learn posts

FlashcardExchange: create and study flashcards

by Todd Ritter Feb 25th 2008

FlashcardExchange is a flashcard-sharing site that lets you create and study digital forms of everyone's favorite 3x5 cards. The directory already has a large list of subjects, from elementary math to high-level pharmacology.

The flashcards are available to study for free via the website, and if you shell out $19.95 (one-time fee) for the full membership, you can print the flashcards and export them to Word or Excel. With a free account you can create your own flashcards by typing or text/Excel import. You can share your flashcard sets, which are maintained via the "My Flashcards" feature, and play a memory game with them.

FlashcardExchange can be helpful for test preparation, certification exam review, and language learning.

[Via MusicBizGuy]

Tags: flashcards, learn, study, Technology in Education, TechnologyInEducation

Filed under: Design, Developer, Internet

htmlPlayground: learn and test HTML and CSS

by Todd Ritter Feb 6th 2008

htmlPlayground is a helpful reference for web developers of any skill level. It provides an easy way to generate, test, and learn about HTML and CSS syntax. Simply select your reference (HTML tags, attributes, or CSS properties), and then select an item like "blockquote."

htmlPlayground will then display a description of the item (to explain what it's used for), an example code snippet that is editable, and a rendered preview of the code snippet. The snippet is color coded: green for tags, red for attributes, and black for regular text.

If you click on a green tag in the snippet, you can edit the tag's attributes easily via another pane. When you're happy with your finalized code, you can of course copy/paste it to an HTML file to use on your website.

[Via garyll]

Tags: code, css, html, learn, test, xhtml

Filed under: Internet, Web services, Beta

Learn to speak a foreign language with Mango

by Brad Linder Sep 20th 2007

Learning to speak a foreign language can be hard work, especially if you don't have someone around to practice speaking and listening with.

Mango is a new online website that makes learning foreign languages a whole lot easier. When you begin a lesson, you will hear a brief conversation, and then you can flip forward and backward through a series of slides at your own pace. Mango does an excellent job of combining audio clips and written text. Want to hear a phrase again? Just click the sound icon. Want to skip ahead, just click the slide advance button.

There are a variety of languages to choose from, including Chinese, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Mandarine, Brazillian Portuguese, Polish, Russian, and Spanish. The lessons are almost all geared toward English speakers, but the infrastructure would easily lend itself to adding lessons for native speakers of any language.

You can choose from about 100 lessons for each language, so while Mango might not qualify as an advanced language course, it's a pretty good way to start learning a new language or to brush up on the Spanish you never really learned during high school.

Mango is free while in beta, although you'll need to register for an account. We're not sure whether the ultimate plan is for Mango to become a subscription-based or advertising-supported service, but we're assuming the developers wouldn't have put together this fine resource without a plan to make some money off it one day.

[via Lifehacker]

Tags: education, foreign-language, foreign-languages, language, learn, mango

Filed under: Audio, Fun, Windows, Open Source

Piano Hero: Learn to play piano, have fun?

by Jordan Running Jan 22nd 2007

I took piano lessons for a couple years when I was a kid. I never became a virtuoso, but maybe if I had had Piano Hero I could have. It's an open source edutainer in the mold of Guitar Hero and the like, except with a piano instead of a guitar. It's a bit rough around the edges and definitely doesn't have the eye candy appeal of its console brethren, but if you want to improve your real piano skills (rather than your fake guitar skills), it might be right up your alley. Piano Hero works with any MIDI music file you throw at it, but currently it doesn't sync up to a MIDI keyboard--that feature will come with the 0.5.0 release promised later this month. Until then you'll just have to play along and pretend.

The Piano Hero web site seems to be sputtering a bit just now, but you can download the program for Windows from SourceForge.

Tags: guitar hero, GuitarHero, learn, midi, music, open source, OpenSource, piano, piano hero, PianoHero

Filed under: Fun, Internet, E-mail, Web services, Social Software

Want to learn a language? Try out FriendsAbroad

by Chris Gilmer Nov 14th 2006

FriendsAbroad is the world's largest online community for people who are trying to learn new languages. It seems like a great social way to learn and meet people that speak the language or, like you, want to learn a different language. The social networking site is free but requires registration. Current contact methods through FriendsAbroad include email and live text chats through the web site. FreindsAbroad is working on adding in free voice calls over the Internet, which I can see speeding up the learning process drastically. For learning nothing beats actually hearing a language spoken. So, if you are trying to learn new language, check this network out, it might help a little.

[via Emily Chang]

Tags: friendsabroad, launguage, learn, network, social

Filed under: Fun, Productivity, Web services, Social Software

Research, learn and collaborate at Zimbio

by Chris Gilmer Aug 25th 2006

Zimbio is a collaborative media portal site. Users create portal channels about key information they are interested in. These portals provide significant meaningful information on topics that people are knowledgeable and passionate about.

Zimbio, like Wikipedia, is a form of a social information network that actually works to provide meaningful and useful information that people are passionate about. Upon registering on Zimbio, users can collaborate by adding meaningful information and pictures, and expanding on the topics in question.

It's nice to see that sites like Zimbio and Wikipedia are around and easily accessible providing people with information from well informed users. I will still have my fingers crossed that they don't become infected with bunk content.

Tags: collaborate, collaborative media, CollaborativeMedia, learn, research, wikipedia, zimbio

Featured Time Waster

Graveyard Shift - zombie-busting Time Waster

With Halloween fast approaching, it's a great time to get in some practice defending your territory against zombies. In Graveyard Shift, you take aim at zombies and other creepy-crawlies, blasting them into splatters of cartoony green guts. It's a casual first-person shooter, and it's very easy to get the hang of - use the mouse to aim, click to fire. Graveyard Shift has at least 15 levels, and it might even have some secret stages I haven't unlocked yet. They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...

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