Literary Essays Meet Flipgrid

Fourth grade students prepare feverishly for the MCAS by learning how to write literary essays. But, hey, let’s face it. Outlining, highlighting and typing can get a bit boring. So, with a helpful Flipgrid introduction from Tammy and Clare from Teachers for Teachers combined with the necessity of creating a choice project for our FSU Lesson Design with G-Suite Class, I launched Flipgrid in my classroom on March 11th, 2019.

Dramatic introduction? I think not. See, here’s the thing. Without the time to play on Flipgrid earlier in the winter and the necessity of completing a choice project for graduate school, I would have let Flipgrid slip by the wayside. So here’s how it happened.

First, I checked in with my school’s technology teacher to have her help me set up the account. I had my student’s email accounts, but not their passwords. So, I typed in their email accounts and she added their school password. But, then I didn’t use it in the classroom, and I lost my momentum.

Fortunately, we had literacy professional development again in February and Tammy and Clare showed us how to answer a literary essay orally with the whole class before asking kids to write one independently. After the Edcamp Boston discussion about combining Flipgrid with the writing process, I came back to my classroom ready to go. We rehearsed the essay orally as a whole group, then students practiced with their partners, finally they recorded their essays on Flipgrid.

It wasn’t as smooth as that though. I didn’t know what code the students were supposed to enter once they accessed my Flipgrid account through Google Classroom. It wasn’t the number code given to me. Luckily, a student figured out they were supposed to enter their school email address and we were in. All except one student. She has a Russian last name. So, we tried a couple of misspellings to see if that was the problem. But nothing worked. The next day, the technology teacher and I figured out that I had misspelled that Russian last name. So, we fixed it and the student happily recited her essay.

In the future, I’ll eliminate the views and likes buttons as well as figure out how to extend the length of the video so that students don’t get cut off at ninety seconds. Most of them would be almost finished when the video stopped recording. Also, Mary, you’re right. They weren’t so keen on seeing themselves on video. In addition, I won’t play the videos in front of the class. This time I played the few that were submitted to see how everything worked, but that embarrassed some kids.

After all that oral rehearsing, students came in ready to write the following day. From the essays I’ve read so far, I’m totally impressed. The students wrote far more than usual, and most importantly, they had fun!