Sharing Expertise - Don't Shy Away From Experimenting!

A friend asked me if I would create a post outlining how I use Flipgrid. Not in a philosophy of education way, but in a technical, here's how to do it way. Below I go into a lot of detail to walk you through how to get set up on Flipgrid - my best advice is to create an account and then experiment! (I am not paid by Flipgrid, I am just an enthusiastic user!)



Flipgrid is an online space where a facilitator (teacher/instructor/etc.) can create a prompt, and then others can respond with a short video. Depending on how you set it up,  contributors (in my case, students) either are or are not able to see each others' responses. In a school setting, setting the videos to private can be useful if I am using the videos as a way for students to give a response to a question without hearing the point of view of other students first. Other times, I want students to view and respond to each others' videos, so I make them public.

Public in the Flipgrid world means that the videos are viewable by others who have the link to that particular prompt, or "Topic". This is great for classrooms, as the only people with access to the topics are the students to whom I provide the link. You can further set up privacy protections by setting a password for the topics as well.

I love using Flipgrid to connect with my students :

• it's asynchronous, so students don't have to worry about logging on at a specific time
• we can see each others' faces and hear each others' voices, much more connection than email or other text-based options
• students can reply to each other, as well as to the prompt (it's not as good as our morning circles, but it is a great option while we are not at school)

Now that I've given a basic overview, I'll get into more detail about getting yourself set up on Flipgrid. They have also put out a quick-start guide to remote learning that you can access here.

The first step as a facilitator is to set up your account. You can do this with either a Google or Microsoft account.

As you can see, you do not have to be a teacher to set up an account. In fact, I know of people who use Flipgrid to host virtual family reunions!

Once you have your account set up, you will be invited to create a "Grid". Essentially, I like to think of my grids as the individual classes I teach, and the topics inside them are the different activities. You can really set it up anyway you like though.

There are three options for the type of grid you set up, and your choice will depend on how you intend to use Flipgrid. The first option is School Email. You can set the domain name that your students use (in my case, I have it set to gnspes.ca as that is what all students in my school use) You can add multiple domain names if this useful to you.

The option for Student IDs allows you to create a list of people who will access your grid, and assign them individual logins. This is useful if your students don't use email.

The third option is to create a public grid. You will share the link with contributors, and can set a password as well.

Once your grid has been created, you can make individual topics. It is possible to create topics in grid and share the individual topics with people, rather than sharing the link to the entire grid. 

When creating a topic, you will see the following basic options :

When setting up a topic, you are able to record your own video as a prompt (or "Focus"), and also to attach other types of documents (e.g. Google Doc, an image, a link to a website, a Youtube video, etc.) There are lots of options for integrating Flipgrid with other websites and apps.

You will likely want to access some of the other options when setting up a topic (such as video moderation, which is how I keep students' videos hidden from each other - you can always "release" these videos after you have seen them, so other students can watch them later) Here are the other options when setting up a topic :

I hope this has been helpful to you in setting up your own Flipgrid account. Please reach out if you have questions! If you want to see what this looks like from a participant/student point of view, I've created a topic for that purpose that you can access here.