Nearpod: New Features for Student Engagement

Although you may have somehow overlooked the power of using Nearpod to deliver lessons to students, the new features that are offered are just a few more reasons to purchase and adapt your lessons to include this amazing program into your daily lessons. Whether you are uploading and adapting your old school powerpoints into new 21st century lessons, using ones already created in the vast Nearpod library or creating your own unique content sessions for students, each Nearpod lesson can be used to engage learners, assess understanding and allow them to review and revisit content at their own pace.

While this program still offers embedded videos, quizzes and open ended questioning to assess the learning of content, the interactive questioning elements now allow for student feedback with the Collaborate Feature! Acting as a bulletin board for ideas and allowing students to give immediate responses to learned content, this Padlet type session board allows the student to answer the necessary question, add images related tot he topic and like other responses they agree with. This collaborative element allows a teacher to gain insight into their students learning and provides an opportunity for the class to reflect on what was just learned. However, this feature is only available in a teacher led session.

As students follow along with the teachers lesson, they can now take their own Notes of the lesson inside the app. By clicking the caret in the top right corner students can choose to keep notes at the bottom of each screen and then export their notes by sending themselves a copy to their email. For some, this engagement tool will allow students another opportunity to interact with the content and retain what they need to be successful in class.

Finally, On the Fly activities allow a teacher to change up their lesson based on student responses to questions and changes to the timing of the lesson. Teachers can immediately add in another content question, video clip, draw it or true & false question to extend the discussion as needed for students.

Of course their many regular features are very useful for engaging students in class and redelivering content in small group with the student paced lesson or as a large group activity. There are many ways to integrate its use in class that are very helpful to students and teachers. I recommend you investigate how it can be an added resource to your classroom by visiting their website today at https://nearpod.com/