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9 New Ways to Use Flipgrid in the Classroom

The popular tool has features that teachers in any subject can use to help students connect with each other and share their learning.

The video-sharing tool Flipgrid, as we all know, is popular in schools—so popular, in so many countries, that its rapid rise been attributed to “Flipgrid Fever.” The tool has been free for educators to use for over a year now after being acquired by Microsoft.

One of the main things going for Flipgrid is its ease of use. Teachers set up an account and create grids, which act as communities for students to work in. Within each grid the teacher creates prompts called topics, and students post video responses to the prompts and replies to each other’s videos. Most of the videos are quite short, just a minute or two long, and the tool is simple enough that kindergartners use it.

9 New Ways to Use Flipgrid

1. Sharing book reviews: With Flipgrid’s new augmented reality (AR) feature, classrooms and classroom libraries can use the video QR code to create an engaging way for students to share book reviews. After a student records their review, the teacher can print the QR code and tape it on the book, and the student’s classmates can use their devices to scan the code and watch the review as a way to help them decide if they’d like to read the book.

2. Practicing world language skills: Flipgrid makes it possible for teachers in different districts and different countries to collaborate. For world language teachers, this creates opportunities for students to practice their speaking skills with a larger group than just their class. Students can post videos to get practice with the vocabulary they’re learning, and instead of being limited to practicing with the people in their physical classroom, they can engage and build their skills with other students around the world studying the same language or have conversations with native speakers of the language.

3. Increasing accessibility for all students: Flipgrid has expanded many of its accessibility features to ensure that all students can participate. Students can use closed captioning when viewing videos, which also generates a full transcript for each video. Microsoft’s Immersive Reader can be used within both the closed captioning and any text within a topic to read the texts aloud and break up words into syllables for easier decoding.

4. Inviting outside speakers: Using Guest Mode, teachers can invite guest speakers to participate in classroom discussions. Guests can watch student videos and post their own videos. This option provides a way for experts in a field to share their knowledge asynchronously, with students posting videos of their questions for the expert to answer at a convenient time in a video response. STEM teachers, for example, could invite engineers or scientists to discuss their careers and research and to answer student questions.

5. Building student portfolios: A teacher can create a grid for student portfolios. Within this grid, the teacher creates a topic for each student, and students post videos explaining their work, demonstrating a recently learned skill, or reflecting on an in-class experience. The teacher can share the link to a student’s topic with their parents or guardians so they can view their child’s work throughout the year. Since the topics can also be available to every student in the class, students can observe their classmates’ work.

6. Adding annotations: When students record a video, they have the option to write directly on the video, and they can add sticky notes with additional text. For students in math practicing solving problems or students in chemistry learning to balance chemical equations, this feature is a great way to show their thinking.

7. Building a mixtape: The mixtape is a way to curate videos from any topic or grid in a single location. A teacher can select any student video and add it to the mixtape, which can be shared with the entire class. Collecting memories from throughout the year is a great way to take advantage of the feature: As the year progresses, the teacher can save interesting videos or important moments from different topics. Watching the mixtape as a class at the end of the year will help students recall what they’ve learned.

8. Sharing and celebrating work: Celebrating completed projects or finished assignments is often forgotten in the classroom due to time constraints, but Flipgrid makes it fairly easy and quick. Using the student-to-student replies option, everyone in the class can view and respond to each other’s videos. For example, students in a history class could share a long-term project they have completed, walking through what they learned and what they created. Peers in the class compose video responses, providing positive feedback on the work completed. When I do this with my ELA students, I require everyone to comment on two or three classmates’ projects from any of my sections.

9. Supporting absent students: Flipgrid can be a catch-up solution for students who are absent. The teacher creates a topic for work completed in class, and if a student is absent during a given class period, one of their peers can post a quick video about what assignments were completed in class so the absent students can quickly learn about what they missed.

