Retrieval Practice with Flipgrid

petutor

I recently bought the excellent book by Kate Jones called Retrieval Practice. This book is really accessible and is packed with great ideas about how to promote retrieval practice in your classroom. If you have not yet picked up a copy of this book, I highly recommend it and as an added bonus, it is very affordable.

Reading through Kate’s book got me thinking about how I could support my students through technology with their retrieval practice and I came up with the idea of linking a retrieval practice task with Flipgrid which would enable my students to access model answers after they had attempted to answer the question for themselves.

As Kate says in her book, the key concept of retrieval practice is about getting information out of the students. It is the process of trying hard to remember which ultimately aids the students. And so it is important that students are not given the opportunity to access the answers before they have attempted the questions. It’s also really important that the students grapple with the questions and try hard to retrieve the information required without using any notes or any material that will assist them.

So this is what I did.

Firstly, I made a retrieval practice exercise which included a set of 12 questions based upon content and material that we had recently studied. I created the document below using PowerPoint. The QR codes that you can see in the image came later.

Next I had to create the QR codes and this is where Flipgrid comes in.

I hopped over to my account in Flipgrid and created a number of topics as you can see from the image below.

In each topic I recorded a video which explained the model answer to each of the retrieval practice questions.

But instead of the students seeing my face and me explaining the model answer, I decided that I would put the question onto the video screen so that the students were able to see the question whilst they were hearing the model answer.

I thought this was a good idea because it enables the students to see the question and hear how I was often referring back to the question when providing the answer. This way I was not only providing an answer, I was also modelling how to construct the answer based upon what the question was asking of me.

Using the snip tool in Windows 10, I snipped an image of each of the questions from the PowerPoint slide and saved them.

Then, after I had recorded my video on Flipgrid, I used the ‘Add Custom Sticker’ function to put the question onto the video screen, as in the images below. I then made the rest of the background white by using the whiteboard function.

Once I had made the video and entered the white background with the question on the screen as a sticker, I then followed the usual procedure in Flipgrid and created my video.

Then I downloaded the QR code that is automatically generated by Flipgrid and I cropped it a little bit, before saving it as an image.

Next, I then inserted each of the QR codes onto the slide, resized them, placed them in the corresponding position with the relevant question, aligned them using the alignment tool and that was job done!

I printed the PowerPoint slide out a number of times to use in my lesson and I also inserted a PDF version into OneNote and distributed the page to my students, which means that they can now access this retrieval practice exercise whenever they want to.