FlipGrid is one of my favorite tech tools. It’s a really great tool for integrating technology, whether you’re in person, distance, virtual, or hybrid learning to assess speaking or just to organize spoken responses to a prompt. Let’s look at what it is, some ideas for use, and some tips to get started!
What is FlipGrid?
It is a video recording app/site that is free for educators to use with their students. You set up “Grids” (basically classes) and then “Topics” (sub categories or prompts within your classes). Students can watch the videos within the topics or respond to the prompts given within the topics. They can also just do audio responses!
Uses for FlipGrid
- Response to a prompt – How are you today? Describe your family?
- Reflection to learning for the day – What questions do you have from today? What did you take away from today?
- Speaking Assessment – Within FlipGrid you can input your own rubric! Give your students the prompt, upload your rubric, and let them respond away!
- Grid Pals – like virtual pen pals students can send videos back and forth to communicate
- Listening activities – Laura Sexton at PBL in the TL has a listening library for novice learners with TONS of different videos you can use for listening activities! Check out some more info here.
Some notes:
You can set up the topics so that students either can watch other people’s responses OR so they cannot see what other people say. There are some pros and cons to each! When they see other people’s responses, they can watch and respond to their classmates. However, when students know their classmates can see their videos sometimes they get uncomfortable with that and will take forever to respond, or just refuse to! Chatterbox is a tool for animated pictures that allows them to record their voice over an image (there are many options for sites that do something similar!). Students can also record their videos from Snapchat and use whatever filters they would like and then upload that to FlipGrid. On the other hand, if you’re using FlipGrid for a speaking assessment, it’s nice to hide those responses from their classmates to see what each student can individually do.