Flipgrid Video Discussion

Before I explain how I created my Flipgrid, I want to note that creating a video to be shared widely is way outside my comfort zone.  I was nervous to do it, I doubted whether I should, and I subjected my kids to being my dry-run audience before I actually posted.  I mention this only because this did feel like taking a risk and one I wouldn't have taken if I didn't see all the possible ways students could benefit. If I had the opportunity to share this with students I would certainly start by acknowledging how I struggled to make this and how unsure I felt posting it to help ease their discomfort and hopefully encourage them to take risks.

Flipgrid
When I first came across Flipgrid, it  instantly prompted me to think about all the ways I would love to try integrating this with students.  Flipdgrid is both a website and an app that can be downloaded on iPads and phones.  Basically, Flipgrid is a tool where you pose a question, either through video or typing, to a community of learners.  Those who've viewed your Flipgrid then have the opportunity to respond to your prompt by creating their own short  response. It took me about 3 minutes to create a teacher/admin account using my email and a password and within 10 minutes I was creating my Flipgrid video!

Groups 

Groups are basically the classes or communities of viewers you want to reach. You might create Groups for each of your class periods, or create one grid for all your students.  Since I don't have any particular classes, I created a Group called ELA PLG.  To create a grid you just click the +New Group, give the Group a name, and upload a picture if you choose. 

Privacy: You can choose who can access your group and how. If you select Student Email, simply input @_____(your students' address) and this will require students to enter their school email to access and participate in the group.  

Topics

Once you've created your GROUP, you can think about creating Topics--the questions you want to pose to generate video responses from your learning community.  I created the ELA PLG GROUP as a way for our PLG to stay in contact during this time.  I added a Topic titled "Idle Hands..." to hopefully start a discussion and for us to share some personal victories in the midst of such uncertainty.

I made this Topic Active so people who have the code are able to view and respond.  You can also set your topic to FROZEN (view only) or HIDDEN (won't be visible or open for responses until you change the setting). Another feature is that you can create a topic and then "set a launch date" to Activate your topic and accept responses. 

Setting for Student Response:

There are many settings you can use to control what students can share, whether or not you moderate and see videos before they are posted, whether or not students can respond to peers, and other responsible use parameters you might consider putting in place depending on the ages of your students.

Alternative to Video:

Students can also respond using the WHITE BOARD feature (visible when they add to the dicussion) which allows them to write with a voice over explanation. This is similar to Explain Everything but will also appear in the grid response.  

Flipgrid in the Classroom

Whether you're already using this or are just hearing about it now, I'm positive you have many creative ways to use this with your students.  Here are just a few I've thought about. :

• Book Talk/Review: Create a Topic(s) dedicated solely to reading and ask your students to post a Book Talk/Review for a book they've recently read or even just make a quick post about a book they are currently reading.  Again, ask students to reply to peers to expand students' exposure to different books and learn from classmates.
• Answer Explanations: This could probably be for any subject but I was thinking about a different way to "show your work" and make students' thinking visible in math.  Pose a question to students and ask them to respond with their answer and explanation.  If it were a HW assignment the first to reply with correct answers could be rewarded.  With the moderate tool, you could wait to post students' videos to the Grid until you've received many answers to avoid "giving away" the answer. 
• Getting to Know You: As a beginning of the year activity pose a question (nothing intensely personal) to your students and ask them to share their responses.  Additionally, have them watch at least two of their peers' videos and respond.  You get to know your students but they get to know each other.
• Read Aloud: Students could record themselves reading aloud sections of a book they are enjoying or the text you've assigned and share their response to the text. One of the challenges with incorporating the reading standards into remote learning is that we're often assessing students' reading through writing.  While writing is often a solid measure of a students' comprehension, it sometimes creates more barriers for students who struggle to write.

These are just a few of the ideas that have surfaced for me since learning about this tool.  If you are interested in learning more I highly suggest following @Flipgrid and checking out the hashtag #FlipgridFever. Both will provide you with many ideas for how teachers all over the world are integrating Flipgrid into their classrooms. There are also a number of articles and other posts about Flipgrid in the classroom.  I recently read one titled, "5 Strategies for Using Flipgrid in the Language Learner Classroom," in which a Language Learner shares his successes and struggles using Flipgrid with his students.

Summer Reading

Summer Reading! 

My Summer Goal: read as many diverse books as I possibly could in effort to add more "mirrors & windows" to our SBA student library.  Some of the books I read, particularly the ones I couldn't see myself in at all, caused me to think about our diverse student population and how often they come to the library and can't find a book that feels like a mirror to them.  Or, maybe they don't come at all because they just assume they won't one.  Either way, I intentionally sought out books with diverse characters and stories and I'm happy to say that the books I read and more have already been purchased for the SBA Library.  I'd love your thoughts for titles and authors we should add.  

