One of the latest trends in student engagement is to create audiovisual interaction between teachers and learners with Flipgrid. The innovative video-sharing platform is enhancing classroom discussions all over the world.

Flipgrid is super simple yet highly powerful. Teachers come up with a topic, record a video prompt, and post it to a grid that only those granted access can view. Students then upload their own video responses to the teacher’s topic and their classmates’ posts.

Users can capture and upload their video comments with smartphones, tablets, and laptops. But if educators and their students want to take Flipgrid to a whole new level of interaction, connecting a USB visualizer (document camera) to a laptop could be the best choice.

Visualizer Versatility

The Flipgrid app conveniently accesses your laptop or smartphone’s built-in camera, so you may be wondering why you should go to the trouble of connecting your visualizer. A quick look at the advantages a visualizer holds over a webcam or smartphone should convince you.

A visualizer is perfect for showing documents or images, step-by-step processes, and the details on 3D objects, holding the camera steady and suspending it at a wide range of angles. While you can certainly use other types of cameras for displaying these things in a video prompt, it’s probably going to be shaky, shot from a subpar angle, or just straight-up impossible. What’s more, a good visualizer will offer 4K quality, a high-powered zoom, and one-touch auto focusing.

Imagine trying to make a video of a science experiment or a craft project while holding a cellphone with one hand or trying to bend your laptop screen to get the camera to a position that kind of picks up all the action. Even if you draft a student as a camera operator, it will be hard for him or her to find the right angle and hold the cellphone steady. Now picture making the same video using the AVerVision M15-13M, with the camera’s mechanical arm and adjustable camera head positioned to capture from the perfect perspective and leaving both your hands free to work, the zoom at just the right distance and ready to change at the touch of a button, and beautiful 4K clarity capturing the entire process. With such capabilities at your fingertips, the possibilities for Flipgrid are pretty much endless.

Interesting Ideas

Now that we’ve convinced you to try out your visualizer with Flipgrid, it's only fair that we share some ideas for how you can use this device to take advantage of the platform’s features—like creating MixTapes, Guest Mode Topics, and Flipgrid AR. If you’re using the AVerVision M15-13M, you can either connect it to your laptop as a USB camera, or you can use AVerTouch software to capture video with your tablet and upload it to the cloud and then to Flipgrid.

Now, on to the ideas:

      • Dissect a frog under your visualizer, post the video, and have students share their thoughts and pose questions in video replies.
      • Make a video of a process done incorrectly, say, a comically failed science experiment. Then, ask students to reply with their ideas about what went wrong.
      • Create a video scavenger hunt for students, like Flipgrid experts suggest. A visualizer is perfect for this, because it will hold the camera in place on the list while you explain the rules.
      • Use the AVerVision M15-13M to make a video teaching a new shading technique for art class. Students can then use free time throughout the week to reply with their own visualizer videos attempting the new skill, and you can curate a MixTape with the most original responses.
      • Teach your students to write Chinese characters with traditional brush and ink calligraphy in your foreign language class. Have students write the characters under a visualizer, post the videos to Flipgrid, and then open the grid with Guest Mode, and share it with parents. Proud moms and dads can post encouraging replies.
      • Use a visualizer to create videos of step-by-step math problems, visual representations of math word problems, and more. Fligrid produces QR codes for all your videos, and you can include them on AR homework handouts. This gives students access to a grid full of help from you and their peers.

There are literally millions of ways you can use your AVer USB plug-and-play visualizer to get even more out of Flipgrid or any of your other favorite educational apps. Click below to find the visualizer that will best match your Flipgrid needs.

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