Flipgrid and Nearpod: A Great Match-up

Nearpod has long been a favourite of faculty who are looking to create and deliver engaging, interactive lessons for students in both face-to-face learning environments and, more increasingly these days, in online ones. Being able to create presentations that guide you and your learners through an entire lesson is made all the better when you include interactive content and activities, and now, thanks to a recent pair up between Nearpod and Flipgrid, you have another choice for inserting some fun and student engagement into your students’ work.

As users of Nearpod know, you can insert a great number of activities into lessons, including quizzes, polls, draw it boards, collaborate boards and matching pairs, to name a few. Now, with just a few clicks, you are also able to insert active Flipgrid boards.

Flipgrid, as its millions of users around the globe know, is a platform that allows for video discussions with and amongst students. You can think of it as a discussion board where rather than reading and writing, students use video to participate in a discussion. It’s a special kind of interactivity that can help bring teachers and learners together – and learners together with each other – which is an incredibly important component for success in learning, particularly in an online learning environment. Being able to incorporate Flipgrid directly into a Nearpod lesson further helps facilitate that connection.

The first step is to go to Flipgrid and sign up. Flipgrid is fully free so anyone can create an account. Educators with Microsoft Office or Google accounts can simply click on Educator Login and click to sign up with credentials from either account. Once you’re up and running, you can create a grid (think ‘discussion board’) and topics (think ‘threads’) that your students can participate in. You can share these items with students by sending them a link, embedding the items into Blackboard and now, including them in your interactive Nearpod lesson by copying and pasting the appropriate links.

From there, the Flipgrid automatically becomes part of your presentation as one of your slides, which you can edit and move around like any other slide.

Including a Flipgrid into your Nearpod opens up a great new avenue for interaction and participation in your lessons. There may not be much benefit to using a Flipgrid in a live Nearpod lesson delivered in a face-to-face environment, but there are possibilities for a live session being delivered online. Flipgrid slides could be added to give learners time and opportunity to reflect on topics delivered in the session, for example, or to verbally respond to a task in the privacy of their own at-home learning environment. It is in student-paced lessons, though, this tool has the most potential. When you’re working on an in-class live lesson, there are several opportunities for learners to engage with each other both in and out of the Nearpod, but when students are working in self-paced mode on their own time, there are few options outside of a collaborate board. Adding a Flipgrid, however, has all the benefits of a discussion board plus gives students the opportunity support and learn from each other, while being almost as good as live interaction.

This exciting development is sure to help educators take a step in the right direction toward creating effective, interactive lessons that help students learn and retain more in an interesting and engaging learning environment.

*Note: The HCT TWT team offers professional development courses that offer training in both Nearpod and Flipgrid.