Let's work together!

 

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According to the Oxford learner`s dictionary, collaboration is the act of working with another person or group of people to create or produce something. Many people believe that we learn better when we work together with someone, and I totally agree with this belief. Making our students to work together with their classmates, in pairs or in groups or even online, may facilitate their learning process. They can help and learn from each other as well as becoming less dependant on the teacher. In this post, I intend to introduce an application that has great potential to be used with our students when it comes to making them to collaborate and learn from each other.

The Flip platform

Flip is a video discussion platform where you can create groups and add different discussion topics to each group. It is a very powerful tool when we need to involve our students in virtual discussions about a specific topic. Flip is very user-friendly and it is FREE. In addition, you can create as many topics and groups as you wish. You can use Flip's website or you can download the app and use it in your cell phone or tablet.

You can access the Flip platform here

How to use the Flip platform

First, you need to create a free account and log in. After doing that, you have to create a group. It is very simple. All you need to do is to click on the "group" button and a new group will be added to your dashboard. Your "group(s)" is/are the place(s) where you will be posting the topics of your discussions, activitivies or collaborative tasks. You can introduce a discussion topic or an activity there, for example,  and tell your students to come up with their answers and opinions on the topics and activities proposed.

How do I use it with my students?

I use Flip with my students in many different ways - giving and receiving feedback, promoting speaking activities, group discussions, study groups and fostering teamwork. 

Regarding the teaching of the four language skills, I woud be very wrong if I said we could only use it to promote speaking activities. Actually, you can use it to work with all the four skills. It all depends on your level of creativity and your lesson goals. However, in my opinion, it works best with speaking-based activities.

I would say that all the features available in the Flip platform make it really attractive for our students to use it. They can add backgrounds to their videos, drawings, texts, emojis and so on. Whenever I prepare any activity using Flip, my students get very excited about it and really engage themselves in the activities. It works pretty well with teenagers and adults. 

Things to consider before using Flip

1. The main interactions between students using Flip occur through short videos, so if your students are a bit shy to show their faces or record themselves speaking, it could be a problem for you to use it with them. 

2. There is not a virtual whiteboard or sth similar to allow students to share written texts or files in the groups. Although they can comment on each other's videos individually, I think it would be useful if they could offer an extra collaborative space inside the groups so that eveyone could share things or post comments at one place only. 

Let's get down to business!

I have been giving a teacher training course to EFL teachers who are interested in working with young learners. It has been three weeks now and this past week we were talking about social and emotional learning. I decided to create a very simple collaborative task for my students by using the Flip platform. I created a topic called "When do kids feel sad?" and asked for their help to answer this question. This worked as a preparation task for the class that would take place in that week. I used it to brainstorm some ideas from my students and make them collaborate with each other. Here's the result:

That's all for today, guys. See you on the next post! 😁