Nearpod




Nearpod is an application that allows teachers to create interactive lessons and engage students. Nearpod allows students to write, draw, and type on their own devices and teachers to see what students are working on. It takes away from the traditional “chalk and talk” style of teaching and incorporates discussion and true engagement in the classroom. As part of Danielson’s framework of teaching, assessment and discussion are two components that NYC schools have deemed two of the most important. So, having Nearpod meet these two components is a huge positive for teachers.

I like that there are two versions of the lesson: live lesson and student-paced. This allows students to have their own copy of the lesson and move at their own pace. I think that the option of hiding students’ names is a good feature as students can get self conscious when their names are displayed.

Nearpod is a true community of educators. Being able to search topics and find lessons that other educators have used and have been successful with provides us with a greater network beyond our own school. Of course, there is the ability to create my own lessons.

There is integration with Google Drive, which is very important for me because my school uses all Google Apps for Education. All of our students have Google accounts in our domain, and would make access to lessons seamless with the ability to save their work all in one place.

I think that Nearpod would work best in smaller class sizes. There was a video of a teacher using Nearpod, and it looked like he had a class or fewer than 20 students, each with their own device. Even though having 1:1 devices is possible for some of my classes, my school does not have access to 1:1 for all students all of the time. There are really nice features to Nearpod, but I am not sure it is made for a class size of 33.

If I would to use Nearpod, I can see using it in the live lesson feature. I think that there are creative ways to teach various topics out there and the Nearpod community gives teachers that outlet to share and develop created ways of teaching different topics. In the few topics that I explored, I can see the tax calculation lesson being useful to my students as they would be able to work in groups to complete the task instead of individuals. That would limit the number of devices needed and still use a majority of features in Nearpod.

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