[Duolingo] Are Tinycards coming back?

[Explorer]

Tinycards, Duolingo's flashcards feature, were one of my favorite learning tools. Now It seems that they have been rolling out an A/B test to bring them back. I guess the vocabulary decks are built automatically as you learn new words from the lessons, but I'm not completely sure of that. It'd be great if you could also build your own decks. Any thoughts?

[Deleted User 114]

I remember when Tinycards was a thing, then was saddened when I heard they had been discontinued. I hope I will find myself in the Tinycards A/B test soon!

[dakanga]

I hope you are correct !

Thanks for all you do also Explorer !!!

It is substantial, impressive, and appreciatied !

I am hoping you are correct.

But that it will be that as a learner - you can control, and also create and edit your own deck - to give you (the learner) the control for your own learning.

Not something that is imposed on you.

And - that you may also extend yourself - to create new decks - not limited to what the course content on Duolingo is.

That though is my wish list.

[Jetdriver]

I discovered an app called Chegg Prep, which is a free flashcard app. There are many user generated decks which you can search for and you can of course create your own.

It’s strange to think that this used to be a feature and was something else that was discarded rather than developed.

[Corinnebelle]

I loved Tinycards! I think it would be great to have decks generated from your words. I feel you don't learn the words properly with Duolingo. You need flashcards as well. I have been using Anki for that, but Tinycards would be great!

Really good if there could be user generated decks also! I suspect it won't be. I could see a lot of copyright issues arising from the pictures people used on Tinycards. They were great, but seeing you can copy 'bout anything on the web, it probably wasn't something marketable legally.

I like Dakanga's idea of being able to adjust your own learning curve!

[Madame Sensei]

Learning my way around the new Duome Forums -- Please forgive any formatting errors, etc. as I experiment with how to reply.

Teacher here-- and I sorely miss Tinycards. DaKanga and I and a rew others experimented a ton with Tinycards to get the most out of them.

I am excited at the prospect of them coming back -- but I will be really disappointed if they are treated as mere flashcards for vocabulary.

There is so much that can be do with Tinycards in terms of drilling down on grammar (verb conjugations, inflections, matching adjectives to nouns...), and entire phrases (sample restaurant conversations, typical greetings between two people, asking friends what their plans are...), and heck, I even taught all of my classes songs during the early days of the pandemic when we were suddenly sent home, using Tinycards.

And, very importantly, I could keep my students entirely in the target language. I would put a picture on one side and a phrase or cloze activity on the back side.

Thank you so much for posting about this A/B test! I will take this information to the Educator's Network, and hopefully we can get in on the ground floor for bringing a robust version back,

[JonD]

That would be nice. I used tiny cards when they had them. I remember you could automatically build card decks from the vocabulary in the stories.

[Kelikaku]

.. Any thoughts?

I used to use them, I had a few different categories saved on the site.

[HikingHeather]

When TinyCards shut down they mentioned at the time that they were exploring ways to incorporate some sort of similar learning into Duolingo.

[2GreyCats]

Learning my way around the new Duome Forums -- Please forgive any formatting errors, etc….
<snip>

There is so much that can be do with Tinycards in terms of drilling down on grammar (verb conjugations, inflections, matching adjectives to nouns...), and entire phrases (sample restaurant conversations, typical greetings between two people, asking friends what their plans are...), and heck, I even taught all of my classes songs during the early days of the pandemic when we were suddenly sent home, using Tinycards.

I teach ESL, and I would LOVE to hear more about what different ways you used TinyCards. I wonder if I can do some similar things with Quizlet.

Thanks!

[Madame Sensei]

Learning my way around the new Duome Forums -- Please forgive any formatting errors, etc….
<snip>

There is so much that can be do with Tinycards in terms of drilling down on grammar (verb conjugations, inflections, matching adjectives to nouns...), and entire phrases (sample restaurant conversations, typical greetings between two people, asking friends what their plans are...), and heck, I even taught all of my classes songs during the early days of the pandemic when we were suddenly sent home, using Tinycards.

I teach ESL, and I would LOVE to hear more about what different ways you used TinyCards. I wonder if I can do some similar things with Quizlet.

Thanks!

Hi, 2greycats,

Yay! Let’s collaborate on making Quizlet do what we need it to do.