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Educators Technology

Innovative EdTech for teachers, educators, parents, and students

How to Use Flipgrid for Students and Teachers

By Med Kharbach, PhD | Last Update: January 16, 2024

Flipgrid (now called Flip) is an excellent video discussion platform that teachers can use to empower students voice and boost their creative thinking. The way Flipgrid works is simple: teachers create Groups for their class (a Group is a shared virtual space), then invite students to join. In Groups, teachers add Topics which are discussion prompts that students  respond to using short videos recorded by Fliprid camera. 

Creating videos on Flipgrid is both fun and engaging. Students do not only record videos but also apply various editing features, effects, and annotations to make their videos much more expressive. For instance, students can add to their recorded videos things such as  text, drawings, photos, sticky notes, GIFs,  emojis, and more. 

Besides empowering students voice, Flipgrid can also be used in various learning activities including in digital storytelling, creating and sharing reviews of digital content, in language learning, and many many more. 

In this post, I will introduce you to the different things you can do on Flipgrid. More specifically, I will walk you through the process of creating Groups for your class and show you how to add Topics and share them with your students. 

I will also discuss  some of the main Flipgrid features  including: video editing features, Shorts, Mixtapes, and Discovery Library. To learn about how students can log in to Flipgrid check out students sign in  tutorial I posted here in educatorstechnology.com.

1- Create a Flipgrid Group for your class

As a teacher, you can can create a Group for your class and invite students to join. The Group is the shared space where your students get to interact, learn, and share video responses. To create a Group:

 >  Log in to your Flipgrid account and click on ‘+Group”

 > Provide a name for your Group

 > Set up how members can join your Group: 

•   Email and school domain: only those with approved emails can join  
•  Google Classroom: Import Google Classroom roster and allow students to easily access your Group using their Google Classroom account.
• Username: Assign students specific usernames and use these usernames to invite them to join the Group.

2- Share your Group with students

Once the Group is created you can then use the generated join code or link to invite students to join your Group. There are numerous ways to share your Group link: via email, share to Google Classroom or Remind, post it to Twitter, embed it online using an embed code, or you can share it as a QR Code that students can scan on their devices. 

3- Create Topics

Topics are discussion prompts to engage students in Group discussions. Topics take different forms: you can use text, video, or choose a ready-to-go Topic from Flipgrid’s Discovery Library.

To add a Topic to your class Group, click on “+Topic” and add the following details: title and description of your Topic, add media which can be an image, a recorded video (maximum recording time 10 minutes),  emoji, an uploaded video, a YouTube or Vimeo video; or you can insert media from Adobe Spark or Buncee, and/or add attachment links. 

You can also customize the settings of your Topic the way you want. You can change the Topic status (e.g., active, video only, or hidden), set the recording time of video responses, turn on/off moderations of videos and comments, and choose caption language. 

You can also edit the settings of responses. For instance, you can choose whether students’ video responses can have attachment links or not, allow likes, display view count, and allow download and share. Likewise, you can control the settings of Flipgrid’s camera. 

For instance, select whether you want to support Essentials (e.g. text, drawing, photos, stickers, frames, and boards), Sticky notes (allow sticky notes when recording), and Expressions (e.g., lenses, filters, GIFs and backdrops). Once you are done, you can save your new settings as the default settings so that you do not have to create new settings each time you want to add a Topic. To do so, simply click on ‘Save changes to my default settings’. 

Now that you created a Topic, students will now be able to respond to the Topic using short videos recorded by Flipgrid camera, and according to the settings you have chosen when you created the Topic. 

