Connecting, Collaborating, Creating

Written by: Alli Pryor, Monica Champagne and Kelly Skillingberg

This year, Pilar Castro-Zena joined the Creativity and Innovation Personal Learning Network (PLN). Not long ago, she attended a coffee meet up organized by her PLN to connect and chat with other educators. At the meet up, she had a conversation with DLC, Alli Pryor about a project her learners were working on using design thinking to create toys from idea to prototype. One key piece of the project was to gather market feedback from the target age groups for which the toys were designed.

Since Alli is a DLC for Cottonwood Creek and Lee Elementary, a beautiful idea was born from the conversation. They wondered, how could we make a connection between the learners in Pilar’s class to other CISD learners within the target age range? Alli reached out to us and both of her campuses so their kindergarteners could test the toys for product market research in order to provide feedback to Pilar’s engineering learners.

From there the idea flourished. In a true partnership between DLCs and educators, we were able to design a process to make it easy for the learners to record feedback using Flipgrid. The CHS learners created a commercial video and posted it to a Flipgrid topic. The kindergarteners would watch the commercial video, play with the toys, and provide feedback through a video reply of their own and the use of the emoji icons located at the bottom using the key below. 

The DLCs loaded up the toy prototypes and delivered them to Cottonwood Creek Elementary, where the kindergarteners took turns playing with the toys and providing feedback via Flipgrid. Take a look at some of the feedback they have been able to provide:

When introducing the project to the kindergarteners, we quickly learned that they were even savvier than we had hoped. “That’s Flipgrid!” they cried. “We love Flipgrid!” Beyond that the main question they had were “When do we get to PLAY?” After talking through key vocabulary, in addition to talking through the purpose and how to provide feedback, they did just that - played. Take a look at this video made by Stacey Harris that illustrates the process on the Kindergarten side.

https://twitter.com/WaytoBeK3/status/981622067878678528

After a week of toy testing at CCE, the next stop for the toys will be the Purple house kindergarten classes at Lee. All because of a coffee conversation, multiple learners are now connected virtually!

What connections can you make using Flipgrid?

If you are interested in making connections or utilizing Flipgrid in your classroom, we are here to support you in the design and implementation of your lessons. Feel free to leave a comment below or contact us for more information on how we can support you in the design and implementation of your learning experiences.