Flipgrid - A Tool for Educators

Flipgrid is a an app that can be used on Apple or Android devices that allows teachers to post questions or prompts about anything and have students respond with videos as well as view and respond to other students’ videos. This tool can help increase participation amongst students who have trouble voicing their ideas to the class and prefer to develop their own ideas independently while still including the group as part of the process. Having an alternative method in a world where students primarily communicate digitally helps achieve diversity in teaching strategies.

Sharing information:
Have a quiet student in your class who has great ideas but hates sharing? This is an app for you! It’s a digital world now and kids often prefer to text instead of talk, so why not let them use alternative means to communicate their ideas? Try it out! #Flipgrid #GetInvolved #Participation #Technologyinschool #Summer2018IICTI

Reflection:Giving each student an opportunity to share their voice is a fantastic boon for an educator, especially since it’s recorded for any future assessment requirements. It’s already set up with classroom dashboards and was developed as an educational tool, so there’d be very little set up required should one choose to use the system. The full suite requires computer access however as some of the tools won’t run on tablet/phone devices. Additionally, one would have to make sure that your schools’ infrastructure could handle the amount of bandwidth required to have large numbers of students uploading video responses, some networks may be bogged down by the volume taken up!

Comments

Be Bored

A question that I keep coming back to is how the varied integration of technology in schools may be adversely impacting students’ ability to focus on boring stuff. It is quite challenging to actually be bored for any extended periods of time now, as soon as there is nothing going on the smartphones come out to play and fingers start texting, playing games or scrolling through social media. Is this causing an adverse impact on creativity in kids? Technology has taken over making stuff up to keep ourselves occupied, imagination may be being stifled. In a classroom environment we’re always looking at trying new and novel things, but I feel like a lot of it may be “lets try that, lets try this” instead of sitting down with a particular perhaps not-so exciting tool and mastering it to a high level. Sharing our information: I’m interested to see what @AndrewMendosa, @SamHarris and @StevenPinker would think about this issue, being the most active and followed psychologists currently on Twi...

Future Focused

This quote, along with “New technology is common, new thinking is rare.” – Sir Peter Blake, are two statements that are resoundingly true. We as educators are consistently looking to improve the quality of education that our students receive, whether through improvements in our pedagogy, access to better resources, or simply creating a learning environment with many diverse options to approaching learning. I feel as if there is a disconnect between how quickly society advances in the integration of technology in our daily lives and the curriculum being delivered in schools. Do specifics matter anymore? If a student knows how to find information, does memorizing specific facts still hold value? Are subjects such as history changing because the facts are less important compared to the ability to find that information on your own? I’m continually frustrated with how no technology curriculum exists for intermediate and younger students in the public board, and the vital content that shou...

The Basics

Good Blog for Old Dogs (Teach ‘em New Tricks!) This blog can be found at https://alicekeeler.com/ and is filled with easy to follow posts and information about technology basics that have become core to effective student learning experiences in the Modern classroom. Keeler covers a variety of resources such as Google Classroom & Sites, social media tips and tricks, and very straightforward tools. She also includes a number of shortcuts and quality of life improvements in programs we already use that many people may not be aware of. Anything that helps us save time as educators without losing quality is a plus! Sharing the information: An easy to follow blog that introduces technology and its teaching applications is honestly best suited towards older (or experienced as some would put it!) teachers later in their careers who haven’t particularly kept up with new things and feel like they may have fallen behind. It can be difficult to get up to speed with how quickly thing...

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