Boom Cards

What is Boom Cards?

Due to its name, it is easy to think that Boom Cards is just a flashcard app, but this is certainly not the case. Teachers buy or create decks of Boom Cards that contain tasks or learning content and then assign them to students or use them for their front-of-class teaching. They can move and rearrange elements on the cards for either thinking purposes or to answer questions.

Boom Cards has grown in popularity lately. This review of Boom Cards and its apps will tell you whether you should adopt it too.

What we love about Boom Cards

Boom Cards' main strength is its flexibility. It can contribute to any subject, and there are many different ways it can be used. Creative teachers get a chance to make great looking decks, while those more pushed for time can pay a small fee and quickly get decks to match the topic they're teaching.

The cards have useful features and are easy to use and create. If you do get stuck, Boom Cards' website has answers to every problem you might encounter.

What skills does it improve?

Boom Cards addresses many different skills. Decks exist for a vast amount of subjects and topics within them. Some decks are directly related to specific curricula or subjects, while others address broader topics such as anniversaries and non-academic matters.

Boom Cards are easy to apply to many everyday teaching tasks such as plenaries, study guides, quick assessments, and revision.

What age is it appropriate for?

The appropriate age for users of Boom Cards will depend upon the deck you select. As long as kids can interpret the images or words on the decks you allocate to them, they can use Boom Cards.

Is Boom Cards easy to use?

Boom Cards has created a very supportive onboarding process. As well as a thorough and easy to follow help section on its website, it also sends out helpful guides when you first register as a Boom Card user.

The card creation process is straightforward, and the cards have struck a good balance between features and ease of use. A few more tools may be nice but would come at the expense of complexity.

It is easy for kids to access the decks you assign either by having a username and password or entering a PIN that you create using Boom Cards' FastPlay option.

How will students benefit?

Boom Cards are accessible by kids wherever they are, letting them complete card-based homework tasks at convenient moments. The card interactions can detect whether something is correct, giving kids immediate feedback to the answers they submit. They receive digital rewards to mark their success which can act as additional motivation.

How will teachers benefit?

Boom Cards not only make it easy to create the decks, but the tools to allocate them to students are intuitive. Having multiple variations of a deck of Boom Cards makes it easy to differentiate between various ability levels by assigning them to different students.

There are guides to importing class lists, and Boom Cards work well with Google Classroom so teachers can integrate Boom Cards into their existing workflow without too much effort. Reports about student progress are accessible through teachers' accounts.

The choice between creating and buying Boom Card decks gives teachers options. A purchased deck will save teachers' preparation time and may be more professional in its design. A constructed deck will take longer and be subject to each teacher's design skills but will be free and tailor-made for what they want.

One final plus is that teachers who really enjoy making Boom Card decks and are good at it can sell them to other teachers via Boom Learning's site.

How will parents benefit?

Parents could support kids using Boom Cards and a free account. The maximum student limit won't be a problem, and parents might only need to create a few decks to support kids in areas they find difficult.

Parents will also be pleased to see that their kids can access Boom Cards on many devices, including the popular kids' tablet, the Kindle Fire. No subscription is needed for kids to view and use the cards.

How much does Boom Cards cost?

There are a few subscription tiers available. The main questions you need to ask yourself before deciding are:

• Do you mainly want to use decks created by other people?
• Do you want to sell the decks you create on the Boom Cards Marketplace?
• How many students do you wish to be able to view your Boom Cards?

These are the main features that change as you rise through the subscription tiers.

What is included with the free version vs. paid?

The free tier of Boom Cards' subscription is perfectly adequate for assessing whether you can fit them into your teaching style but, if you can, the free level is likely to become quite limiting quickly. You can only create five decks of your own and have five students access them.

Fortunately, the subscriptions charged yearly are relatively low-cost, although you will still have to pay for premium decks.

Students do not have to pay to use the decks you assign to them.

Is Boom Cards safe to use?

You'll know that any decks you create for kids are safe. Any you buy, you'll want to check through both to ensure they are accurate and appropriate. During this review, none of the decks downloaded was problematic.

The Boom Cards marketplace has rules about what is appropriate, but the ultimate responsibility for checking on the appropriateness of any purchased deck rests with the buyer themselves.

Overall rating of Boom Cards

As you'll have seen in this review of Boom Cards, there is a lot to like about it. It is easy to use, is very flexible, and strikes a good balance between features and usability. The popularity of using Boom Cards to help kids learn is well earned, as is the five stars awarded to it in this review.