The Beginning
My journey was launched at the #WDC17 Google Innovator Academy in 2017. I was introduced to so many amazing #edurockstars. However, I was super intrigued by a little Flipgrid gnome that Jen Giffen (@virtualgiff) was toting around everywhere. As our time together drew to a close in Washington D.C. I was able to have an awesome conversation with Jornea Erwin (@savvy_educator) about Flipgrid and how easy it is to amplify student voice. I was sold!
The Launch
My school was taking part of the Global Read Aloud project in the fall of 2017 and I thought it would be a great opportunity to try out the power of Flipgrid. My students loved how simple it was to use Flipgrid as we connected with schools across the United States. To date, it has 28,260 views which boggles my mind. So awesome!
More #FlipgridFever Fun
Positive Messages
Students even created memes and recorded positive messages. We grabbed the QR Code for the positive messages and printed out our own little tickets that we could give to students to reinforce their awesomeness. You can check out the blog post about our process here.
A project that I started during the 2016-2017 school year was called Lenses of Diversity. I wanted to connect multiple 5th grade classrooms within my district to have meaningful conversations about race and culture. We continued this project during the 2017-2018 school year, but moved the learning space to Flipgrid from Google Classroom. It was amazing to hear and see students as they shared their experiences and thoughts about diversity. While I couldn't share the entire grid to the Discovery Library, you can find the three individual links.
I was fortunate to be part of the Appsmash Madness 2018 with my use of WeVideo and Flipgrid for student podcasting. There were so many great ideas shared. The unfortunate part was being matched against Jen Giffen for round 1. So my partner in crime at the #WDC17 Google Innovator Academy, who was toting around a Flipgrid gnome, and was integral in sparking my use of Flipgrid, was now matched against me. Jen, connected with me right away and said she thought my Appsmash would win it all. Her prediction was very close to being correct. I made it to the championship round where I was outed by Sean Forde and his amazing appsmash.
The Mic Drop Moment
This project makes my heart happy. I had partnered with another teacher to create an online writing space for our students in an attempt to make writing more "sexy". Through this partnership, I realized how much students wanted to share their voice. This led to the idea of creating student podcasts using Flipgrid. AMAZING!!
While we were at the Iowa 1:1 Conference, we had the chance to connect with Matt Miller remotely and record an episode for his Ditch That Textbook Podcast. It was such an empowering experience for these students to record as well as for their classmates to see how their voices and ideas matter. You can give the episode a listen here.
The finale!
When the opportunity opened for mic drop session proposals, I put my students to the challenge of creating a submission so we could share their awesome project.
My mic drop session was accepted and I had the opportunity to share our story at Flipgrid's first Student Voice Conference. It was such an amazing event with so many passionate educators. Matt Miller and Holly Clark shared some inspirational keynotes to energize us for the upcoming school year.
My year officially came full circle. The two amazing #edurockstars that I met at my time in DC for the Google Innovator Academy and who opened my world to Flipgrid, were able to connect again to celebrate, not only our one year anniversary of our Google Innovator Academy, but a year of awesomeness with using Flipgrid to amplify student voice!!!
Cheers to another amazing year!
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Andrew FenstermakerInstructional Technology Coordinator | Innovation Coach | Google Certified Innovator | Presenter | Blogger | Adjunct @UiowaEducation | Owner @kids_f_i_r_s_t |