NOTE: We shared FlipGrid during our webinar, "Tools for Teaching World Languages at a Distance." FlipGrid is an excellent way for students to speak and listen to each other. Whereas Zoom or Google Hangouts is where students all speak to each other at the same time, FlipGrid allows students to create short, timed videos for each other at anytime. It works like this: Teacher creates a “grid” for a class. For example, we created this grid below as an example. The “grid” is the home base for each class. Your grid is specific to where you and a class of students post their videos and discussion prompts. You will need to choose how students access your Grid Community. Students can access via Microsoft or Gmail email addresses. Another option would be to create a class list with their student ID number (this can be their real school ID or a simple one you assign). Lastly, you can create Grids for the world, meaning anyone with your Flip Code can access your Grid. This option works well across school corporations or with personal friends and family. Even for this option, however, users will need to log in with a Microsoft or Google email in order to respond to videos. Once your Grid is created, the next step is to create your first discussion post topic. Our first discussion thread was titled, “Qui sui-je?” for students to simply introduce themselves. When we taught a unit on “la nature,” we created “une chasse de trésors: Qu’est-ce que vous avez découvert ? » We asked students to record themselves finding some of the vocabulary words outside in nature. We have seen elementary teachers ask their students to show a favorite book and tell a little about it. The possibilities of topics are endless. You get to decide how long the videos will be: 30 seconds to 5 minutes. We like to post the first video for each FlipGrid we assign so that students can see an example of what we are expecting. So, for “une chasse de trésors dans la nature,” we took a tour around our backyard, pointing out different items of vocabulary words we saw (un gland, une fleur, etc.). Once our video was done, we uploaded it into our discussion thread, added our picture to it, and voilà! It is ready to go! You will see the Share button with a rocket on it. Click on that. You will be directed to your Grid’s flip code. That is the link you share with students (or parents with younger children). Once students have the link, they enter their school email address. They are taken to the page where they will see the discussion topic, the intro video, and a big green circle. By clicking on the green circle, they will now be able to record themselves answering the discussion question in the allotted amount of time. They can also watch anyone else’s posted video and respond with another video or emoji. This can get fun as students “interact” with each other, speaking and listening to all the prompts. There are fun ways to change the look of the videos, too. For the student who likes color variations in the videos, It's an option! For the student who doesn’t really want to be seen on the video, he can pixel his face. For the student who loves emojis, there are plenty of ways to get creative with those. We enjoy FlipGrid as teachers and our students enjoy it, too. And you know what is the BEST part? They are having fun speaking FRENCH with each other!!!
Here are directions taken straight from FlipGrid to help you as well:
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NOTE: All of the following information is available in our webinar, "Tools for Teaching World Languages at a Distance."
****** Teaching world languages via distance learning... exciting or overwhelming? Stressful or innovative? Tiring or energizing? A time to coast or a time to prosper? Teaching and learning? Depending on the day and the class, the circumstances might change your answers to those questions. As fellow French teachers with you, we’d like to share some of our favorite (and easy) resources we have found to use with students during our time of distance learning. As language teachers, we are always focusing on the core skills of language (reading, writing, listening and speaking) and how to incorporate those so that students are met with lower order thinking up to higher order thinking. Meeting Reading and Writing Core Skills Incorporating reading and writing is a bit more conducive to distance learning than listening and speaking. There is a plethora of ways you can ask students to read and write. We like Kami and Boom Learning digital task cards. Check out the detailed and more in-depth explanation of how those work in these blog posts: Digital Pen and Paper with Kami and Boom with Writing. Meeting Listening and Speaking Core Skills Getting students to listen and speak the target language is a bit trickier with distance learning. We have found these two resources to be effective: Boom Learning task cards and FlipGrid. We offer 10 different ways to create listening activities in your Boom cards in our blog post HERE. Boom lacks the speaking capability, so that’s why we have incorporated FlipGrid for speaking purposes and explained it HERE. With FlipGrid, it works simply like this: Teacher posts a video with a prompt/discussion/question. Students respond with a recorded video. Classmates respond to each other with additional videos or emojis. It is very easy to see who is replying to whom. It is fun... and the best part? Students are SPEAKING in the target language. Check out the blog post for more detailed ways to get started and use it in the distance learning classroom. There are so many other resources available for world language learners and distance learning. We wrote out this list of other resources you might want to try. Which mentioned resources have you tried? Which one(s) do your students especially like? Do you have any suggestions for us? Let us know! [email protected] |
Who are the Hobbs?Originally, we are from the Midwest and the East; however, our paths took us to Angers, France where we met and fell in love. Archives
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