If you are looking for ways to bring some life back into your remote or blended instruction, Flipgrid may be the tool for you. At its core it is a video conversation tool, but in practice it is something much more. So let me point out some of the features that I think you will like about Flipgrid.
- Free Educational Accounts: That's right! Since MSU is on Office365, all MSU faculty, staff, and students have Outlook accounts; which are recognized as Microsoft accounts. Therefore, you can use MSU email to setup your free flipgrid account
- Classroom Structrure: Flipgrid uses the term "Grid" to refer to a community space. For educational purposes, think of the Grid as a representation of your classroom. In each Grid, you can create collection of topics. Think of the "Topics" as your class assignments.
- Rich Posting Features: By default, video posts are 1:30, but you can make them longer or shorter. This helps to make every student post an equal length ; and encourages students to organize their thoughts ahead of time. Here are some features related to posting that make it fun:
- Abilty to add text and sticky notes to your video posts
- Apply different color themes, backgrounds, pixelate faces, etc
- Students can also add emojis
- Detailed Feedback: Instructor can provide feedback on student videos. Students can provide feedback on other student videos. Rubric can be applied to the prompt. Students can see how many views there videos are getting.
- Topic Repository: Lastly, there is a content library filled with discipline specifc content created by educators in the Flipgrid community that instructors can use in their own student Topics (assignments). These can be filtered by Audience, Subject, and Keyword. Each of these Topics contain information about the usage and the engagment scores.
These are just some the cool features that I have come across on flip grid. If you would like a thorough overview of the tool, check out this tutorial by the New EdTech Classroom:
