Over the summer, Flipgrid made an announcement that they were implementing a new feature with their product called Mixtapes. At first, I really didn’t process what this meant. I had to play around with it before the aha moment kicked in.
Mixtapes allows the teacher to grab any flipgrid response from any topic and add it to a ‘tape’. The teacher is able to grab a response from any grid as well. What a brilliant idea from the creators of Flipgrid as the possibilities are endless with how a teacher can implement mixtapes. By curating all responses in a mixtape, anyone that has the link can view all responses, one after the other.
Mrs. DeAngelis, a high school Spanish Teacher, and I were talking about how she could use Mixtapes to curate student responses throughout the semester for parent conferences. Now that we live in a digital age, students are not necessarily going home opening up Google Classroom to show their parents what they have produced, made, or learned. Gone are the days of putting something on the refrigerator. Mixtapes can now help open the window to verbal student work.
Why MixTapes?
- Teachers are able to curate responses to show up in a particular order.
- Each MixTape has its own link which can be sent out via Google Classroom or through an email.
- Means to show exemplar examples for future classes
- Means for students to view other student work without having to be invited to a different class grid.
The Process
Mrs. DeAngelis first determined which parents were attending parent/teacher conferences. Then, she went into the MixTapes tab of Flipgrid to create x number of student MixTapes. She used the first name of each student as the name of the tape. Below is a gif showing you how to create a mixtape in Flipgrid.
After all mixtapes were created, she was then able to go into topics from the past two months to curate all responses. Below is an example of how to add a student response to a mixtape.
NOTE: To streamline the process, while you are in a topic, add the student responses to each students mixtape. In other words, don’t add all of student 1’s responses to his/her mixtape first and then move on to the next student. This will consist of you clicking too many times and wasting time.
I am happy for Mrs. DeAngelis that mixtapes proved helpful for her conferences with parents. The ease of being able to quickly play a mixtape and go through examples of work helped show evidence of student performance. Now that Mrs. DeAngelis knows how this works, she is going to take it to the next level. Each month, she chooses two families to email from a class sharing good information about son/daughter. She will now also include a link to a mixtape of that particular students’ work. Just another way to share the learning.
There are obviously many other ways by which mixtapes can be used. If you would like to talk more about how this can be used in your classes, you know where to find me.
And that is my Spiel…
Craig M Sheil 