And finally... Flipgrid!

For those that follow me on #Twitter, you know I have been spending my summer learning about Flipgrid.  For those that don't know, Flipgrid is a platform that allows educators to post questions to students and allows those students to respond via video to both the teacher and each other.

Or at least on the most basic level, that is what it is. Truthfully there is far more power in this platform.  And that is what I have been learning over the summer - how to begin to incorporate Flipgrid into my classroom routines.  What has been wonderful is anytime I had a question, I could post it to #twitter and either someone in my #PLN or someone from Flipgrid itself would reply. In fact last night I wrote a direct message to Flipgrid about some settings and there was a reply to me within two hours!

I decided to start to incorporate this into my remediation class. This year I am teaching a class that focuses on Executive Function Skills and then applies those skills to writing. The students in this class have difficulties with organization, planning, prioritizing, noticing details... the very skills you need for both writing and to be a successful student.

On the first academic day of class, I gave the students a writing prompt: "You win $1 million. How do you spend the money?"  I told them I'd give them ten minutes and at the end of ten minutes they had to submit their response. They could not press 'post' until all 10 minutes were up and they weren't allowed to do anything else for those ten minutes.

After 10 minutes, they posted their writings. I gathered them into one document and as a class we analyzed them - not for anything more than word count. I gave the class the data and after some math, students calculated that the average length of a response was about 20 words, so as a class they wrote just about 2 words per minute.

We discussed the expected length of a 10 minute writing prompt as well as the outline.  At Marburn we use Keys to Literacy and talk about pre-writing as a major component of the writing process.  You can imagine the reactions: "Pre-writing doesn't work for me." "I just write my ideas and that's my sentences." "Why pre-write when I can just start writing!"  After some lessons about what pre-writing looks like, I introduced them to Flipgrid and told them we would be making a video to record their pre-writing. The prompt that day was, "What I did over the weekend."

Students took to the video format pretty well. I explained they would have up to one minute of time to introduce themselves and talk about their weekend in as much detail as they could. Later that day I was able to watch each video and comment back to each of them a summary of their video, with notes organized by day.  The next class period, I explained they would have three to five minutes to turn my notes into organized thoughts. Students took these teacher-generated comments and turned them into a top-down web. From there they did a two-minute written response to the original question.

What did they discover?  In those two minutes of writing, the average response was 32 words long meaning a student wrote an average of 16 words per minute.  One student was particularly stunned by the result: "So we wrote eight times more?" Yes - you wrote more words per minute AND more words overall even though you had 8 fewer minutes of 'writing' time. We talked about the amount of 'time on task' was exactly the same: 10 minutes. This broke down into 1 minute of a video, 3 minutes of summary (done by a teacher this time, with the knowledge that they would slowly add this skill in themselves), 4 minutes of building a top down web, and 2 minutes of writing.

It was a powerful lesson and one that I was so glad to present. Many of these students have not had an opportunity to see the 'why' behind the pre-writing. This process, with Flipgrid adding some technological support, gave them the justification.  I'm so excited to continue to explore Flipgrid and the educational applications it could provide!