Cross-College Student Interaction Using Flipgrid

We are a pair of community college ESL teaching veterans, world travelers, lifelong learners and former City College of San Francisco colleagues, who continue to collaborate despite our current North-South (San Francisco-San Diego) divide. We stay connected by a daily stream of text messages and social media posts, encouraging one another in our interconnected personal and professional lives. We share everything from our latest workshop and presentation slide decks to shopping selfies, vacation photos and videos of our newest dance steps and gym moves. Last semester we decided to share the love with our students, and expanded our use of a tech tool we both regularly use, Flipgrid, a free tool that enables asynchronous interactions in video using a webcam or a smartphone.

Both of us were teaching a class that fosters listening and speaking skills, Denise with an Intermediate-level Credit class at San Diego Miramar College, and Daya with a Beginning-level Non-Credit class at City College of San Francisco. Both of us were also using Flipgrid as a tool for our students to record authentic videos to extend course content, build community between students, and practice communication skills. One day after informally sharing what we each doing in our classes, it dawned us that our our classes could collaborate together on one shared Flipgrid!

Quickly, we put together a new grid called “Visit SF/SD”, and we created our first shared topic with the instructions, “Where should we go if we are visiting San Francisco or San Diego? Tell us where to have fun and why you like this place.”

Excited students!

When we announced this to our classes, they were immediately excited to share places in their city and learn about one another. Denise knew it would be a hit when she recorded a group hello from her class at San Diego Miramar College.

As the posts began rolling in, we realized how this provided an excellent opportunity for students to “show off” their city and their speaking skills with other students outside their own classroom walls. Students posted about favorite restaurants, special parks and famous landmarks. They recorded their videos on the top of a mountain, in their cars, at home, and in the back of the classroom. One of Denise’s experienced students took us on a live tour of the San Diego

Student providing a tour of the San Diego Zoo.

One of Denise's students provided a tour of the San Diego Zoo.

Zoo, and one of Daya’s students, on her first day attending class, stood in the hall and encouraged visitors to come to her favorite spot in San Francisco, City College! No matter where they recorded or what they shared, all students were engaged and enthusiastic, practicing their presentations many times, for increased language mastery and confidence.

Daya’s class watched Denise’s class on the big screen and students were inspired by their peers’ fluency. They felt connected and inspired. And they felt more curious about this other California community, motivated by global learners like themselves committing themselves to their education.

Overall, we found this to be such a wonderful collaboration, that we are planning to incorporate it in our fall semester classes as well.

6 Tips for Class-to-Class Collaborations with Flipgrid

We have identified a few tips for for a successful collaborations:

If you use Canvas, forego using the Flipgrid Integration for your collaboration, as it will only allow students enrolled in your course to participate in your Flipgrid Topic. Instead, create an Assignment, enter "No Submission" for Assignment Type, and include the link and password to your Flipgrid Topic in the rich content editor below the Assignment title.
Activate the closed captions feature in your Grid settings to ensure your student contributions are accessible to everyone.
Before your class-to-class collaboration, use Flipgrid with your own class. Before our collaboration, both of our classes were already familiar with Flipgrid, which made students more comfortable with collaborating. This approach lessens the students’ cognitive load and calms nerves that can come along with using a new tool.
When you introduce Flipgrid to your students, use a prompt that invites all students from participating classes to join in. It’s fun to see the other class setting, and the smiling faces of the professor and students.
For your class-to-class collaboration, choose a topic that allows students to “show off” their expertise in their college or city. Then move into other more content-based topics.
Find ways to support students who are less comfortable with the platform. If you're teaching a blended or face-to-face course, allow students to work alone or in pairs. For those who aren't comfortable showing themselves on video, provide the option to show a video tour and simply narrate it with their voice.

Flipgrid is a wonderful way to build a learning community, within a class and between classes. In addition, our students love sharing their grids with their friends and families, here in California and back in their home countries. Once the semester finishes they leave the class with a record of their learning progress and memories of classmates near and far.

Supporting English Language Learners Online

Imagine moving to another country, where few people speak English, where the culture is completely different. Imagine yourself settling in and deciding to take a local online class. You become an online learner in a new country, in a new language, in a new culture, in a new online space. How do you feel? What will you need to succeed?

This is the perspective of your online English Language Learners: your ELLs. Who are they and what do they need? How can you support them in your online class? One word: Scaffolding.

Navigating the Course

First, how do you welcome your students? How do you deliver directions? What are the norms for your class? From the start it will be helpful to identify the ELLs in your class and in a 1-on-1 communication to acknowledge the language learning piece of their study. Could you create a special Welcome Letter for your ELLs? Could you create a vocabulary list of terms for navigating the course? Could you pair up ELLs in a break-out group? Identifying the challenges up-front and scaffolding the navigation will bring a sense of ease, opening the channels of communication, and giving students the language to identify confusion in course navigation.

Course Content

Learning in another language is easier and tends to be more successful when the content area is already familiar. So an ELL with an advanced degree in Chemistry might not be fluent in English for your Science course, but they’ll have sufficient background knowledge in the content to be successful. In contrast, if an ELL has no background in your content area you’ll need to scaffold the discipline itself. For an example, in a Composition class your ELLs may have never learned the norms we use for organizing a paragraph around a topic sentence and sticking to a controlling idea. Some cultures go around and around a topic until they get to the point. Other cultures use long flowing sentences that last a whole paragraph. Acknowledging these differences respectfully and scaffolding the mastery of norms for your discipline within this culture is key.

Learning Modalities

How many learning modalities do you use when you deliver your instruction? The more you can scaffold your content with video clips, audio clips, infographics, outside links, kinesthetic activities, the more successful your ELLs, and all your students, will be.

Time Management

Online learning requires effective time management, especially in another language. State this up-front with your ELLs. How can your they plug in to student support services regularly and how might they work this into their weekly schedule so that their learning is consistently scaffolded?

Online Readiness

Some of your ELLs might not have the academic background, the personal discipline, the technology access, or the language ability they need to do their best work. How do you prepare for this the first weeks of your class so that all your students have access to effective online learning? How can you scaffold readiness?

Cultural Differences

Some cultures encourage students to be outspoken and argumentative. Others expect students to be passive and agreeable. How can you nudge students to follow the rules of netiquette and also speak up when they need clarification? And how can you be curious about your ELLs as individuals who bring their cultural background as well as their unique personality and learning style to this online space?

Bringing Together The Stakeholders

Who is invested in the success of your ELLs? Do you have ESL online tutoring? Online Basic Skills preparation? Is your Equity team plugged in to your online program? Does the EdTech Department collaborate on ELL-friendly course design? Do ELLs have an online campus voice? How can we bring all these voices to a round-table forum so that we design our programs with ELLs in mind, bringing all our campus resources and content area knowledge together in a shared commitment to excellence? How can we build a strong ELL scaffold together?

Now return to your imaginary new country and your imaginary new online course. How do you feel knowing you have been been acknowledged, warmly welcomed and supported in your learning? What else might you need to do your best work?