What’s new with Flocabulary: Back to school 2024
With the return to school, this summer and fall comes the crunch of lesson planning and hunting for resources to support your instruction and engage students. At Flocabulary, we’ve been hard at work to make the lesson planning process seamless and help set you up for success with our latest product release: Playlists…including AI-Powered Playlists! Read on to learn about how this new feature will change the game in creating meaningful learning moments in your classroom.
Watch the video below to get an inside look into Flocabulary’s Playlists!
New to Flocabulary? Teachers can sign up for a trial to access our lesson videos and assessment activities. Administrators can get in touch with us to learn more about unlocking the full power of Flocabulary through Flocabulary Plus.
What’s new with Flocabulary: Back to school 2024
What are Playlists?
Playlists enable teachers to curate a set of Flocabulary videos to support an entire instructional unit and to extend learning throughout the school day. You can curate your own playlists by hand or using AI, as well as choose from a library of Playlists curated by the Flocabulary team. The full Playlist library and AI capabilities are available to Flocabulary Plus users, while users with Lite licenses will be able to curate Playlists manually and access a selection of Playlists from the Flocabulary library. All Playlists, whether created by you or the Flocabulary team, will let you queue up a list of Flocabulary songs to play back to back—a frequent request from teachers who want to include Flocabulary in their classroom during independent work, transition time, and more moments beyond direct instruction!
How do Flocabulary Playlists work?
Easily plan how you will use Flocabulary throughout an instructional unit by creating a playlist tailored to the needs of your class. Are you teaching a unit on text structure and want to make a playlist to support it? Click “Playlists” on the top navigation and give your Playlist a name. Optionally, include your learning objectives and you’re ready to create! Search for the topic you’re teaching or browse our topic areas to find relevant lessons, and click to add them to your Playlist.
In the example below, we’ve added two Flocabulary lessons that provide an overview of the five main informational text structures and Flocabulary’s targeted lessons about each one. To find lessons, you can also browse our recommendations, popular lessons, and any lessons you’ve already favorited. The Flocabulary team is constantly publishing new lessons, so if you come across a new lesson you want to include in your playlist, you can always add it later.
Once you’ve added lessons to your Playlist, you can use it as a reference when lesson planning over the course of a unit. Or, click “Play” at any time to set the songs to play back to back. You can view the lyrics while listening to the playlist and skip songs during playback. You can also disable the autoplay feature if you’d like to discuss the lessons between playing them.
Save time planning and creating with AI-Powered Playlists
Teachers can curate full Playlists that align with their scope and sequence or unit plans with just a click, using our AI Playlist generator.* Input a prompt like “9th-grade biology, cells” or paste in part of your unit plan, click, and voilà: a custom playlist aligned to your unit, ready to use. No need to search for and bookmark individual lessons—our AI Playlist generator makes unit planning fast and efficient. Once you save an AI-Powered Playlist, you can always add or remove lessons manually. Be sure to use the thumbs-up and down buttons to send us feedback so that we can improve our model!
*This update is only available to Flocabulary Plus users. Schedule a call to learn more.
Go for our Flocabulary-curated Playlists
Get inspired to create your own playlists by checking out playlists curated by the Flocabulary team. These playlists were created to align with common instructional topics and sequences and include some of the Flocab team’s favorite lessons. You’ll find Playlists across grades and subjects. Whether it’s providing direct instruction on an English Language Arts (ELA) topic followed by example texts (Genre Study: Poetry), highlighting ways students and teachers can develop a shared classroom community (Our Classroom Community), or covering a topic from multiple angles (The Cold War Era), each playlist is grounded in standards and ordered in a deliberate way. As with AI-Powered Playlists, you can save a Flocabulary team-curated playlist and then modify the lessons included.
How can I use Playlists?
Curate Playlists to teach with Flocabulary throughout your unit to review concepts before standardized testing, curate cross-curricular resources, or collect your class’s favorite Flocabulary videos. Are you a grade-level lead or instructional coach? You can curate Playlists for your team’s scope and sequence. Flocabulary users with Teacher accounts can also share Playlists. Teachers can share their own (or someone else’s) playlists as long as they’re Public, and allow their colleagues to use them as is, or save and modify them afterwards. Playlists cannot be assigned to students.
With our autoplay feature, you can set the Playlist to play during students’ independent work time, centers, transition time, brain breaks—any time you’d typically use music in your classroom! Flocabulary Playlists extend the learning, making even moments between your lessons educational. Create a playlist to teach a unit like operations with integers, and then play it to help students review for the unit test. Or, treat your class to a playlist-driven Flocabulary dance party after they reach a learning goal! How would you use Playlists in your classroom? Write to us at [email protected] and let us know.
Start using Playlists today!
Flocabulary takes our users’ feedback seriously—you know best what would benefit your instruction and engage your students. We’re thrilled to be able to release this frequently requested feature and enable teachers to easily curate Flocabulary resources to support their units of instruction. We can’t wait to see how you use Playlists to bring the joy of Flocabulary to your classroom again and again.
New to Flocabulary? Teachers can sign up for a trial to access our lesson videos and assessment activities. Administrators can get in touch with us to learn more about unlocking the full power of Flocabulary through Flocabulary Plus.