Flipgrid

Flipgrid is a free app and platform that allows students to record short video responses. These videos are usually reflections or responses to specific topics/prompts asked by their teachers. This study aims to deepen the potentiality and effectiveness of Flipgrid in virtual learning environments for university students. Moreover, it aims to understand whether such a platform is really beneficial for developing reflective skills, meets students interests and gets their approval. To deepen these issues, we have analyzed the results of a case study conducted at the University of Rome Foro Italico, Italy, where Flipgrid was used as a support for delivering a course on education and European values and getting students to reflect in a deeper way on the topics and issues entailed. The data were collected through three principal phases. In the first one, within the framework of an exploratory study, a survey questionnaire containing items based on the Likert scale was administered to a general sample of University of Rome Foro Italico students. In the following phase, a focus group was conducted with a small group of students attending the course mentioned above, and in the third one, the students from the course were in-depth interviewed. The data were processed by statistical and text analysis software. The data were then interpreted and compared. The data results allowed us to obtain information and a map to understand the Flipgrid app/platform's effectiveness. From the data collected, at the end of the study, we were able to sketch a model for using the new app in a way so that it can help students develop reflective skills in e-learning in the most effective way.

The shift from in-person to remote learning has have led to crisis management. Teachers find it more challenging as content designing and presentation have to undergo drastic change. Though many face-to-face methodologies could be adapted in the online context, Yet, "one size fits all approach" cannot be standardized in remote learning setups. The critical challenge in this 'new era' is to make the learners motivated, productive, and responsible. The study aims to find the impact of four digital tools: Discussion Forums, Kahoot, Padlet, and FlipGrid in fostering 21stcentury skills and identify the existing gaps between Remote Learning and instructional activities in the EFL context. The study adopts a quantitative approach. First, it tries to examine the utilization of the digital learning tools under Blackboard by the faculty at the Department of English at Prince Sattam University and find out the impact of digital tools in fostering 21 st-century skills on the undergraduate students pursuing level six. From the results of the study, it is evident that digital learning tools empower learners. The study recommends significant changes in the pedagogies. Finally, the study suggests rubrics be taken into consideration while choosing digital tools to foster 21 st century skills.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced colleges and universities to move all in-person courses to a remote or online learning format. As a result, many faculty, including teacher educators , opted to transition their courses to live synchronous web meetings using web conferencing tools like Zoom. Despite benefits of synchronous communication, there are constraints with the use and overuse of synchronous live meetings (which many teacher educators ended up experiencing during the pandemic). In this paper, we describe the experiences of how four different faculty, at four different universities, used asynchronous video to maintain connection and engagement during the COVID-19 pandemic. We conclude with implications for practice and future research.

Objectives
The broader study behind this paper examines Ontario’s new teacher-education policy mandating that all teacher candidates learn to support English Learners (ELs). However, this category of “English Learner” is defined broadly and includes vastly diverse experiences and identities. Of the 2 million K-12 students in Ontario, about one quarter are identified as ELs with 63% of elementary schools and 58% of secondary schools reporting ELs in the student body (People for Education, 2017). This continuum of ELs includes Metis, Inuit and First Nations students living in remote locations and experiencing chronic marginalization, Franco-Ontarians who attend French-language schools, refugees with significant gaps in their education, immigrant students who have begun to learn English at school in their country of origin, as well as secondary students in Canada on a study visa. We have undertaken to develop linguistic portraits with this very diverse group of ELs to determine whether Ontario’s teacher education policy is consistent with the diversity, strengths, and needs of ELs.

Theoretical Framework
Freire’s (1970) Humanizing Pedagogy is a frame for Cummins’ (2009) Transformative Multiliteracies Pedagogy (TMP) and the Literacy Expertise Framework (LEF) which inform our development of linguistic portraits with diverse ELs. Humanizing Pedagogy emphasizes the need for transformative educational experiences in which students’ identities and experiences are central. TMP and LEF emphasize ELs’ prior knowledge and the need to involve them in cognitively engaging activities leading to knowledge construction and dialogue via art and technology, as well as how teachers/mentors can accomplish this by focusing on meaning, language and use (Cummins, 2009; Cummins et al., 2015).

Methods & Participants
Using participatory action research (PAR) and Flipgrid, a video discussion app, we collaborated with over 20 ELs aged 10-20 years to create multimedia profiles of their full linguistic repertoires, their beliefs and attitudes about the languages they speak, and what needs they have at home, in the community, and at school to maintain their languages. PAR helped us to rethink researcher positionality with respect to youth who are marginalized. We followed McCarty, Wyman and Nicholas (2014) in viewing EL youth not merely as objects of policy, but also as policy-makers themselves. We have used maximum variation sampling (Merriam, 1998) to reflect the vast diversity among English learners in Ontario.

