Boom cards in the world language classroom

Have you ever used Boom cards? They are quite popular with elementary school teachers, but many secondary teachers haven’t heard of them. Boom cards are simply digital task cards that allow you to assign activities that can be automatically graded. While they are more popular with teachers of younger students, there is no reason why they can’t be used in secondary classrooms as well.

What are Boom cards?

Boom cards are digital flashcards that can be used in the classroom or for homeschooling. They are designed to help students learn and practice concepts such as math, language arts, science, history, and more. The cards can be used on any device and accessed through a special website or app. Boom cards are interactive and engaging and offer features such as audio recordings, images, animations, and rewards to motivate student learning.

To use Boom cards, you will need a compatible device (computer, tablet or smartphone) and an internet connection. You can find Boom card decks on the boomlearning.com website or download the Boom Learning app. Once you have purchased a deck of cards, you can access it via a special link given by the teacher or card creator. There are cards available for all sorts of things – and if you don’t see a deck that you like, you can make your own!

What information is tracked by Boom cards?

When students work with Boom cards, certain data is collected and stored. This data can include the student’s response, how long it took to answer the question, and whether they answered the question correctly or not. This data is useful in providing performance statistics and insights to teachers in order to improve student learning.

When I assign Boom decks to my students, it is helpful to see which students have logged in to the site and which ones are still messing around – or maybe having trouble logging in. Since boom integrates with Clever, students rarely have trouble logging in, but being able to see which ones haven’t yet is useful information. I can also see which students are just randomly clicking through the deck in the hopes of hitting the correct answer.

How can Boom cards be used to teach French?

Boom cards are an excellent tool to help students learn a new language. They can offer interactive and adaptive exercises to help students learn pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar. Boom cards can also be used to encourage creative use of the language through fun games or activities that allow students to apply what they have learned.

Boom decks can include a variety of different types of questions, including multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank, and open-ended questions. They can also include audio or video snippets to help students practice their listening and speaking skills. Additionally, some Boom decks include activities such as word searches or crosswords, which help reinforce the material being covered.

While you can ask short answer questions on a card, I personally don’t do this all that often. The best part of Boom is that it grades student work automatically. If I want to ask a question that requires me to grade the response, I would rather use Canvas.

Buying Boom cards or making your own?

Creating your own Boom card decks is relatively simple. First, you will need to sign up for a free membership at the Boom Learning website. After signing up, you can create your own deck by uploading images, text, audio and video files that pertain to the topic or material you are teaching. Once uploaded, you can add questions to your slides and determine how students are to answer them. It’s not particularly difficult to learn how to make the slides and add questions – but it does take time. You will need to gather the material, write the questions, then format the slides. If you want to add images or audio, you’ll need to gather those resources as well.

If you are comfortable with PowerPoint or have your own presentations already made, you can also save your slides as jpg files and then upload them as a Boom deck. It will still take time to build each deck, but you can cut down a little bit if you have the resource already made in some other format.

If you don’t really want to put that much effort into making decks, there are a wide variety of pre-made decks that you can get for free or a minimal amount in the store. Many teachers sell their card decks in the Boom store as well as TPT and other websites. Frenchified has a variety of boom decks available – many games to practice grammar and vocabulary, but also some reading activities.