Iron Chef with a Dash of Flipgrid for Distance Learning

One of my favorite Eduprotocols is Iron Chef. It's a great way to jigsaw, get students analyzing text, build slides and get all students to present all in one activity. When students present Iron Chef, students become active listeners as they hear the same topics repeated by their peers throughout. This gives them the opportunity to add to their notes as new tidbits and ideas may be added each time a topic gets repeated. 

In distance learning, Iron Chef can be difficult to facilitate. After many iterations of distance learning Iron Chef, I think I may have found a convenient method for teachers. 

The first step is to create a topic on Flipgrid for students to "present" their slides. Students now can screencast on Flipgrid using the option to screen record. Click here to read my past blog post on screencasting with Flipgrid. The second step is to create a Google Slides template you want students to use for building their Iron Chef slide. 

Once you've created the Flipgrid topic and Slides template, go to Classwork in Google Classroom and set up an assignment. Add the link to Flipgrid and the Slides template. For permissions on the Slides template, set it to Make a copy for each student. Be sure each student knows what their assigned reading is.

The screenshot below show how teachers set up the activity. If the image on this post is too small, click here for a larger view.

When students open the assignment, they will open the Slides first and build their slides. Give them 10-15 minutes, in a synchronous lesson, to do their assigned reading and build their Slides. When the 10-15 minutes is up, have them go to the Flipgrid link and screen record their Slides presentation.

Normally, students would present live to the whole class. That can be done, but a hurdle that often comes up is issues with students' microphones on Zoom or Google Meet.  Another issue is time constraints. If the students present their slides on Flipgrid, the teacher can present all the video presentations whole class synchronously (time permitting) or it can bleed over into asynchronous work where students watch their peers' presentations on their own time and take notes.

When students open the Flipgrid link, they will click the options button.

After clicking the options button, they will click Record screen.

When the Capture your screen window appears, they will click Start screen recording. There will be a short countdown before the recording begins. They will click over to the tab where there slides are and record their presentation. When finished, they click back to the Flipgrid tab and click Stop recording. From there, they follow the same steps as they normally would for reviewing and finishing a Flipgrid video.

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My book, The Complete EdTech Coach: An Organic Approach to Digital Learning, co-authored with my wife Katherine Goyette is due out in October/November of 2020. It will be published by Dave Burgess Publishing. Keep an eye out on this blog and on social media. Be sure to follow the hashtag #OrganicEdTech and #CVTechTalk for updates.