Bitsboard Flashcards & Games

Seriously this app is incredible - almost endless possibilities to teach a wide variety of material in a wide variety of ways - in particular if you are willing to create your own boards. I have used very extensively homeschooling a child with special needs - and it has been an invaluable resource. My teen daughter creates her own boards to study spanish and science! We have dealt with many bugs over the years that have caused much frustration and the catalog of photos includes a ridiculous amount of provocatively dressed women so nearly all boards with women have to be reviewed and sometimes edited by me which is not only annoying - but just plain puzzling. Can’t imagine my life without Bitsboard - but there is room for improvement! I’d like to suggest some new voice choices - after years of use- it would be a nice change. Also, the fact that board edits can only be made while in the board creator “game” is a pain - the old way was much better!! I’d also like to suggest the addition of an auditory memory game that provides for a delay before displaying the image/word after it is spoken - and an option in settings to at least slightly alter the voice “speed’’ to allow for individuals with auditory processing challenges to hear sentences spoken at a slower pace.

Overall, this is a great app for language learning. I use it nearly every day. I upgraded to Bitsboard Pro so that I can share boards with others and so that I can bulk edit. Well worth it. This is a very versatile tool, but there are a few bugs that, if fixed, could make this even better: In order to edit a board, I have to select my user, select "user settings," which takes me straight to my account, and then I have to hit the "back" button in order to select "boards" under settings. This is annoying to do every time. It feels like a have to ride past my bus stop every time, get off, and walk back. It would really help to be able to get to editing my boards more easily. It would really help to be able to import audio files from elsewhere instead of having to record them straight into the app. You can do that with pictures, just not with audio files, which is a real bummer. It would be really nice to have multiple fonts supported; specifically, it would help if IPA (phonetics) fonts were supported. Bitsboard makes my foreign language entries look weird and hard to read by converting those foreign characters to cursive while the other letters in the word are in comic sans or another common print font. All that said, it is an awesome tool for learning and reviewing things. The many different games for reviewing the same pieces of information is one of the best features of this app. Great job, developers! Keep up the good work!

I use this app to create exercises to help a friend with aphasia practice grammar and sentence construction. I appreciate how easy it is to put in my own content personalized for my friend, how flexible the app is in creating exercises, and how my friend can incorporate physical movement with re-acquiring sentence grammar. It allows my friend to practice, practice, and practice. However, although there is much information on using the program, I still find it not very intuitive to use and, even after a year, I still feel like I am often learning to use it by trial and error. I would appreciate it if the instructions were organized more by: "if you want to do x, then follow these steps" given from the various perspectives of the different roles users play (e.g., as creator of lessons, as teacher, as student in a class, as independent learner, etc.) But this might be the price of the flexibility of the app. It is really an incredible and powerful tool with many hidden applications, in my context at least, beneath the surface and I appreciate it greatly.