If you’re a technological Luddite like I was a few months ago, you probably have a thousand ideas that you’d love to incorporate into your class but simply don’t know how. It’s not for a lack of desire, but rather a lack of exposure to a higher educational technology (edtech). Like many teachers, I was able to deliver quality instruction without having to incorporate the internet. My logic was, if my parents could receive a high quality education in the analog world before computers, then clearly I could deliver high quality education without learning to use modern edtech. However, COVID-19 turned our worlds upside down and every educational institution went into emergency remote learning mode. With that I was forced to learn how to use and incorporate edtech into my lesson planning and delivery. Probably the first thing I learned about was Flipgrid, and I will definitely continue to use it when I return to the classroom.
Flipgrid is an easy to use video sharing portal for the classroom where students can share short video assignments to create a virtual synchronistic discussion. I, a self professed Luddite, have successfully participated in classes where the educator has created a discussion topic and students each add a video on their reflections. I’ve also seen it used as means of informal and formal assessment, to check if a class reading was completed. This is something that is super useful to make sure that students are completing the required reading while at home.
I will also be using this in my upcoming semester where my fifth grade students in Vietnam participate in a cultural exchange with students from the United States. Here students get to participate in anti bias education, while interacting with students from from a different country, ethnicity, religious, and economic background. Before I was struggling to take small videos on a smart phone and upload them to Google Drive, which took hours and took up massive amounts of storage space. Now, with Flipgrid, I can post discussion topics into a Flipgrid and students in both countries can upload content at their own pace and respond to other students videos on the other side of the world.
If you’re interested in using videos in your classroom, I highly recommend you check out Flipgrid. I’m sure there are a million other applications of Flipgrid that I have yet to discover. I would love to hear if you have other fun, creative, or useful applications in the classroom.