Recording video responses using Flipgrid Camera

Flipgrid’s camera is equipped with tons of fun and creative tools including immersive lenses, fun backdrops, GIFs, and many more. Some of the video editing  features it offers include:

• Upload clip: students can upload clips to add to their Flipgrid recordings.
• Mic only: Students can record their responses using only audio.
• Mirror video: “Flip the camera – this is helpful for showing books and text that appear backwards.”
• Record screen: This feature works only on Edge and Chrome and allows students to share their screen. This is especially helpful when sharing presentations and digital content.
• Filters : Apply various fun filters to the camera such as rainbow, pixel, black and white and many more.
• Text: Annotate your recording with text .
• Board:  Showcase your ideas using different boards including a whiteboard, chalkboard, graph paper and more.
• Stickers and GIFs: Use Flipgrid’s library to add emojis and GIFs to recorded videos.
• Backdrops: “With backdrops, you have more control over what you would like to share, and you can focus the viewer’s attention on what you’re saying and doing, not what is happening behind you!”
• Music: Students can add music tracks directly from within the Flipgrid app.

Shorts is a video service that allows you to create videos beyond your Topics. Shorts can be a screen recording, a recorded clip by Flipgrid camera, or an imported clip from your device. As a teacher, you can use Shorts for a wide variety of educational purposes including; creating step-by-step tutorials and guides, recording screencasts, recording lesson overviews, sharing messages with families and colleagues, recording and sharing class announcements, and many more. To make your Shorts more expressive,  add annotations such as drawings, text,  filters, overlay photos, frames, emojis and many more. 

Mixtapes enable teachers (i.e., Group creators) to showcase videos curated from students responses across different Topics. These video highlights can be shared with the whole class in a view-only mode. As Kathryn Nieves stated, teachers can use the mixtape feature to collect select videos from students responses and  share them as memories with the whole class. “Watching the mixtape as a class at the end of the year will help students recall what they’ve learned.”

Discovery library

Discovery Library is where you, as a teacher, can access a wide variety of ready-to-go Topics created by Flipgrid community and its partners. You can easily add these Topics to your Groups to ignite conversations among students. You can browse Topics by subject (e.g., Arts, Math, Music, Science, Special Education, STEM/STEAM, History, Engineering, Design, Geography, Language Learning, and more. 

You can also browse trending Topics and Topics created by Flipgrid’s partners. Some of these partners include Adobe for Education, Buncee, BBC Learning, Discovery Education, Epic, Genially, LEGO Education, Made by Dyslexia, Nearpod, Pulitzer Center Education, and many more. 

Featured collections is a section where you can find Topics aggregated by theme. For instance, there are collections on indigenous heritage month, coding and computer science, digital citizenship, mental health awareness, social and emotional learning, and many more.

Alternatively, you can also use Flipgrid’ s search functionality to search for specific Topics. You can filter your search by subject and community. Once you find the Topic you are interested in click on ‘+add Topic’ and choose whether you want to add it to an existing Group, create a new Group to add it to, or save it for later. Each Topic comes with detailed instructions and questions to engage users and spark meaningful discussions. 

Final thoughts

Flipgrid stands out not only as a tool for amplifying student voice but also as a catalyst for fostering creativity and collaborative learning. The simplicity of creating Groups and Topics, coupled with the dynamic video editing features, offers an engaging and accessible way for students to express their ideas and share their learning experiences.

Beyond just video discussions, Flipgrid’s versatility extends to digital storytelling, language learning, and a myriad of other educational activities. Its capacity to engage students in meaningful, reflective conversations while providing a platform for their creativity is truly remarkable.

Whether you’re crafting lesson overviews with Shorts, highlighting student achievements through Mixtapes, or drawing from the rich resources in the Discovery Library, Flipgrid provides endless opportunities for enhancing classroom engagement.

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Meet Med Kharbach, PhD

Dr. Med Kharbach is an influential voice in the global educational technology landscape, with an extensive background in educational studies and a decade-long experience as a K-12 teacher. Holding a Ph.D. from Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, Canada, he brings a unique perspective to the educational world by integrating his profound academic knowledge with his hands-on teaching experience. Dr. Kharbach's academic pursuits encompass curriculum studies, discourse analysis, language learning/teaching, language and identity, emerging literacies, educational technology, and research methodologies. His work has been presented at numerous national and international conferences and published in various esteemed academic journals.

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