Here to stay! My favourite teaching apps and websites: Flipgrid

As promised, I am starting a series of posts about apps and websites I've grown to love during online teaching; apps and websites which I am definitely going to continue using once this craziness is over and we're back in our classrooms. Today's hero:

Flipgrid is both a website and an app and you use it to create and share videos ... I mean ... not you ... your students 😅 It's made specifically for educational purposes, so you can be sure that your students' data and videos they create are safe and protected.

My students love Flipgrid! I kid you not, I had kids begging me for more assignments! It also got the highest possible praise a thing can get from a teenager: "It's like TikTok but for school!" 😂

As a teacher, you create an account on their website: info.flipgrid.com using the "Educator sign up" button. Once your account is all set up you can start creating groups/classes. Flipgrid will assign a join code for each group. You can decide to give the code to students and make them sign up like that OR you can add their school emails and send out invitations to specific groups OR you can create their accounts by adding their names and assigning usernames.

Once your group is ready, you can start creating your topics. This is what one of my groups looks like:

In the photo you can see the top of the page and in the video you can see all the topics. I chose to show it to you as a video so you can see all the moving GIF covers for each topic 😄 I'm an avid GIF enthusiast so I appreciate this option A LOT!

In each topic you can add a description of the task you want your kids to do, you can add links if you want them to watch or read something before they do their task. You get to choose many options like, whether or not you want to moderate the topic; whether or not you want your kids to comment on each other's videos; how long you want their videos to be; what sort of feedback you'll be able to give once they submit their videos; and many more.

Once your topic is good and ready your kids access it from their Flipgrip phone app. In the app they press the "Add response" button and start recording! They can record short videos and edit them into one longer video; they can add drawings and whiteboards; they can choose to turn off the camera and only record the sound; they can upload something from their phones. Once their video is finished, they press "submit" and make their video visible to everyone in the group. If you chose to moderate the topic you'll have to accept the video first from your teacher dashboard.

As you can see I still haven't accepted one of the responses (it says "hidden" next to it) because it needs to be corrected.

Flipgrid has so many more options: you can share kids' videos; you can join public topics available to everyone in the world; you can create "mixtapes" which are collections of videos from any of your topics ... I feel like I'm not doing Flipgrid justice with this post! IT IS AMAZING!

Why I love it so much? Because it made quiet kids from my groups find their voice. Students who wouldn't normally talk in class started sending me videos with natural language production just chatting away in English because they wanted to share and play with the app!

There are so many ways in which you can use it. You can create short assignments or assignments which will last a whole school year to which students can just keep adding new videos. One idea that I have is to create an "unboxing" topic and tell them to record unboxing videos each time they buy something. I know some of my kids will go mental for it 😆

Your students can record videos without them in it if they don't want to show their faces or, as I've mentioned above, only record their voice. There's also an option to pixelate the camera.

All in all, it's a great teaching tool and I can't recommend it enough 💯 My student Antosia has kindly agreed (and so did her parents) for me to show you one of her videos. If I haven't convinced you yet, let this video do it:

Have you ever worked with Flipgrid? Or perhaps you have a question about it? Comment below and let me know if you'd like to know anything else about this marvel 😅