Here are some of my experiments over the years:

Sentence/phrase/ or word on one side, picture on back side with no words

https://quizlet.com/_8hiayy?x=1jqt&i=2qv9di

https://quizlet.com/_8hbirc?x=1jqt&i=2qv9di

I find this a bit frustrating. With Tinycards, I was able to specify “picture on the front.” That way, the students see the picture, and then have to put their brains into language gear. With the picture on the back… I dunno. It’s almost pointless. The student looks at the word first, and then they either know it or they don’t. Seeing the picture afterwards comes too late in the process, I believe.

Also, when the students are playing Gravity, they have to remember to go into the settings and change what is shown. Every. Single. Time. Which means that my students don’t play Gravity too much, which is a shame because I’m all about games.

I spoke to people at Quizlet about this during last year's Unconference, and they didn't understand why it would be important to put the pictures on the front.

I have had more success with teaching songs. I love to make the kids sing, because music is repetition. We also make up Total Physical Response dance moves to each song. I tell the students that they will be 80 years old and still remember these songs. Here is an example:

Halloween song
https://quizlet.com/_abcwee?x=1jqt&i=2qv9di

This sort of thing works pretty well: Think of a Communicative Approach-type scenario, and make a dialog for the students to practice:

dialog between a waiter and a customer
https://quizlet.com/_9dgmz5?x=1jqt&i=2qv9di

If you don’t want to do a whole scenario, you can just put questions on one side and answers on the other. This one is about “What do you like to do? Do you like to ride bikes?” (etc.) :

questions and answers using negatives
https://quizlet.com/_902aqp?x=1jqt&i=2qv9di

During our crazy remote year, I experimented with putting some workbook pages on Quizlet. Didn’t work too well, but I will show you what I did and you can help me brainstorm. This is a section from a workbook, with the multiple-choice answer annotated like a diagram, so that I could put the answer on the front side of the card. (Again, I was frustrated because the picture can only appear on the back, which means that the students see the answer and then the question. Like I said, it’s a work in progress…)

experiment with a workbook
https://quizlet.com/_8k3ali?x=1jqt&i=2qv9di

another one, just a screen shot from the textbook.
https://quizlet.com/_8hmay2?x=1jqt&i=2qv9di

Japanese schools love a fill-in-the-blank called まるうめ。(I teach French, Spanish, and Japanese, if you are confused about my millions of sets…) This type of exercise leaves out a particle (kind of like a preposition), and students have to fill it in.
https://quizlet.com/_8he5q5?x=1jqt&i=2qv9di

This next one was my experiment with teaching a concept that needs lots of repetition (liaison). I wrote up some sentences, took screen shot, and then pretended that they were a diagram. This was a very difficult concept to teach remotely.
https://quizlet.com/_8k2ask?x=1jqt&i=2qv9di

This next one was pretty fun. It was an experiment with having students write their own answers, and then practice them for an exam. Every student had to customize their deck, and then share the url with me so that I could double-check their sentences before they began memorizing. We are in-person this year, and I haven’t found a need for this. But if we were remote again, I would definitely do it, even though it was much much more work for me. (I had to check each student’s account individually to make sure they were practicing, since each student had customized the set.)
https://quizlet.com/_94q6pv?x=1jqt&i=2qv9di

I’m looking forward to hearing your thoughts!

[Yoong1eKangTerry]

Tinycards, Duolingo's flashcards feature, were one of my favorite learning tools. Now It seems that they have been rolling out an A/B test to bring them back. I guess the vocabulary decks are built automatically as you learn new words from the lessons, but I'm not completely sure of that. It'd be great if you could also build your own decks. Any thoughts?

Hang on hold up. Why again did they remove this feature?? It looks like to me that they were a VERY VERY valuable feature FAR FAR FAR better than adding in cartoons.

I will never get what’s going on in the mind of the DL team.

I do hope they add them back in!

[Madame Sensei]

My understanding is that the upkeep was too difficult, because the programming was an entirely different set. I had hoped that they would make them "read only," with no ability to create your own set, but alas.

For the record, none of the programmers who frequent the Educator's Forum are aware of an A/B test for Tinycards. But there are some features that have been rolled out, for example in the Japanese and Korean trees for learning to write the basics.

Fingers crossed this comes back!

[Yoong1eKangTerry]

Yes! Finger crossed! To be honest they should’ve kept them. I think the upkeep oh for them would’ve been worth it.

Also it would also ad in to them being the one stop place instead of downloading any other app for flash cards. But even if they did add back tiny cards they still wouldn’t be a one stop only place since they removed forums.

