I just got off a Google Meet meeting with teachers. They were trying to decide how to engage with students every day. Starting Monday, this teacher team will share a morning message in Google Classroom, and ask students to post a note back. Simple, and yet a way to see who is there and showing up, and who might need more support.
And they’ve decided they want to add Flipgrid to their Google Classroom setup.
There are 4 steps to getting Flipgrid going.
Really. They are:
- Start a Grid for your classroom. This is the mothership for all of your discussions (topics). According to this Getting Started Guide “A Grid is the “home” for your class in Flipgrid, and you can create as many Grid’s as you want. Within your Grid you can post unlimited discussion prompts. We call those Topics.”
- Next, select the community type. For school emails, use the school email community type. This will be the best choice for most schools. For the embedded example, I selected the PLC and public option. If you want students to be able to use personal emails, you can use this option, and share unique student ID.
3. Add topics
In this case, our topic is daily check-in. But these can be anything! You could post a book club question. A math problem. A PE assignment and reflection. The whole is your oyster. But wait, back up. We are simplifying. And this is for morning check ins.
Back to the regularly scheduled program!
4. Share with students via a link.
This can be posted where you are sending links.. via Google Classroom, email, sites, wherever.
Some tips:
- Kids can add stickers, use filters, so be prepared. You can limit these things, but why? Kids (and adults) need fun right now.
- The default setting is not to allow kids to like each others posts, but you can change this. Students can also add attachments, digital sticky notes, and can download their video to their computers to share with family in another way.
- Flipgrid features captions by default, so they’re available any time you need or want them.
Making decisions right now feels very hard. There are so many options, and so many people with advice. It is a *lot* to wade through. One thing we have to keep in mind is how to keep things streamlined, simple, and useable for not only the kids, but for the educators.
Because these are not easy days. It is so important that you don’t burn out in the first few days of switching to online instruction. Start small, and build on that.
Play with us! (link to Flipgrid here too)