Reading aloud to my kids was something I enjoyed doing every day. We would sit together, read through a story together and talk. We would journey through the various stories together, each taking away different things, sharing as we went. When we moved to virtual teaching online, the path of remote learning looked like it would take away this time.
I was determined to find a way for us to share this time together even though we are apart and Flipgrid was the perfect platform to do this in. The multiple features and tools within the Flipgrid platform make read aloud possible and still give us a space for discussions during this time of asynchronous learning.
We continue our reading daily so after dividing the book up into daily sections, I recorded myself reading. Now there are two ways to do this. 1) Record directly into Flipgrid and then put the video as your Topic focus. This will house the read aloud portion in the thumbnail of the topic. You can record up to 10 minutes in one video which makes it much easier to read a nice portion of your story. 2) The other option is to record the reading video in another platform and then attach to the Topic. This is what I did. I chose not to use the Topic focus for my actual read aloud because I like to use my Topic focus as a place to start the actual discussion.
In addition to starting the discussion within my Topic video, I also wrote them out in the prompt portion of the Topic. I like to use emojis to make the different steps stand out. Emojicopy.com is a great place to find, copy and paste emojis for this. The Tip feature is also great to help my different classes know which read aloud was for them, but you can use this to give recording hints, a reminder for discussion and much more!
Finally, many miss the link feature within the Topic prompt. This is where I linked my read aloud. The students would click there, be taken to a safe search window where they would watch me read the book, and then they would participate in our discussion back on Flipgrid. You can also link the read aloud as one of the 9 Topic attachments you can have. For more information on how to attach links as Topic attachments check out this YouTube tutorial.
You can choose to moderate videos before they appear, but I chose to just participate with the students’ discussions rather than moderating beforehand. Finally, once I had the first day’s Topic created, I used the Duplicate Topic feature to duplicate the entire Topic.
I then went in and changed out the link for listening, rerecorded a new direction video and changed out the prompt in the directions. This was a HUGE time saver since I had 5 to do each week for both classes. I could keep the same emoji decorations, list of directions etc. and just change out the parts that were different each day. (read aloud video, discussion prompt)
Our read aloud ended last week and I thought the kids would be happy to have one less thing to do. Completely the opposite! They are asking when the next book will be started and what we will be reading! I can’t wait to continue this time of reading and discussion while we are #remotelearning and I am thankful to have a platform like Flipgrid to facilitate this time with my students.
-K 👗
For more #interACTIVE lesson ideas using Flipgrid, check out our book The InterACTIVE Class on Amazon!