[Basler Biker]

Yes! Finger crossed! To be honest they should’ve kept them. I think the upkeep oh for them would’ve been worth it.

Also it would also ad in to them being the one stop place instead of downloading any other app for flash cards. But even if they did add back tiny cards they still wouldn’t be a one stop only place since they removed forums.

DL Flashcards would always be limited to the DL "fixed" teaching material.

I prefer the extra tool, such as google chrome extension Readlang, which takes new material from your favorite web sites (you choose: news, sports, a DL story, whatever) and helps you to translate, then makes all cards for you automatically.

So, at your own pace, new material and words/phrases can be learned...no "repetition", because that is what people complained about a lot on the former DL forum, ... repetition of things already known and already answered tens of times....

Readlang teaches you the new words, and known stuff goes on the bottom of the pile, for rehearsal later, or for removal if no longer needed. Also, cards keep the full context of where the word was found, so it's not word translation, but "word in context" learning, also a point where DL stand-alone sentences completely failed... with ambiguity and endless discussions as a result

[Yoong1eKangTerry]

Yes! Finger crossed! To be honest they should’ve kept them. I think the upkeep oh for them would’ve been worth it.

Also it would also ad in to them being the one stop place instead of downloading any other app for flash cards. But even if they did add back tiny cards they still wouldn’t be a one stop only place since they removed forums.

DL Flashcards would always be limited to the DL "fixed" teaching material.

I prefer the extra tool, such as google chrome extension Readlang, which takes new material from your favorite web sites (you choose: news, sports, a DL story, whatever) and helps you to translate, then makes all cards for you automatically.

So, at your own pace, new material and words/phrases can be learned...no "repetition", because that is what people complained about a lot on the former DL forum, ... repetition of things already known and already answered tens of times....

Readlang teaches you the new words, and known stuff goes on the bottom of the pile, for rehearsal later, or for removal if no longer needed. Also, cards keep the full context of where the word was found, so it's not word translation, but "word in context" learning, also a point where DL stand-alone sentences completely failed... with ambiguity and endless discussions as a result

Yes, I was just saying, if DL was going for the “We have everything you need” kind of thing.

[Explorer]

Hang on hold up. Why again did they remove this feature?? It looks like to me that they were a VERY VERY valuable feature FAR FAR FAR better than adding in cartoons.

I will never get what’s going on in the mind of the DL team.

I do hope they add them back in!

I agree with you. Well, they removed tinycards for the same reason they removed the forums. Cost-benefit considerations...

[verdensrommet]

Neat! I'd readily welcome back Tinycards, especially if you can make your own. Do you mind linking where you found this/where I can find out more (I asked Google but couldn't find anything).

[Explorer]

Neat! I'd readily welcome back Tinycards, especially if you can make your own. Do you mind linking where you found this/where I can find out more (I asked Google but couldn't find anything).

I'm afraid we cannot know for sure what their plans are. This is just another A/B test they rolled out for some users, as they always do to test anything. There never was an official announcement from Duolingo concerning the new Tinycards, and we may not know anything else for the time being. Personally, I wouldn't hold my breath.

[2GreyCats]

[mention]Madame Sensei[/mention] —

That’s very interesting to see the different things you are doing with Quizlet— thanks for showing me some of them!

But right now, it’s the middle of the semester, I have 4 classes, and I just don’t have the time to work on a collaborative project. Depending on what my summer schedule looks like, I might be able to revisit that idea.

As far as having the picture or illustration on the front of the card— I know it won’t let you do that… but you CAN select which side of the card appears first, “term” or “definition”. I don’t know if you can set it so the users will always see it that way, or whether they have to choose that option every time.

[Madame Sensei]

@Madame Sensei —

That’s very interesting to see the different things you are doing with Quizlet— thanks for showing me some of them!

But right now, it’s the middle of the semester, I have 4 classes, and I just don’t have the time to work on a collaborative project. Depending on what my summer schedule looks like, I might be able to revisit that idea.

As far as having the picture or illustration on the front of the card— I know it won’t let you do that… but you CAN select which side of the card appears first, “term” or “definition”. I don’t know if you can set it so the users will always see it that way, or whether they have to choose that option every time.

Yes, you are right, a learner can set the back side to appear first. But they have to do that every single time. And I have to remind them every single time. Sigh. There is no setting for me to make the set like that always, unfortunately.