Welcome to Jeremy’s IT Lab. This is a complete course for the CCNA, Cisco Certified Network Associate. In this video we will look at one of the supplemental resources I provide for this course, Anki flashcards.
For most lecture videos of the course I will provide a deck of flashcards that you can open in the Anki app. These flashcards will help you review and remember important information covered in each lecture. Anki is an example of SRS, Spaced Repetition Software.
It allows you to create flashcards, as well as import pre-made flashcards such as the ones I provide. Anki’s algorithm schedules flashcard reviews for you each day to help information stay in your long-term memory. You don’t have to use the flashcards for this course, but I highly recommend that you try them, at least.
So, this is the Anki homepage, apps. ankiweb. net.
If you want to really learn how to use Anki well you can click on the Docs link up here to read their documentation. But I’ll show you the basics in this video that you need to use my flashcards for this course. So, let’s click on Download, and it brings us down here where we can download Anki.
It’s available for Windows, Mac, Linux, as well as iPhone and Android. I use Windows, so I’ve downloaded and installed the latest version available for Windows. All versions of Anki except the iPhone version are free.
The developer uses the sales of the iPhone app to fund Anki’s development. At the time I’m making this video the iPhone version is 25 dollars. If you are using the Anki flashcards it’s very convenient to be able to review them both on your desktop and on the go, so I purchased the iPhone app myself.
But if you have an iPhone and don’t want to spend the 25 dollars, there is a web browser version of Anki available at ankiweb. net. You can use this web app on an iPhone to review your Anki flashcards without having to buy the Anki app.
It’s limited, but good enough for just reviewing flashcards. Anyway, download the latest version of Anki available for your platform and install it like any other app. Once you install it and open the app, it will look like this.
We could spend a lot of time looking at the various functionalities of Anki, it’s quite a flexible app. But for this video let me just walk through what you need to know to use the flashcards in this course. And note that what I’m showing you in this video is just my recommendation for how to set up Anki.
There are other ways you can set up your Anki decks for studying, so feel free to experiment if you want to. Anyway, when you first open the app, you will see this ‘Default’ deck here. This deck will be here until you create or import another deck.
So, let’s create a deck by clicking the Create Deck button down here. I’ll name it CCNA and click OK. Notice the CCNA deck has now replaced the default deck.
We’re going to use this CCNA deck as a ‘parent’ deck, and import the decks for each day of my CCNA course as sub-decks of this one. Now, how can you get the flashcards for my course? Let’s go to the first video of the course, Day 1 – Network Devices.
The link to get both the Anki flashcards and the Packet Tracer lab files is in the top line of the description of the videos, where it says ‘Free CCNA flashcards and packet tracer lab files for the course. The link is jitl. jp/ccna-files.
If you click on that link, you will be redirected to this page. If you want you can just type in this URL directly, sendfox. com/jeremysitlab.
To receive the files, enter your first name here, your email address, and then click on Join. What should happen after that is you will get an email to confirm your address, and after you confirm your email address you will get the email with the links for the flashcards and packet tracer labs. As I’ve written above, if there are any issues send me an email at info@jeremysitlab.
com. I check my emails at least once a day, so I’ll get back to you. But, before sending an email please wait at least 10 minutes.
I often get emails from people saying they couldn’t receive the flashcards, and then a few minutes later they send me another email saying nevermind, the email came. So, please wait at least 10 minutes. And note that, if you don’t want any further emails from me after receiving the link for the flashcards and labs, feel free to unsubscribe from the mailing list.
The files are all in a Google Drve and labeled by the day of the course: Day 1 flashcards, Day 1 lab, Day 2 flashcards, Day 2 lab, etc. All of the files are in this one drive, no need to sign up multiple times. And actually you won’t be able to sign up multiple times if you try.
The email system I use will only send each email to each address once. I highly recommend bookmarking this Google Drve so you can access the files easily. For this demonstration I’ve download the flashcards for Day 1 and Day 2, here they are in the folder.
To import them into Anki you can simply click on the files. I’ll import Day 1 by clicking on it, and click close on this notification. And then do the same for Day 2.
Now both decks are imported into Anki. Notice, next to each deck, there is a ‘20’ indicating that there are 20 new flashcards in these decks to learn today. Here’s my first recommendation: increase the maximum number of daily new cards and reviews.
To do that, click the gear icon for either of the decks. Notice that the default settings for new cards per day is 20, and maximum reviews per day is 200. I don’t want Anki limiting my new cards or reviews, so I’ll just increase these to 999 and 9999 and click on Save.
