For any student or teacher in the Frisco ISD Virtual Academy, when it comes to learning and teaching, things tend to be different than what most are used to. For students in medical terminology, that means presenting their projects using Flipgrid as a new method of teaching.

Heritage High School teacher, Kari Lark, hopes students will become an expert on at least one disease by researching facts about the disease on their own terms.

“Students have to research one disease from each unit in Med Term,” Lark said. “They have to tell me the origin of the disease name, signs and symptoms of the disease, how it is diagnosed, treated and what the usual prognosis for that disease is. I am hoping that students will become the “expert” on at least one disease and the diagnosis and treatments associated with that disease, per unit.”

Freshman, Meghana Dasari, believes Flipgrid is a better way of presenting topics as opposed to the regular way as you can fix your mistakes by re-recording rather than losing points for messing up in a live presentation.

“I found using Flipgrid as an interesting new way to submit projects as well as a new way to give presentations,” Dasari said. “I would say using Flipgrid is a better way of presenting information in projects simply because you can re-record your video if you mess up something instead of getting total points docked for live mistakes. Right now, I would definitely try this way of learning about something again, as researching information about different diseases that I am interested in instead of getting assigned a topic is more fun to do.”

Lark reckons it is better for the students to tell her what they know, rather than having to ask students questions over only a few questions that don’t cover all of the topics.

“I feel that having students tell me what they know, rather than me asking random questions, is sometimes a better gauge of their knowledge of a unit. I hope that students will retain more of what they are learning in Med Term to take with them into other classes.”

However, preferring the live presentations over Flipgrids freshman Vihaan Lalwani believes that writing out information is more efficient than just making videos about it.“I chose Tetany as my disease/condition for the project because I felt that it was a condition that occurs often in the muscular system,” Lalwani said. “I felt that Flipgrids were much better than the class presentation because I can redo the video as many times as I want, as compared to the classroom, where I have one try. Although, I would not do this again because I feel that writing out your information is much more efficient and that making videos in a class that has no requirements for presentation just is strange to me.”