Flashcards for Teachers: Make a Set and Share the Link

Some material has to be memorized before it can be used: vocabulary, the parts of a cell, the order of the planets, the dates that hold a unit together. A quiz is a poor way to learn those things for the first time, because a wrong answer on a quiz feels like a failure when the student has not seen the material often enough to deserve better. A set of flashcards is the gentler first step.

Kwizzy now has flashcards next to quizzes. You make a set, switch on a link, and any student with the link can flip through the cards on a phone or laptop without an account. This post covers how to build a set, how students study with it, and how to attach it to a quiz so the practice and the game sit side by side.

What a card holds

Every card has a front and a back. The front is the prompt, a term or a question. The back is the answer, and it shows when the student taps the card to flip it.

Three extras are optional and off until you add them:

• A hint. A short nudge the student can reveal before flipping, written so it does not give the answer away. For "mitochondria" the hint might be "think about energy".
• A description. A longer note that shows on the back, under the answer. This is the place for an example or a reason, such as why a date matters.
• A picture on the back. You upload it, and you also write a description of it for students who use a screen reader. Pictures appear only on the answer side, so a diagram never gives the answer away on the front.

Cards can be reordered by dragging, or with the move up and down buttons if dragging is awkward on your device. Keep each side short. A card that needs a paragraph on the front is really a quiz question wearing a costume.

Two ways to build a set

You can write the cards yourself. Open the flashcards page from your dashboard, choose to create a set, pick the manual option, and type. Free accounts can do this, and it is the right choice for a short, specific list such as this week's vocabulary.

Paid plans can also have the AI draft the cards. You give it the same kinds of source that quiz generation accepts (a document, a presentation, photos, a link or a written topic), choose how many cards you want, and it returns a set you can edit. The advice from turning a PDF or PowerPoint into a quiz applies here too: one lesson of source material gives better cards than a whole chapter, and you should read every card before students see it. A machine can pair a term with the wrong definition, and a flashcard that teaches something false is worse than none.

Share it with a link

A new set is private. Only you can open it. When you are ready, turn on the study link on the set's page and copy it. Anyone who has the link can study the cards, with no account and nothing to install, and they cannot change the cards.

A few details are worth knowing before you paste the link into a class message:

• The link is long and random on purpose. Nobody can guess it, so the link itself is the only key. Post it where your students can reach it, not on a public page.
• Turning the link off makes the set private again at once. If you turn it on later you get a new link, and the old one stays dead. That is useful if a link has travelled further than you meant.
• Wrong links and switched-off links show the same "we couldn't find these flashcards" message, so a stranger learns nothing about whether a set exists.

How students study

Students open the link and see a start screen with one choice: whether to track what they know. It is off by default.

With tracking off, studying is simple browsing. The student taps a card to flip it, moves to the next, and can shuffle the order. Good for a first look, and good for the student who just wants to read through the material.

With tracking on, the student marks each card as known or not known after flipping. At the end, a summary shows how many they knew, and a button starts a new round with only the cards they missed. That second round is the useful part, because it spends the student's time on the shaky cards instead of the ones they already own. A card that was skipped without an answer counts as not known, since nothing showed that the student knew it.

All of this lives on the student's own device while the screen is open. Nothing is sent to you and nothing is stored about the student, which means you cannot see who studied. If you need to know who did the work, a homework assignment shows each nickname's score, and flashcards are better as the optional extra around it.

Attach a set to a quiz: Study first

This is where flashcards and quizzes meet. On a quiz's page you can choose one of your own sets to attach. Players then see an optional "Study first" button beside the way into the quiz: on the screen where students join a live game, on the start screen of solo play, and on the homework page. It never stands in front of the quiz and nobody has to use it.

Two things to know:

• Attaching a private set turns its link on, because students cannot open a set that is shut. Kwizzy asks you to confirm before it does.
• Copying a quiz does not copy the set attached to it, so a colleague's copy starts without a Study first button.

A workable pattern for a vocabulary unit: put the cards in a set on Monday and share the link, attach the set to a quiz, and run the quiz as homework on Thursday. Students who feel unsure have a place to go from the same page they use to start. If you would like to try the quiz side first, the library has ready-made ones such as Cells: The Building Blocks of Life and The Solar System, and a reasonable pairing is a short set of key terms for the topic.

Share with your team

If your school has a Kwizzy team, you can offer a set to the team's folder. Colleagues can see that you shared it, copy it and change their copy. They cannot edit yours, and the set stops being offered if you take it back or leave the team. A copy counts toward the colleague's own allowance, not yours.

When flashcards are the wrong tool

Flashcards test recognition and recall of single facts. They are weak for anything that needs reasoning, such as explaining why the Roman Republic fell or solving a two-step equation. For that, write quiz questions, and use the explanation field to teach after a wrong answer. They also give you no data, so do not use them when you need evidence of what the class knows.

And a long set is not a better set. Twenty well-chosen cards that a student actually finishes beat a hundred that nobody opens.

Where this fits in your plan

Writing flashcards by hand works on a free account. Drafting them from your own documents with AI, and keeping more or longer sets, belongs to the paid plans, so see the pricing page for what each one includes before you plan a whole year of sets.