Elementary teachers, are you looking to liven up your Clever Teacher Announcements? Consider using Flipgrid Shorts to create a video message for students with your announcement of the day. Not only will you be building community and keeping students engaged, but you can use the whiteboard feature to include animations or written directions to your video message as an important part of asynchronous instruction. The best part is, ISD teachers already have a Flipgrid Educator account through Microsoft!
First, Create a Flipgrid Short
Once in your Flipgrid Educator account, look to the top of your screen for “Shorts.” Shorts are only available to educators (not students). Any Shorts that you have previously recorded will show up in this tab, as well as a button to create a new Short.
A Short can be up to ten minutes, and the possibilities are endless. You can record video, include the interactive whiteboard to model for students or provide directions, and you can add emojis! Many teachers are using the whiteboard feature of Flipgrid Shorts to read-aloud for students, annotate a sample document, model a math concept, and send important announcements!
To use the whiteboard feature, upload a background or begin from scratch, and annotate the whiteboard as desired. Then, “clear” the annotations with the back arrow. Begin your recording, and talk through your annotations as you click “re-do” (forward arrow) which will bring back your annotations one-by-one. Yes, it seems backwards, but it works! Check out my sample Short by clicking the image below.
Read more about Flipgrid Shorts in this previous post.
Second, Share Your Short in a Clever Announcement
The best part about a Flipgrid Short is that it is shared with a simple link! This link can be shared directly to your Clever page, either by adding a link to the page itself or in an Announcement, if it is not something that you need to keep.
To share a link to a Clever Announcement, simply type in the link (or copy and paste) and Clever will automatically turn this into a hyperlink that students can click on. Voila! Your Clever announcements will be jazzed up like never before!
Read more about Clever Announcements here.