Nearpod

    

     Nearpod is a wonderful resource for students and teachers of all ages. A study found that using Nearpod enables 100% student participation and allows students to collaborate, build creativity, and communication skills. It can also improve focus, engagement and reading comprehension skills.

     Nearpod allows teachers to build lesson plans and create activities for all subjects. There are also thousands of lesson plans that are already on the platform for teachers to access and use from the lesson library, some free and some for a small price. You can access these lesson plans that are categorized by subject, grade-level, and price.

     The best Nearpod lessons begin with an essential question and learning objective. These lessons will then give students an open-ended question in order to access prior knowledge. Lessons will have activities, stories, and sometimes even games to promote their learning even further. There are options to self-assess in order to allow students to know where they are at with the content.

     Nearpod has teamed up with Flocabulary to offer over 100 pre-made lessons with Flocabulary videos to enhance engagement. By occasionally using these lessons, you can spend so much more time accommodating and editing these lessons to be more adaptive to the needs of your students. With all of the lessons being editable, it is easy to alter pieces of the lessons to be very mindful of your students’ needs. Editing pre-made lessons allows the teacher to spend more time teaching and assisting students when needed instead of focusing all of their time and attention on the planning part of the lesson.

    Nearpod allows teachers to create a Google Slide presentation to work seamlessly with the application. You can embed any Nearpod activity directly into the Google Slide presentation. This presentation can, of course, be uploaded directly into Google Classroom for students to access.

     In my future classroom, I will use Nearpod as often as possible. With the plethora of lessons that are available to access and customize, I would love to use Nearpod to avoid spending too much time creating lessons. It is great to use these on occasion to save time and allow yourself more time to accommodate for and work directly with your students. There is a free version that has many of the same options that the paid version has. Many districts or individual schools purchase it for their teachers, so that is something worth inquiring about!

Check out this video!