Flipgrid as a discussion-based educational technology has taken the K-12 world by storm, but beyond its stickers, filters, and fancy fonts, the tool has a lot to offer to higher education as well. One such use is as an audio visual dictionary or demonstration tool. Think of it as Audio/Visual flashcards for important terms and concepts in class. What is Flipgrid? Flipgrid is a free, Microsoft-owned and powered educational tool for creating video-based discussions in the classroom. Instructors create “Groups” similar to a message board for their classes which can include one or more “Topic” threads. Typically, Instructors supply a prompt and students respond to the prompt and to each other within a “Topic”. It’s an asynchronous video discussion. Flipgrid allows instructors to link from several applications to support their prompts and responses including: Microsoft products, Google, YouTube, Vimeo, Kahoot!, Adobe Spark and more. But the system’s built-in audio and video editor should n...

Today more than ever we are competing for our students' attention within the world of unfolding events. We are instructing across a variety of platforms both asynchronous fully online, and synchronous, hybrid, virtual face-to-face. It can be difficult to establish our course as paramount in our students minds. However, with a little planning we can help students see the intersection of their studies within the world around them, rather than just in an academic silo disconnected from their daily life. We’ve all heard students whisper that the first day of school in any course is “syllabus day”, a day in which an instructor reads over their syllabus document and points out any pertinent information and answers students questions about the workload for the term. It’s no secret that some students admit to skipping what they believe will be a “syllabus day”, because after all, they can read the syllabus at home. Although fully online students will not have this synchronous meeting to di...

image link Traditionally, active learning has been associated with the face-to-face classroom, and many online courses focus on more traditional activities like watching videos and taking online quizzes. However, with the push for an online biology degree at the ASU School of Life Sciences , it is vital that techniques that focus on student-centered learning and collaborative/peer engagement be integrated into our new online courses. This webinar focused on taking activities that are used in a traditional classroom, and translating them into online activities with the use of web apps and some restructuring.  One of the examples shared included changing a typical minute paper written before students left a class, into an interactive video post, asking students to answer a prompt with their own videos using FlipGrid. Another example showed participants how Google slides and Padlet could replace post-it note activities that allow students to group, categorize and make conn...