Flip and Jamboard Replacements
- Rob Caldwell
- Justin Fleming
Microsoft Flip (formerly Flipgrid) will be discounted on September 30 and Google Jamboard will be discontinued October 1, 2024. If you have any activities or assignments in your courses that utilize these tools, you must replace them with alternative activities or assignments, as they will no longer function.
The following guide will help you know what alternatives you can use and how to download your data from these sites before they shut down.
Flipgrid Alternatives
Canvas Discussion Forums
For many Flipgrid activities, a simple discussion forum may suffice. This is the most straightforward and simple alternative. If you wish for students to post video replies, they can do so with the Media Upload button when replying to a post. Students can also post photos to forums.
Padlet
Padlet is a better alternative if you intend for students to share and comment on images, drawings, or videos. Padlet more closely resembles Flip and can be used for more advanced uses.
Students can post videos to Padlet by choosing the “more options” link when creating a post.
Students will then be presented with many options they can use to post different types of media, including videos created with their webcams or screen recordings of presentations on their screen.
NCSSM has a pro Padlet account you can access at ncssm.padlet.org, but you will need a teacher account first. The following guide explains how to request an account and get started.
Guide to Accessing and Using Padlet
Saving Flip Videos and uploading them to Padlet
Most people will likely not need to save old Flip assignments and their accompanying videos, but if you have a need to archive your Flip videos, you should do this prior to September 30. Follow this guide to downloading your Flip videos, and follow the directions to download all your videos at once as a zip file.
Then you can import all your videos to Flipgrid. Go to ncssm.padlet.org/flip-importer and follow the instructions to upload your zip file. Your Flip videos will be posted into Padlet. Padlet will create a board for each Flip discussion and every discussion video will be an individual post on that board.
Jamboard Alternatives
There are many collaborative whiteboard apps that can serve as a replacement for Jamboard. We recommend Lucidspark for most use cases, as it is fully integrated with Canvas, is relatively intuitive to use, and has free accounts for educators and students.
Lucidspark
We recommend you import any Jamboards you wish to save into Lucidspark before October 1, 2024.
Lucidspark’s biggest difference is that it uses an “infinite canvas,” which means the canvas expands as you draw or post to it and all interactions take place in one infinite canvas. For those who may prefer working in individual slides, we recommend Padlet Sandbox.
Padlet Sandbox
Padlet has a new feature called Padlet Sandbox that is very similar to Jamboard. If you already use Padlet, this may be a good replacement for Jamboard for many teachers due to its simplicity.
You can import Jamboards into Padlet Sandbox. However, we have found that importing Jamboards into Padlet Sandbox does not always work as well as importing into Lucidspark.