In this video, I'll be showing you how to do a community building activity in Flipgrid
called You Wouldn't Know It. The purpose of this activity is to build class community
by helping students get to know each other on a deeper level. Hey everybody it's Sam
Kary with New EdTech Classroom, and on this channel we show you everything you need to
know about teaching with technology. Aside from just being engaging, one of the reasons
why it's a good idea to use technology to do community building activities at the beginning
of the year is because you'll not only help build community, but you'll also be teaching
students how to use the programs that you'll be using later in the year in a more fun,
interesting way. All right, let's jump in and check it out. All right so the first thing
that you'll want to do when you go into Flipgrid is go to Create a Group. And then here, you'll
give your group a name. I'll just call this one Demo Class, and then you'll be able to
choose how you want to bring the students into your class. Just for the sake of this
tutorial, I'm going to directly input students' emails. You can also import your Google Classroom,
or you can create student usernames. And so here, I'll just write in my students' email
addresses, and then I'll go down to this blue Create a Group button. So now I have a group,
which is essentially like a class. You can also set these up for small groups. And then
once I'm in that group, you'll see that there's another blue button that says Create a Topic.
And so a topic is essentially like an assignment and what I'll do here is click on Create a
Topic, and then I'm going to title this "You Wouldn't Know It." And in the instructions,
what I'm going to have students do is share something that other people wouldn't know
about them just by looking at them. Since this is an activity where we want students
to share something a little bit deeper about themselves, more intimate about their lives,
with the end goal of building community and connection with others, we should try to encourage
students to stay away from sharing something just like, "You wouldn't know it by looking
at me, but I like hamburgers." Now, something related to food that might be something that's
a little bit more intimate is, "You wouldn't know it by looking at me, but I don't eat
meat for these particular reasons..." And that might get into some more ethical reasons
or lifestyle choices. So you could still have students talk about food, but there are ways
that we can have them talk about a topic like food in a more intimate way than just sharing
a particular food that they like. After they have recorded a video sharing something that
other people wouldn't know about them by looking at them, they're going to watch at least five
of their peers' responses. Now, you can choose to have them watch more than this. I would
recommend that you have them watch at least five so that they're not just watching only
their friends' videos. And then what they'll do is also respond via video to their peers.
So here we'll have them use some sentence starters. It's up to you whether or not you
want to use these sentence starters, one could be, "Thanks for sharing about how you are
this thing or you like this particular thing." And then they could just share why that's
interesting. And then you can also have students try to hunt around and find a student that
they have something in common with based on what they share. So this sentence starter
would look more like, "I also (blank), it's really cool that you also do this thing or
that we share this in common." Okay, so you'll see here that when you're creating a Flipgrid
assignment, you have a lot of different options for the different types of media that you
can add as essentially a prompt, and for this particular type of activity I would highly
recommend that you use the Record a Video prompt. So what this is going to mean is that
you are going to record a video, essentially modeling what you would expect out of this
assignment. So you'll want to hit that Record button and then you'll get yourself all set
up, ready to record your video, and then hit that Record button in the middle. If you make
a mistake, you can always hit the Retake button to redo it, so you're not committed to your
first try. And then what you're going to do is record your video and you're just going
to model the process of sharing something about yourself that others wouldn't know by
looking at you. So let's take a look at what I recorded. "Hey everybody, it is Mr. Kary
here, great to meet you. And I'm going to share that something that you might not know
just from looking at me is that I come from a divorced household. So my parents divorced
when I was a year and a half, and that definitely had a significant impact on my childhood.
So I can't wait to meet the rest of you in your videos." By the way, if you're enjoying
this video, it's actually a part of a mini-course that I created called Community Building Activities
with Technology. That course and many others are going to be part of our upcoming New EdTech
Classroom Academy. You can check that out at newedtechclassroom.com/academy. So the
idea here is really that whatever bar you set for the type of sharing that students
would do will likely be the bar that students meet. So if all you model is, "I like this
type of food, you wouldn't know that by looking at me," that's what students are probably
going to be sharing. But if you do something a little bit deeper, more intimate, like I
did, sharing something about your family background, students are more likely to go to that place.
One idea is that you start off with easier prompts. You could redo the activity in a
couple of weeks and get students to share something that's maybe more personal if they
don't feel comfortable doing that right away, or if you don't think they're quite ready
for that right away. So after you're done recording your video, you're going to go down
and you're going to create your topic, and then you'll see that it's going to give you
a link that you could directly copy and share with students. Once you get this link, you
can post it to your learning management system, you could share it directly with students,
and you'll see that once they go to the link, they'll be prompted to log in with their email.
And then once they log in to Flipgrid, you'll see that they'll see your instructions. They'll
be able to watch your video that you recorded explaining and modeling the assignment, and
they can also record, of course, their own response to the prompt. Once a student records
their response, it's going to show up on your end and you can actually record a video back
to them by clicking on this red video icon in the comment section, or you can leave them
a text-based comment. And similarly, when a student logs in, that student is also going
to see some other responses that have been recorded by their peers. They can click on
them, watch them, and then they can leave their video response or their text-based comment.
When you're first doing an activity with Flipgrid, I would highly recommend that you give students
as much structure as possible. So tell them what sentence starters to use, tell them what
they should be recording, what's inappropriate to record, and moderate the different posts
that come through. And I would delete the ones that are not actually meeting the expectations
and communicate to the students why they need to redo it. That will help set the standard
for future activities that you do in Flipgrid. Now, there is an option to set moderation
so that you actually have to approve all the videos before they get posted. So if you're
at all concerned and you just want to make sure that you're able to moderate them, then
turn this on and you'll have to look at them before they actually get publicly posted onto
your board. All right, that is, You Wouldn't Know It in Flipgrid. This is an activity that
you can clearly do at the beginning of the year, but you can also do it later on in the
year as well once students get to know each other a little bit better and are ready to
share more intimate, more personal aspects of their lives. And it can be an effective,
fun activity for students to be able to discover things that they might actually have in common
with some of their peers to ultimately help you build community. Like I mentioned, this
video is also part of a mini-course I created called Community Building Activities with
Technology. To learn more about that course, as well as others that are going to be available
in our soon to be released New EdTech Classroom Academy, be sure to check out newedtechclassroom.com/academy.
And I can't wait to see you in the next video!