As the new academic year begins, many schools will be looking to build upon the steep learning curve of digital learning that the past year to 18 months has brought us.
Like many teachers, I looked for new ways to engage my pupils online during remote learning and I found an excellent resource that keeps pupils engaged and allows them to reconnect with the outside world: Flipgrid. It’s free to use, and its main tagline is that it “empowers every voice” through simple recording via video or audio. Think TikTok, but with a specific educational purpose.
Making the most of Flipgrid in schools
In reality, it facilitates much more than this in the classroom - here’s how I use it.
1. Start small
As with any new digital resource, start small. It can be used across both primary and secondary school levels but if you are in a secondary school I’d start with a small class that you feel confident with.
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2. Set straightforward tasks to begin with
Flipgrid allows recordings to vary in time from one to 10 minutes, but for the first time using the two-minute time limit is ideal. You can set any task you like: a simple question you want the pupils to respond to, a book review, a voice to a character. Make sure you record a video of yourself giving them precise instructions. You can also add video clips, PowerPoints, images, etc, as part of your prompts.
3. Disable likes and comments - for now
Flipgrid does allow likes and comments on videos uploaded but until your classes are fully used to working this way I would have them disabled so that no one participating will be worried about the number of likes they are getting. Flipgrid also allows you, as the teacher, to monitor videos before they are cleared to view and this is a good tool to use initially so that you control the content.
4. Tie to national celebrations
Use Flipgrid in creative ways with events in your school calendar and relevant to your subject. In my English department, we use National Storytelling week, National Poetry/International Poetry Day, Valentine’s Day and World Book Day to create Flipgrids that allow our pupils to write and retell their stories, send Valentine poems or celebrate their favourite author.
5. Make use of the tools
Flipgrid comes with lots of additional tools but two of the best to use are the Mixtapes features and Shorts. The Mixtapes essentially allows you to create a montage of all your “best bits” across a range of Flipgrids and this can be good for whole-school assemblies where you want to showcase the work or across departments.
The Shorts feature allows you to record personalised feedback on work done or to send personalised farewell messages to pupils who are leaving. With Shorts, you can embed it anywhere in your school systems-Teams, Word, PowerPoint or OneNote and it will work as a standalone video. The recipient does not even have to have a Flipgrid account.
6. Connect with others around the world
But for me the best feature by far is Gridpals. Once you have your account, you can set your profile on to Gridpals and this allows you to connect with schools, classes and teachers around the globe. It can take a few attempts to link up but I would say persevere as the results will be brilliant. Throughout this past year, my pupils managed to link up with pupils in America, Russia and France and share their common experience of the pandemic as well as celebrate Unesco’s World Poetry Day. Here the pupils can respond back and forth to each other and view the world through each other’s eyes.
Flipgrid works on mobile phones as well as tablets and laptops, and so access to this platform can be pretty universal, no matter what the IT provision is like in your school. David Bowie famously stated in an interview with Jeremy Paxman that the internet had us standing on the “cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying”. With Flipgrid, it is definitely exhilarating.
Alan Biles-Liddell is the head of English at Myddelton College in North Wales
