If you've recently logged into Flipgrid you've probably noticed that they've
made some significant changes to their interface.
Luckily all of the great features of Flipgrid are still there, they've even
added some content upgrades, and they've made some changes to the
student camera that make it more dynamic and even more powerful to use. But one of
the changes that I know is throwing people off is the fact that they no
longer have grids and now there's a discussion tab
with a topics tab and a groups tab. I'll be making a few
videos about the updates to Flipgrid that came out in August of 2020
but in this video I'll focus on how to use the new system of topics and groups
in order to assign students work. Although it's a little bit confusing to
have to learn a new system, this new way of assigning assignments
through Flipgrid is better than the old way
and in this video I'm going to show you why. My name is Sam Kary and this is my
YouTube channel for The New EdTech
Classroom.
Before we get started talking about how to assign assignments,
one thing that I want to point out, because a lot of people have been
talking about it, is the fact that there's no longer a
Disco Library. Disco Library used to be the name of the
place where you could go find pre-created lessons in Flipgrid.
Pre-created lessons are still here, they're just now
under a tab called Discovery. And if you click on that discovery tab you'll also
see some of the new content integrations that Flipgrid has,
so for example they now have an integration with Minecraft: Edu.
All right now we're back on the teacher dashboard and the main thing you'll
notice about this new interface if you're a
previous Flipgrid user is that grids have gone away. When you
first log in, it's going to take you to this discussion tab.
Then you'll notice that there are two sub tabs called groups
and topics. If you previously had a Flipgrid account
and had already created grids, those grids
will now be listed as groups. If you click on the topics tab,
you'll also see any topics that you had created under that tab as well.
So everything is still there, what exactly has changed?
The way the old Flipgrid used to work is that you had to create a grid
first. A grid was usually a way of setting up a class,
then once you had that grid set up you could create topics, which were
essentially assignments, and then assign those to your grid. You
could duplicate topics over to other grids as well
but the topics never existed outside of a grid,
they were always part of a class that you created. So really the only thing
that Flipgrid has done here is just separate topics from grids and
instead of grids they now call them groups.
So now we have a separate place to create assignments and a separate place
to create groups. The benefit of this is that now
you can create an assignment that is not necessarily
affiliated with a group of students. This has clear benefit if you plan to
use an assignment over and over again, year after year, but it also makes it
just a little bit easier to use Flipgrid to set up small group work.
So let me show you how that would work and to make it simple let's start from
an account that doesn't have any topics or groups already created.
First go to the topics tab and then when you're there
click 'Add a topic.' I'm going to set this up to be a small group assignment,
I'll give it a name like 'Demo Group Assignment' and then I'm also going to
write instructions for the members of that group. So for
this assignment I'm going to have students watch a video
that presents something that's a little bit controversial, then they'll record a
video to state their opinion about what they just watched. Then after
students have recorded their own video, they'll start watching the videos of
their groupmates and responding to their answers using
some sentence starters. So it's almost like a live group
discussion except it's going to happen in a slightly asynchronous way
because students will have to wait for their peers' videos to be posted.
You'll still be able to change the duration of a student's video response
and you can also choose whether or not you want to moderate responses
so that you would have to see them before they get posted live.
Then I'm going to scroll down here to media so that I can find a prompt that
students are going to respond to. I'll select the YouTube option here and
I'll put in a link for a video about whether or not cell phones should
be allowed in schools. Down in the access control you're going
to be determining who will be able to have
access to this topic. Since we haven't set up groups yet,
what I would recommend you do is just enter the email domain of your school
so that you know that only students with that school email domain can get in.
You don't ever have to put individual students emails,
it can be a way to make those videos more secure,
but even if you plan to do that don't do that here,
go ahead and wait until you actually set up a group. And if you wanted to create a
public topic, say to use this for professional
development or another reason like that, you could also choose for this to be a
public topic and then users would just need any gmail or microsoft email to get
in. Once you're ready to create the topic
click that 'Create a Topic' button and there you'll see that the topic or
assignment has been created. Now right now this topic has not been
assigned to any group of students. So if you were to go up here to the
drop-down menu and then try to assign this topic to a group
it's just going to prompt you to create a group. You can do that directly from
here but I'm going to go back to the
discussion tab to show you how you would do it from there instead.
And the reason why I want to start from here on the discussion tab
is just so that you can envision how you could also set up your classes
or small groups of students right here on the groups page as well.
