Giving students time for inquiry can be challenging for many teachers. It can be tough to find time to give students to learn about things they are interested in when you already have a long list of required texts or expected standards to cover. Many try to incorporate Genius Hour, 20% time, Passion Projects, or other named activities all dedicated to student inquiry. For those with limited time or resources, try using Flipgrid! Combine the tool designed for student voice with basic inquiry to create a simple step toward student inquiry.
First you begin by giving students a chance to share something they are interested in. Give students a chance to speak and share what they want to learn more about simply by having them reply to the topic. You could organize topics by week or month or just keep one long topic running all year. When the student records, have them also put their topic of interest in the title line before uploading so that their inquiry will appear on their thumbnail along with their selfie picture.
Then the teacher goes in and adds a vibe to student video showing what topic the student chose. This way other students interested in the same topics could view multiple.
Then the teacher responds and during the response adds an attachment to their reply. This attachment can be anything that can be share with a link. When the teacher responds, the attached link will appear in the top right corner and the student can easily click on it while watching the response video.
Students then can go and learn more using what the teacher provided. The teacher could leave more than one response with various links if they wished. The student can also “report back” with new information learned, or even a project they created attached. Some great programs that integrate with Flipgrid via links are Buncee, Adobe Spark, Microsoft PowerPoint, and Google Slides. Students could also create using something like PicCollage and share back what they have learned through images as stickers.
Are you familiar with adding links? Many are surprised to hear about this simple, yet powerful Flipgrid feature. Links can be attached to a topic video, in addition to being attached to a video response or video reply. When attaching a link to a topic, you would do it when you create the topic as seen below.
If you wish to add a link to a video response or reply, you do this on the LAST screen before submitting the video. As shown below, you can also add a title for the video and change the name of the user on this screen as well.
With all of the new updates being released the ways to use Flipgrid in the classroom really are limitless. The ability to add links and share attachments makes this a really powerful tool to continue the empowerment of student voice and promote student choice in the classroom.
For a visual tutorial on how to create enriching lessons by attaching links, check out our video tutorial here on the Flipgrid YouTube channel.
If you are looking for other lesson ideas using Flipgrid, make sure to check out our book The InterACTIVE Class! You can read more about it here!
Stay #interACTIVE!
-K 👗