Overview
Welcome to Kleio! Kleio is an online community for creating and sharing flashcards, and an app for studying those flashcards.
The Kleio app can be found here. It uses an intelligent spaced-repetition learning system, works offline, synchronizes, and does many other awesome things.
The Kleio app for computers is completely free, and flashcards produced by Kleio users are free for everyone to use as they please. The app for mobile phones is available in a free ad-supported version and in an inexpensive paid version.
Read on for more details:
How Kleio Works
Every Kleio user has a library consisting of decks, which are themselves collections of flashcards. This library is of course private, so only you have access to it. The Kleio app is used to create/delete/edit the flashcards in your library, and to study them.
You may also use the Kleio app to share any of the flashcards in your library, one deck at a time. When you share a deck, Kleio will create a copy of that deck and then put the copy on this website, where other users can find it. The source deck in your library has no connection to this copy, so any changes made to one won't effect the other.
If you find a deck you would like to study on the website, simply add it to your library. Kleio will then make a copy of the public deck and add it to your library, and it will be there when you next open the Kleio app. You can then study and/or edit this deck just like any deck that you make yourself. Of course, there is no connection between the source public deck and the copy of it that's added to your library, so changes to one won't affect the other.
If you think a public deck is a good one, consider voting it up to help the community select the good stuff. As Kleio grows, we will add more sophisticated community tools.
With Kleio, you can also get flashcards from StudyStack or if you're doing something online related to your studies, you can make any text from any website into a flashcard right from your browser.
IMPORTANT: Any flashcards you share will be shared under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.
This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms.
Kleio and your Windows Live ID or Google Account
Kleio uses Windows Live ID and Google Accounts to track users. You need to have at least one of these accounts to use Kleio. This way, we can avoid asking anyone to make yet another username and password, and generally make everyone's life a little easier. We'll add more account providors as time goes on, so let us know if this is important to you.
Kleio uses the email address associated with your Windows Live ID or Google Account to contact you with news about Kleio, if you've consented. No other information is stored or used in any way. For details, see the privacy policy.
The Kleio App
Background
You'll probably spend most of your time with the Kleio app, as opposed to the website. The app is used to study, and to maintain your library of flashcards.
The app offers two study modes. The "learn mode" uses a spaced repetition system which tracks how well you know each card, and schedules the harder cards more often. The cram mode simply keeps showing you your cards until you get tired of them. There is also a reverse-cram mode, which shows you your cards in reverse, with the answer as the question and vice versa.
The app also holds a snapshot of your library of flashcards, so you can use it offline. When the app is online, it synchronizes your work with the Kleio cloud, so all your learning data is always backed up. This also means that if you use the app on multiple devices, the devices will always be synchronized.
Studying
When you open the Kleio app for Windows, the first thing you see is the study screen, with the study mode set to "Learn". In the mobile apps, press the study button from the home screen to start studying.
You are immediately shown the first scheduled flashcard, and after revealing its answer you give Kleio a grade that indicates how difficult it was to remember. 0 means that you drew a complete blank, 1 means you can't remember, 2 means that you barely remembered it after a great struggle, 5 means that you know it perfectly, and so on. Based on these grades, flashcards are scheduled for some day in the future – the harder the card the sooner you will see it again. As you learn a particular flashcard, you see it less and less often, so you don't waste your time on flashcards that you already know.
In Learn mode, cards are shown as follows: First, you are tested on cards scheduled for that particular day, along with any cards you might have missed if you skipped a day. After you give each of these cards a grade of 2 or higher, you will be shown any un-memorized cards that you may have in your library. If you don't have any, you're done for the day! (Or you can switch to cram mode to keep studying.) Un-memorized cards are cards that are not scheduled for any particular day, because you either never graded them at all, or never gave them a grade that was 2 or higher. When you first start studying with the Kleio app, all cards will be un-memorized. As you grade them, they will be scheduled for some time in the future if the grade is over 2. Although its certainly up to you, you probably shouldn't try to learn un-memorized cards in very large batches. Not more than 30-40 a day or so. This helps to avoid having days with large workloads.
The Learn mode is meant to be a long term commitment, appropriate for situations where you have to memorize a large volume of information over a long time, like a big once-in-a-lifetime test or a language. We recommend studying with Kleio habitually, whenever you have a couple of spare minutes – use it on your mobile when waiting in line at the supermarket, use it on your computer for those few minutes that you were going to waste on Facebook (with all due respect to Facebook.) And so on.
Kleio will not replace serious reading, grammar practice, or talking in a foreign language, but when used as part of a larger learning strategy, it makes remembering large amounts of information that much easier.
