animals. Whether I learned about hibernation from Yogi Bear, or was exposed to opera by Bugs Bunny, animated animals are dependable and oft-overlooked fonts of knowledge. Why should learning to read be any different? That’s why, when teaching your elementary students their ABCs, let them have a look at Sight Words with Samson.

The Samson in question is a dog wearing a track suit who speaks with a vaguely German accent (I think - it’s hard to tell). The site lets kids play games that strengthen their word-building. After starting off by viewing a word and listening to it spoken out loud in a sentence, kids are challenged to pick the word out of a lineup, or to spell it. With practice, your students will be able to know and spell words on sight.

Sight Words with Samson also has other resources, including printable flashcards, lesson plans, and worksheets. In my opinion, though, the online word games are are your best bet. The video game factor will keep kids more interested, and Samson will hopefully open your students’ eyes to the wonderful learning possibilities of listening to talking cartoon critters. -BILL FERRIS

Sight Words with Samson

Give your foreign language students some extra ammunition. No, I don’t mean teach them obscure French curse words. I’m talking about powerful lessons and practice that can supplement the great stuff you’re already teaching in class. They can get it with LingQ.

LingQ lets students sign up for free lessons in the language of their choice (language include Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Swedish). If you’re teaching ESL, they can also study English (or any other language) in their native tongue. In the assignments, if they see a word they don’t know, they can highlight it and hit the LingQ button. LingQ will define it and create a flashcard for later review.

Students will also get a progress snapshot, which keeps track of benchmarks like how many words they’ve learned, the number of hours spent listening to lessons or speaking, etc. They’ll also get a list of Priority LingQs, which are the 25 most important words they should learn at whatever skill level they’re at. Students can review Priority LingQs by clicking on the the word to view the definition, or display them as flash cards.The free account lets students have five active assignments at any given time.

You can pay extra for more active assignments at once, plus points you can use for personal tutoring, though if they heard about LingQ from you, they’ve already got a live-and-in-person language guru. Still, students can get an awful lot of LingQ for free. The only place with more free knowledge is in your classroom -BILL FERRIS

LingQ

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Flash cards are an essential for any student who needs to cram all his notes into one study session. Too bad making the cards themselves takes up so much time that could be spent doing something more fun or, you know, actually studying.

StudyStack is a resource that makes flash cards and other learning devices readily available right there on your screen. With subjects to choose from, there are materials here for whatever might be your area of interest. Most of the flash card sets are user-submitted, so they end up being very specific to the creator (Chapter 14?). The advantage, though, is that you can create your own stack of flash cards for sharing just by creating an account.

The best parts about the site are the fun, yet challenging games - like this GRE Vocabulary word scramble game. It might even help you score more Bingos in your Scrabulous game. –JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

StudyStack

How many times have you laid in bed, unable to sleep, thinking, “The wall-sized dry erase board in my classroom is just too big?” Never? Me neither. Wall-sized works just fine for me. But if you’re in the market for something smaller- I mean, a lot smaller- Metacafe’s got a 40-second video called Make a Pocket-Sized Dry Erase Board that will show you how you can create a 3” x 5” dry erase board on the cheap. Now, before you go thinking, “Well, that’s cute, but I can’t use it in my classroom,” the video also offers modest ideas for teachers. Elementary teachers should find the re-usable dry-erase cards particularly useful for all manner of things- hall passes, flash cards, or assigning tasks to students. –ROSS WHITE

Make a Pocket-Sized Dry Erase Board

Get your students to ace their vocab tests with Quizlet. Quizlet is a free, customizable review site that combines flash cards, quizzes, and even a game or two.

The first thing you do in Quizlet is create a “set, a list of vocabulary words, facts, or whatever it is you need to learn. If you don’t want to type all that stuff in, you can use existing user-generated sets.

Once your set is all, um, set, Quizlet offers three choices: Familiarize (basic flash cards), Learn (a fill-in-the-blanks review that gives you extra reps on stuff you get wrong), and Test, which combines written responses, matching, multiple choice, and true/false questions. There’s also a fun “Scatter” game where words are strewn about the screen. Drag a question onto its corresponding answer to clear the screen as you race against the clock.

Quizlet is an ideal tool for a language class, but can also be used for any subject where students have to memorize facts such as state capitals or chemical compounds. If you’re really feeling generous, you could import a set for your students so they can’t say they didn’t know what would be on the test. –BILL FERRIS

Quizlet

I’m not big on memorization, but sometimes, it’s just a necessity. I always found flash cards to be pretty effective; I spent many an hour at the kitchen table with my parents, holding them hostage until they’d run through a stack of cards I’d created. So, I’m sure my mother will be relieved to know that a whole generation of parents can be spared this agony by sending their children to Flashcard Exchange.

Flashcard Exchange lets users create cards and sort them by category, then the fun begins. Students can practice online, print cards for offline practicing, or download them to Word, Excel, or another format. There are already over six million cards on the site for just about every subject imaginable, and you can see new cards as they are created by subscribing to an RSS feed for your favorite tags. Who knew flash cards could be so… well, flashy? –ROSS WHITE

Flashcard Exchange

Nothing beats good old fashioned flash cards for review. And there’s no better way to make good old fashioned flash cards than to customize them with HTML and make them instantly available through a large online network to teachers and students around the globe. Just like when you were a kid. You can do all that with cueFlash.

Create your own deck or use someone else’s. They’re perfect to use for test reviews on pretty much any subject (cueFlash lets you select the type of deck, from vocabulary to math to geography to most anything else). The interface is WYSIWYG simple. The system will keep track of your right or wrong answers, then reshuffle the deck to hit you again with questions you have trouble with.

CueFlash is a simple and powerful way for your students to get acquainted with information they should’ve kept up on for the last unit. Sadly, if you’re into doing things caveman-style, cueFlash doesn’t have a function to print the flash cards onto actual note cards. I can’t imagine why you’d want to, though, since cueFlash is actually easier, minus those nasty papercuts. –BILL FERRIS

cueFlash

The problem with learning a foreign language is you have to learn all those words. That’s doubly-true in Latin–in a dead language, you can’t use the common tourist trick of simply talking English really loud (I SAID, WHERE IS THE BATHROOM?!?)

If you’re trying to teach young students some Latin vocabulary, you’ll want to see these free Latin Flash Cards from Classical Academic Press. The words are from their Latin for Children series, so you won’t be tackling anything too intimidating like Vergil. With three levels of difficulty and 32 chapters’ worth of words, these cards should keep your kids busy until the Roman Coliseum finally collapses to the ground. –BILL FERRIS

Latin Flash Cards