One thing we often want to do, as teachers, is to get our students speaking. For most students, this is one of the main reasons they want to learn English, and yet it can often pose some of the biggest challenges both inside and outside class. Flipgrid is a tool that has been around for a while now. It offers the chance for the students to create video recordings to answer questions that you have posed. So, instead of the students writing their answers in forum posts, they record them. This encourages sharing of information and, of course, helps them develop their oral skills.
Getting started
Setting up a Flipgrid account is straightforward, using either a Microsoft or Google account to sign in. You can’t sign up any other way, and it is important to understand this, because the same applies to your students. They will also have to log in using an email account. Some teachers don’t like this. Personally, I always suggest that my students create a ‘spare’ email account that they can use to sign up to the various useful websites and online learning tools. It is easy to create an extra Gmail account.
When you have set up your account and recorded your first question, you will need to share a link to that question, so that the students can listen to it and then record their answers.
Grids and topics
Creating your account basically means setting up your grid. In the free version of Flipgrid, you are only allowed to have one grid, but you can have several topics within that grid. Think of the grid as like the general subject, eg What people do to stay healthy, and then, as topics, you may have several questions you want your students to answer.
You don’t have to record your questions, but it obviously makes things more interesting, as the students can develop both their listening and speaking skills by first listening to your question and then recording their response. The students can only record for 90 seconds, but it is surprising how much they can say in that time!
Student recordings
My suggestion is that you spend time in class (in Zoom, Microsoft Teams, etc) getting the students to prepare for their recordings, but that they actually do the recordings for homework. I have watched a couple of teachers using Flipgrid, and to really get value out of the recordings, the students need to plan and craft their replies. In class, they might brainstorm the vocabulary they are going to need to answer the question, and they might actually plan their answer before they record it. Try to encourage them not to script the whole answer but, rather, just have a plan for how they are going to respond. However, some will inevitably end up scripting the whole thing, and my feeling is that, at the start, that is fine. Slowly, as they build up confidence, they will stop doing that.
Feedback options
When you receive the recorded answers from your students, you can send them feedback. So you could set a series of questions, wait until all the students have answered them and then go through their answers one by one, providing feedback and grades. My worry is that, for many teachers, this might be too time-consuming.
However, there are alternatives. If you do recordings on a regular basis, you could tell the students that you are going to ‘dip into’ their recordings and that you aim to listen to, say, 20 percent of them each time. You could also draw their attention to one or two recordings when you do a live lesson, so that the students can see that you are listening to them. Another possibiltiy is to think about peer-evaluation. In the past, I have put the students into pairs and got them to provide feedback to their partner. This works best if you do some training on giving feedback.
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There are not many tools around that offer anything similar to Flipgrid. However, setting up and running it can be a bit confusing. In my opinion, it offers far too many features, and my advice is to keep it simple, particularly at the start. It is a technology that, unfortunately, you do need to spend some time learning, but it can offer you a great way of encouraging your students to record themselves speaking, especially outside class.
