Finally Flipgrid!

 Blog 8 – Tech

This week I finally had some success using Flipgrid when I used it with my elementary reading students. Here’s a little background; one year ago, when our school closed, our state made the learning activities “optional”, which meant that not very many students participated. As many teachers did, I taught myself to use some new technology, and one tool I tried out was Flipgrid. I prepared a prompt for any students throughout all of grades 6-8 to participate in, and I had 1 – ONE student – create a Flipgrid video for me. How disappointing!

Since we have been in person for most of this year, I have only tried out a few of the new tools I learned about. This class has been a helpful way to sort of “force” me to integrate some of these new ideas. So last week my fourth grade Title I students were working on retelling and summarizing a fiction story. One of the ways they fall short in their reading testing (Fountas & Pinnell) is not being able to retell important points of a story in order. After my instruction and practicing several different ways (gradual release of responsibility), I had them retell the story we were working on, in a Flipgrid using their Chromebooks. I thought the results were phenomenal! First, they were so excited to make their own videos. Second, they wanted to watch each others’ videos, which reinforced what we learned. And finally, when I evaluated the videos myself, I was able to gain insights into their understanding that I had not picked up on before. For example, I realized that one student still did not understand what a setting is.

This little project was even easier than I had anticipated, with more promising results. I’m sure I will be incorporating Flipgrid more often! If you have students make their own videos for occasional assignments, I’d love to hear what they do.