So to start I'll go over here to the blue 'Create a Group' button,
I'll give my group a name. I'm going to start with my overall class name,
English Language Arts, and then I'm also going to give this
a group number. And again what I'm showing you here is how to use this to
create small groups but you could just as easily set this up
to be your entire class as well. You'll want to do the same thing
you did when you added a topic and set this up so that only students
coming from your specific school's email domain
are able to access the group. And similar to the topic, you could also choose to
make this group public if you wanted to do that as well. After
you click 'Next,' you'll see that it prompts you to
duplicate topics to that group. So if you click on the drop down menu
you'll see any of the topics that you created,
you can select it, and then click 'Duplicate Topic.'
And just to clarify here, it's not required for you to assign
a topic to this group, so if all you wanted to do was create the group first
and you didn't necessarily want to assign a topic,
you could also click 'Skip for Now.' But I'm going to go ahead here and click
'Duplicate Topics,' and then you'll see that it's going to
pop up a box with a link that I can share directly to
students so that when they sign in they'll be taken
directly to their group. And now that we're in that group,
we can also see that the topic has been assigned to that group as well.
Now since I'm setting up small groups of say four to five students,
I'm obviously going to need to create more of them. So what I'll do here is go
up to the Actions drop down menu and then I'll select 'Duplicate Group.'
Once you choose to duplicate the group you'll see that it creates a new group
with exactly the same name, except it'll say 'Duplicate' in front of
it. So to fix that just go back to the Actions drop down
menu, select 'Edit Group' and that will allow you to
change the group's name so that it doesn't have 'duplicate' in front of it,
and you can also change the number of the group as well.
So I'll go here and create group number two. And now all I'm going to do is just
continue to repeat that process over and over again to create as many
groups as I want to make. So now back on the groups tab you'll see
that we have created three different groups
and then since we duplicated the group, when you click on the group
you'll see that that assignment has also been duplicated over to the group as
well. Know that if you do this and students
have already responded with videos, it's not going to copy the student
videos over to the new group, it will only copy that assignment over.
Then when you click on the topics tab, you'll also see that the topic has been
duplicated and that it's been assigned to each group.
Since we're not going to be duplicating groups over and over
you'll also need to know how to do this the other way around.
So let's say that you already have groups created and you want to create a
new topic and duplicate that topic to multiple
groups. You'll want to select 'Add to Group,' then you'll be able to
choose one group to assign that topic to. Pick the group,
click 'Add,' and now if you want to assign that topic
to the rest of the groups, go to the drop down menu, select
'Duplicate Topic,' and then you can pick all the groups
that you want to duplicate that topic over to.
All right so since our intention with this assignment is just to have a small
group of students be able to communicate with each other
about a topic, I only want to give the students who are
going to be in that small group access to the group
and to that assignment. So the first thing that you're going to
want to do here is click on the blue 'Share' button.
That's going to give you a unique link that students would click on
in order to access that group. And what I'm going to show you here is a way you
could do this through Google Classroom, but you can do it with other learning
management systems as well. So now that I'm in Google Classroom
in the assignment editor, I'll create an assignment and I'll copy and paste that
specific group link. Then I'll go to the drop-down menu where
it says 'All Students' and then I'm just going to select from
that list the students that I want to be in that small group. I'll have to repeat
that process for all the groups that I've made,
and although you'll have multiple assignments on your teacher end,
when students log in they'll only see the assignment that was assigned
specifically to them and then when they click on the link it
will take them directly to that group and they'll be able to complete their
assignment. I hope this video helped you understand just a little bit better how
to use the new Flipgrid to assign assignments to students. You
can set up those groups to be either small groups of students, like I showed
in this video, or of course you could just set up those
groups to be whole classes. And as I mentioned in the beginning, I'm
also going to make a couple of other videos
about some of the new features in Flipgrid. One of those will be about the
camera updates and then I'll also talk about how you
can use that camera as a teacher in order to make short
instructional videos. If you have any questions, thoughts, or
ideas please put them in the comments below.
Thank you so much for watching my video to the end. If you found the tips that I
shared helpful, please share it with other teachers that
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You can also check out some of the other tutorials I have on my channel by
clicking on one of those two videos above
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and show on my videos, please visit my website at www.newedtechclassroom.com.
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Thanks so much and have a great week!