Findings
A content analysis of the linguistic portraits reveals the uniqueness of each EL in terms of how they use the various languages in their repertoire across the multiple worlds in which they live. In fact, these portraits have become a rich resource for teacher educators and classroom teachers, in that they provide evidence of the complexity of the students who are categorized as ELs.

Significance
Our study is significant as it reveals the disconnect that can exist between policy and reality. In this case, the linguistic profiles of diverse ELs are very different from the taxonomy of ELs on which the policy is based.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced colleges and universities to move all in-person courses to a remote or online learning format. As a result, many faculty, including teacher educators, opted to transition their courses to live synchronous web meetings using web conferencing tools like Zoom. Despite benefits of synchronous communication, there are constraints with the use and overuse of synchronous live meetings (which many teacher educators ended up experiencing during the pandemic). In this paper, we describe the experiences of how four different faculty, at four different universities, used asynchronous video to maintain connection and engagement during the COVID-19 pandemic. We conclude with implications for practice and future research.

The multimedia portraits presented in this symposium were created with diverse English learners (ELs) and are linked to two research studies. One study explores aspects of the social and academic integration of refugee students through the perspectives of settlement workers, educators, refugee parents as well as the refugee children and youth themselves. Refugee students took part in workshops where they created multimedia products focussed on their linguistic and cultural identities while providing insights on their integration in Ontario. The other study examines Ontario's 2015 policy mandating that all teacher candidates learn to support ELs. As this category of "English learner" is defined broadly and includes vastly diverse experiences and identities, we developed linguistic portraits with this heterogeneous group of ELs to determine whether Ontario's teacher education policy is consistent with the diversity, strengths, and needs of ELs. In this symposium, the process involved in the creation of the portraits is described. Excerpts from the video portraits are shared as illustrations of the thematic and linguistic analyses performed. The session concludes with the audience providing video responses to the multimedia artifacts produced by English learners using the same interface as used by the participants in both studies.

Pembelajaran bahasa asing telah diperkenalkan sejak di bangku sekolah lagi. Ia dilihat sangat penting sebagai persediaan pelajar ke institusi pengajian tinggi. Dikatakan bahasa asing mampu meningkatkan kebolehpasaran pelajar selepas bergelar graduan. Pelbagai teknik diperkenalkan bagi menghasilkan proses pengajaran dan pembelajaran yang efisyen dan menarik. Oleh itu e-Pembelajaran dikatakan sudah mula mendapat tempat dan menjadi pilihan di kalangan para pengajar kini di samping mampu meningkatkan kualiti pengajaran dan pembelajaran sejajar dengan kemajuan teknologi global. Tujuan kajian ini adalah bagi melihat sejauh mana penggunaan aplikasi FLIPGRID mampu meningkatkan tahap kefahaman dan keyakinan komunikasi pelajar terhadap bahasa asing yang mereka pelajari. Kajian telah dijalankan di sebuah sekolah antarabangsa di Selangor yang telah menawarkan Bahasa Melayu, Arab, Perancis dan Mandarin sebagai bahasa asing. Seramai 10 orang pelajar dan 4 orang guru telah dipilih sebagai responden dengan menggunakan kaedah pemerhatian dan soal selidik. Dapatan kajian yang positif telah ditunjukkan oleh responden yang terlibat. Diharap penggunaan aplikasi ini dapat diteruskan untuk melahirkan pelajar hebat yang mampu bertutur dalam pelbagai bahasa dengan baik.

The pandemic has made it clearer than ever that health issues impact education and that schools play a key role in supporting the wellbeing of learners. As emotion and cognition are interconnected, educators should use educational strategies that generate positive emotions so that learning is associated with pleasure. The aim of this study was to investigate if a warm-up activity with Flipgrid could contribute to creating a positive learning environment in the online classroom in times of Covid-19. Flipgrid is a free platform that allows video-based asynchronous discussion. It fosters educator-student contact, cooperation among learners, active-learning techniques and student engagement. A total of 37 MA students participated in the study. Informants were selected by non-probabilistic sampling. The data collection strategies were observation during the Flipgrid warm-up activity, a Moodle survey, and the institution student satisfaction survey. Students' engagement was high and their attitude was mostly positive or neutral. The warm-up was highly rated in terms of creating a positive learning environment by the participants, and informants wrote positive remarks about their experience using the platform. The results suggest that a warm-up activity with Flipgrid is an effective educational strategy to generate positive emotions during the pandemic. Finally, the limitations of the study are addressed, and some directions for future research are proposed.