And finally, a word about Kleio's cram mode. It simply shows you your cards in random batches of 20, and considers a card memorized when you get it right twice. You can configure the size of the batches and the number of times a card must be labelled correct. Use it for that test you have in 3 hours.
Working with flashcards and your library
You will find your library and everything you need to work with it under the Library section of the Kleio app. When you open the Kleio app for the first time, your library will be empty. (Unless you have already added some public decks to your library, in which case you will see those.)
In the Windows app, the top of the Library section shows all the decks in your library, along with buttons for creating, deleting them, and so on. Clicking on a deck's icon will present further options for that deck. You can disable an existing deck to take it out of rotation, or enable a disabled deck. You can also share a deck with the Kleio community, which will result in a copy of it being made and added to Kleio's collection of public decks. Before you share a deck, please give it tags (a maximum of 5), and a name and description, so other Kleio users can find it. If you do not intend to share your deck, you can ignore these fields.
When you select a deck, the flashcards that it contains are shown on the bottom left part of the screen. You can also create flashcards in the selected deck or delete them here. When a flashcard is selected, you will see the card's question and answer on the bottom right part of the screen - the card editor. Clicking on a flashcard's icon will also present options for that specific card.
Each answer within a flashcard has an optional Prompt associated with it, which you will see when you are studying, before you reveal an answer. This is useful for situations where the question does not make it obvious what the answer should be. If the question is “Sein”, the answer could be the translation to English, a particular conjugation, and so on. So if a particular answer contains, for example, the second-person singular conjugation of the question, then the prompt for that answer could be “second-person singular.”
A flashcard consists of one question, and one or more answers. Multiple answers allow you to keep your library more organized. For example, if the question is a verb and you want to study the verb's translation, every possible conjugation, the pronunciation (for all conjugations), and all the prepositions that correspond to that verb, then that one verb could create a mess of many flashcards in your library. It is much easier to organize all of these different answers under one flashcard. When studying in Learn mode, Kleio will treat all of these answers separately, so if you learn one particular answer easily, you will see it less often than another answer that you're having a harder time with. IMPORTANT: Multiple answers are not enabled yet.
The mobile apps work similarly. In the WP7 app, long-tap a deck to access its associated options. In the Android app, tapping the deck's icon will show you the further options. Tapping a deck in both mobile apps will show you the flashcards that the deck contains. Long-tapping a flashcard allows you to delete it, and regular-tapping it will allow you to edit it, and also to add more flashcards to the deck in question. The edit-card screen also has Google Translate built in for paid users, so you can translate any text that's in the question.
Importing and Exporting flashcards
If you want to use existing flashcards that come from somewhere other than the Kleio community, you can import them in the Import screen on the Windows app.
There is a character-delimited importer which you can use to import CSV files, or files delimited by tabs or semicolons. You can also paste coma-delimited data right into the app.
There is also an importer that allows you to browse the entire StudyStack website and use any of the flashcards that you find there.
Finally, you can export any of your flashcards to a CSV file, deck by deck. Keep in mind that formatting and learning statistics will not be included in the CSV file.
The Bookmarklet
Kleio's bookmarklet is a special bookmark that goes right in your Web Browser like any other bookmark, and allows you to turn any text on any webpage into a flashcard. Simply highlight some text, and then press the bookmark. You'll see a popup with the highlighted text in the question, and you'll have a chance to provide an answer and select the deck into which the new flashcard will go, though both of those are optional. Press Ok, and the new flashcard is immediately added to your library. If you're a paid user, Google Translate is integrated right into the bookmarklet. The bookmarklet is great for reading Websites in a foreign language, adding online class notes to your flashcard library, or anything else you can imagine.
To get the bookmarklet, log into this website and click on your username next to the Logout link, and then drag the bookmarklet into your browser's bookmark bar.
Staying synched
You can have the Kleio app installed on as many different computers and mobile devices as you like. They will all synchronize with each other without forcing you to move files around. Be careful about running the Kleio app on multiple devices at the same time, because one device may accidentally overwrite some data from another device.
The computer version of the Kleio app will automatically synchronize when it starts up, and when it shuts down. In addition to keeping all your devices synchronized, this also means that your work is automatically backed up. The mobile versions also sync on startup, and also allow you to manually request a sync. If you spill coffee on your computer or drop your phone in the bathtub, we are very sorry. But at least your flashcards are safe. Just reinstall Kleio and it will re-download your library automatically. Also, Kleio runs on Google's infrastructure, so there are some very powerful industrial-scale computers keeping your flashcards safe.
Of course, you can use the Kleio app without an internet connection. It will simply wait until it finds an internet connection to sync. However, keep in mind that anything you do while the app is offline will not be backed up to the Kleio cloud until you sync. That also means that another device will not know about anything that you did offline until you sync.