Now notice that the Day 1 deck has 22 new cards and the Day 2 deck has 57, those are the actual number of cards in each deck: before the number of new cards Anki would show was limited by that setting. Of course, you don’t have to increase the limits, that’s just what I do. My next recommendation is to make the flashcard decks for each day of the course sub-decks of this CCNA deck we made earlier.
To do that, click on the deck name and drag and drop it on to the CCNA deck. I’ll do it for both decks. Now the CCNA deck has 79 new cards ready for us to learn, but if I click the plus icon next to the deck name I can see the individual sub-decks.
So, this gives more flexibility in learning and reviewing cards. If you want to review flashcards from all days of the course at once, you can click on the CCNA deck. But if you just want to review cards from a particular day of the course, you can click on that particular deck.
For this demonstration I’ll just show the Day 1 cards. To review cards in a deck, click on the deck’s name. And then click on Study Now.
So, here’s the first flashcard we are shown. The ellipses in square brackets is the information you have to remember. That’s the format I use for my flashcards.
So, think of the answer, and then to check if you’re correct click on Show Answer down here. Now there are a few options. If you got the answer wrong, you can click Again.
And note that it says ‘less than 1 minute’ above. That means Anki will show you the card again within 1 minute, so you can try again to get the right answer. If you got the right answer but it was hard, it took some time to remember, you can click on hard.
In that case it will show the card again within 6 minutes. ‘Good’ is the normal option, it will show the card again within 10 minutes. And if the card is easy you can click on that and it will show the card again in 4 days.
Personally, I recommend using only the Again and Good buttons. If you answered correctly, click Good. If you didn’t, click Again.
Nice and simple. I’ll click on good, and now that’s our first card done for now. Notice above the Show Answer button, the blue number is now 21, those are the new cards, and now there is a red 1.
That card has just moved from ‘New’ to ‘Learning’. In Anki, new cards must be reviewed twice in the first day. The first time they will be included in the blue number, meaning ‘New’.
The second time, they will be included in the red number, meaning ‘Learning’. After that, when Anki shows us that card in the future, it will be in the green category, meaning ‘Review’. Let me demonstrate.
I’ll just use the space bar to go through these new cards. If you hit space bar the option in blue will be selected, which is ‘Good’ in this case. And each time I select ‘Good’ on one of the new cards it is moved over to the ‘Learning’ category.
After we get back to the first card and hit Show Answer again, notice that this time if I select ‘Good’ the interval is increased to 1 day. That means tomorrow Anki will show me the card again. If I answer correctly again tomorrow, that interval will increase, maybe to 3 days.
If I answer correctly that time it’ll increase again, for example maybe to 5 or 6 days after that. That’s the power of SRS apps like Anki. As you correctly answer each flashcard, that flashcard’s interval increases to help that information stay in your long term memory.
I’ll just use the space bar again to go through these cards, and then this deck will be done for today. Tomorrow, Anki will show me all of these cards again, because they all have a review interval of 1 day currently. I’ll click on Decks to return to the menu again.
So, now next to the Day 1 deck there are 0 new cards. Tomorrow Anki will show me those cards again for review, they will appear under the ‘Due’ column. Before wrapping up, let me give a bit of advice.
First is to not add more than one deck at a time. For this demonstration I added both Day 1 and Day 2, but I’m only learning the Day 1 cards. If you add too many new cards each day, the number of reviews Anki will give you every day will accumulate and take a lot of time to review.
And make sure to do the reviews Anki schedules for you every day, because if you miss a day or two that will also cause the scheduled reviews to accumulate and it will be hard to catch up. My personal recommendation is to add each flashcard deck after you have studied that particular day’s lecture video. After you’ve studied Day 1, add the Day 1 deck.
After you’ve studied Day 2, add the Day 2 deck, etc. Then do the scheduled reviews every day by just clicking on the parent ‘CCNA’ deck, rather than each individual sub-deck. But as I said before, these are just my recommendations, you are free to use Anki as you wish.
In this video I only showed the basics you need to review my flashcards, but you can do a lot more in Anki such as creating your own flashcards. I recommend spending some time getting familiar with Anki and its capabilities. It’s a great study tool, not just for the CCNA but for anything.
By making and reviewing effective flashcards you can choose exactly what information you will remember, rather than leaving it up to chance what information your brain will remember and what information it will forget. Okay, that was a quick introduction to Anki. You don’t have to use the Anki flashcards with this course, but I highly recommend that you try them.
I think you’ll find that they are very helpful for remembering what you studied. Anki is quite popular on the Internet these days, so if you want to learn more about Anki and how to use it, check out Google, YouTube, and Anki’s documentation. That’s all for this video.
Thanks for watching.
