In part 1, we created a Flipgrid to facilitate student introductions as an ice breaking activity. In this part 2, we look at how to add the topic for students to respond to, how to share the grid, and demonstrate the experience from the student perspective.
Creating a topic

In order to add a topic to a grid, select the grid from your My Grids page. Having accessed your grid you will find, as luck would have it, there is already an icebreaking topic included! In order to change the features of the topic (some examples listed below) click the pencil icon:
- Length of student video responses (ranging between 15 seconds and 10 minutes).
- Enabling students to include an external link to OneNote or Google Docs.
- Ability for students to edit their recordings, like each other’s posts and respond to them.
- Enable moderation so that you can vet responses before they appear on the grid.
- Provide basic feedback or build and assign custom feedback rubrics that may be discipline dependent.


Sharing your grid with students
As stated in part 1, there are a number of methods in which to share your grids you can: email the flipcode to students, embed your grid in a label on a Moodle module using an embed code and the HTML button of the text editor, add embedding it into a Microsoft Teams discussion. For this example I will be embedding it into MS Teams.
To share your grid, go to My Grids and click the Share button on the desired grid.

On the resulting screens, click on the Microsoft Teams icon and select the desired team.




Recording a video to the grid
One of the easiest ways for students to engage with Flipgrid is through the use of a smartphone and the Flipgrid IOS (iPhone) and Android apps. Here I will demonstrate the process in a series of iPhone screenshots. (Please forgive the haggard appearance – it has been a long lockdown!).






Viewing submissions from the grid
Once the grid has received a few responses, you can check them out in an overall grid view. As you will see from the following screenshot the selfies can be as minimalist or as extrovert (within reason) as students see fit. Once accessed students can also like and record a video response to other’s posts.


Providing tutor responses to submissions to the grid
Having received responses from students, Flipgrid gives tutors various methods of providing feedback to them. To access these, you need to go to flipgrid.com, go to My Grids, select the desired grid and topic within it. You will then see submissions to the topic and by clicking these you will then arrive at a screen where you can record feedback and grade these submissions against topic criteria rubrics be they basic defaults or custom ones.



So as you can see Flipgrid could very well be a useful tool in engaging students at a distance to foster a vibrant academic community during what will be a very different start to the 2020-21 academic year!