LGBTQ Books

• George by Alex Gino 
• Gracefully Grayson by Amy Polinski​ (A middle school boy, Grayson, only sees a girl when he looks in the mirror and knows he should have been born female.  The book is his story of playing the female lead in the school and all that comes with.)
• The Pants Project by Cat Clarke (Liv knows she's really a boy and hates that she's forced to wear a skirt as part of her school's uniform.  What I really liked about this book is that there is a lot of diversity-Liv has two moms and her friend at school has a physical disability).
• Boy Meets Boy by David Levithan (Paul is an openly gay high school student in what seems like a pretty progressive high school-many openly gay students, the quarterback of the football team is also the homecoming Queen, named Infinite Darlene.  *mature, probably for 8th grade)
• So Hard to Say by Alex Sanchez 

Culturally Diverse Books

• If I Ever Get Out of Here by Eric Gansworth​ (Lewis, lives in poverty on a Native American reservation while going to a primarily white school and the discrimination and challenges he faced.  )
• Somewhere Among by Annie Donwerth-Chikamatsu 
•  The Whole Story of Half a Girl by Veera Hiranandani (Nadia is half Indian and half Jewish dealing with some seriously life changing events.) 
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Additional Books I read and enjoyed

• The Fourteenth Goldfish by Jennifer Holm
• Counting by 7s by Holly Goldberg Sloan
• Raymie Nightingale by Katie DiCamillo
• Just Another Girl by Elizabeth Eulberg
• Worthy by Donna Cooner

Summer Learnin', Had Me a Blast

I remember reaching the mid-point of the summer and thinking, there's still plenty of time left.  But, with the start of the school year just a few short days away, it certainly feels as if "all at once summer collapsed into fall."  It's the perfect time, then, to reflect on all the reading and learning I did over the summer and think about what impact this might have on the upcoming school year. 

CAST UDL Symposium

If you followed the #UDL4Justice hashtag at all over the summer, you may have seen some of the conversations and ideas being exchanged at CAST's 3rd annual symposium.  I was fortunate enough to attend and present again this year and it was a powerful experience all around. At the most basic level, it's just so energizing to be surrounded by such dedicated educators from all over the globe and from all roles within schools.  While I wish I could have bottled up the whole symposium to bring back to school, I will share just a few of points that have kept me thinking all summer.

In her Day 1 keynote speech, Katie Novak encouraged us to look closely at our curriculum and be honest about whether it offers both "mirrors and windows" for our students.  Mirrors, where they see themselves reflected in the curriculum, and windows that give them views of worlds different from their own.  Katie urged us also to look at ourselves and our own beliefs and attitude towards groups so we are more aware of how our beliefs are reflected in our actions toward our students.  Her whole speech was riveting, but what really connected with me was her distinction between "options & choice" in terms of UDL.  As a parent, I think about when I say things like, "You can clean your room before breakfast OR you can clean your room after breakfast." I have may have presented an option, but I definitely haven't given my kids the choice to not clean their room.  In the classroom if I say, you can "Write an essay about why cell phones should be allowed in school OR why they shouldn't be allowed in school," I've given my students an option but I haven't given them a choice to argue something that matters to them.   Katie's comment, "I can't make authentic choices for you. Students must and can make authentic choices for themselves." is one I will continue thinking about and working toward.

Kristina and I also had the opportunity to present some of the work SBA has done around UDL and as I think it usually happens, the best part of the presentation was in actually reflecting on our work in order to put the slides together.  We focus on how we, the SBA staff, have found ways to infuse student voice into our school and how this can positively impact engagement. Reflecting on the work we've done over the last 5 plus years really encouraged me to continue finding ways to bring student voice into the school and community. If you are interested in seeing what we shared at the symposium, here is a link to our presentation. 

 

   

Session Summaries in Quotes

• "The work is not about intentions. It's about the impact on the the lives of our students." ~Mirko Chardin (@MirkoMilk)
• "Stand up for what you believe in. Do what's right in the face of adversity." ~Elizabeth Stein (@ElizabethLStein)
• "When we make our thinking as expert learners explicit, our dialogue eventually becomes students' inner monologues." ~Lisa Beth Carey (@EquitableAccess)
• "Make one point of contact beyond "hi" each day and you invest in students' emotional bank accounts." ~Matt Bergman (@mattbergman14)
• "We know one size fits all doesn't work for our students so why would we expect it does for our adults?!" ~Liz Berquist (@Liz_Berquist)

MCIEA Cohort 2 

In late August, I joined the 7-Blue Team members at the Massachusetts Consortium of Innovative Education & Assessment (MCIEA) to "begin" the work of creating Quality Performance Assessments.  Although the PD itself definitely fell a bit short, the idea behind the MCIEA and QPAs is founded in the principles of UDL, so we've been moving in this direction for years!  The consortium's goal is to "reclaim the term assessment" and to bring it back into the hands' of teachers.  We were presented with some studies findings that show for all the focus on standardized assessments, we have done little to actually close the gaps we so often hear about.  

For me, the standout "new" idea of the two-day session was Accountability vs. Responsibility. MCAS and other such standardized tests were created in an effort to hold schools accountable for their students' performance and growth over time. This system made schools accountable to external forces.  I can't think of a single teacher I know who would say they didn't want their students to grow and improve after spending a year learning together.  We've also all had a student who we knew made great strides over the year, but for whom the standardized tests didn't offer the opportunity to convey that.  If we think about our responsibility to our students, we begin thinking about holding ourselves accountable.  However subtle this difference may seem, it feels empowering to me.  In "tested" subjects there is often that emotional struggle between what teachers "know is right" and what teachers "feel obligated to do because of testing."  Focusing on our responsibility to our students rather than our accountability to an external force, allows us to see our students as they are--individual and varied learners and not test scores.

It was energizing to be a small part of the team's brainstorming about what kind of Quality Performance Assessment they could create for their shared group of students. The UDL framework was everywhere in their discussion about embedding true choice, seeking authentic audiences, and offering multiple representation of student knowledge!