Memrise

User experience.

Beautifully presented and incredibly easy to use with fun exercises to learn and practise languages and more. Teachers can choose a ready-made course for learners to do in class or for homework. Alternatively, you can make your own courses to liven up a topic or language area that you’re covering in class.

Language learning content.

Memrise uses adaptive ‘spaced repetition’ learning technology to help learners focus on the words they need to learn. It consists of courses which are made of sets of connected language items. When you start learning, you see, hear and start to recognise the first language items in a set, then you answer multiple-choice questions and finally you start writing the language you are learning. If there are too many words to learn in one go, you can change the learning pace in your profile and you’ll see fewer words on your courses.

Tracking learning.

As a teacher, you can create a class and share a link or send your learners email invitations to a course. You can see statistics on how much time learners have spent studying, words learned and course progress, and you and your learners will be able to see a leaderboard of results. You can also see which words learners are finding difficult if you want to prepare some additional classwork to help with these. Learners can easily see their progress as the seed icon in the corner of each item grows and eventually blooms when they have mastered that word.

Social interaction.

Another advantage of Memrise is that learners can choose or make their own courses to practise and revise language covered in class or language connected to topics that interest them. This is a great opportunity for learners to collaborate, create and share learning resources to support and test their peers. With older teenagers, especially, this can really help to engage their interest, maintain levels of motivation and encourage independent, personalised learning.

Learning through language.

Memrise has courses on a number of categories which can be used for building knowledge of school subjects such as: Arts and Literature, Maths and Science, The Natural World, History and Geography. Learners studying these subjects in English at school can improve their knowledge of the subject and their English vocabulary in the subject by using these fun courses.

Supporting teaching and learning.

Memrise uses a system of ‘mems’ to help learners remember language items by connecting words to images, video, example sentences etc. It aims to stimulate the senses, imagination and emotions and to make learning more fun and more effective. Also, there are many useful features to help you personalise learning:

• If you can’t remember the word, you can choose or create a ‘mem’ to make a connection and you’ll get this prompt to remind you next time.
• If you forget to revise the words you learned, Memrise will email you a reminder of the words you need to work on.

Technical: user safety and data security.

Learners have to be 13 or above to sign up for an account. You should check your school’s policy to make sure you can use Memrise with your learners. Some courses created by third parties contain content that may be unsuitable for your learners. If you are using ready-made courses, or asking learners to select ready-made courses, you will need to check the content first. With younger teens you may prefer to restrict learners to courses made by you or other creators that you trust.