Week 7: A new way of teaching – Nearpod

 

Hello everyone, welcome back! How are you this week?
 
In this week I want to show you a mobile learning tool – Nearpod.



Nearpod is an education platform that helps teachers making online presentation, preparing lesson plan and doing in-class activities with students. For teachers, Nearpod is very suitable for live webinars and online learning. Your students can be anywhere and follow the class in no time! I know it sounds quite common in these days, but the unique thing about Nearpod is that it can 'control your students'. I will elaborate this point.

 

'Controlling your students’

One special thing about Nearpod is real-time sharing, which means that when your students join the online classroom you designed, their screens cannot be operated except to see what you want to show them. This greatly helps students to follow the class and focus at all times. When you move, they move. Thus, teachers can focus on delivering the class and balance the input level of each student. Nearpod also allow teachers to track student progress and assess their learning outcomes by sharing their answer, giving feedbacks...

 

Screenshot from Nearpod demo presentation

Lots of interactive elements you can use in your presentation

Polls, quizzes, drawing, open-ended questions, virtual reality… you can find all of them in Nearpod. A few weeks ago, I introduced the Triptico Plus, which is an amazing tool to activate the class. But the thing is, the tools like Triptico Plus provide rather single function, and less interactivity between teachers and students. Nearpod combines them all. You can keep the pace of the class and smoothly complete presentations without switching tools.

 

Screenshot from Nearpod demo presentation

Mobile learning

Mobile learning is one of the aspects of Nearpod that I think attracts the most attention. Your students can sit in the classroom, or they can stay at home, or they can be located in different countries. By using the same joining code, they can see the same slide, answer the same question and draw on the same picture. Sounds amazing, right?

 


Before you try it, a few things you should know…

1. It requires very stable internet.

Because Nearpod is an online teaching platform that relies entirely on the Internet, it requires very very stable internet. If the students or teachers are facing a unstable internet connection, they might lose their progress.

 

2. It is not free.

Nearpod does have free version, but some advanced functions required paid subscription. It is not cheap and teachers should consider before choosing to buy the full version.

 

3. Few personalized templates

Nearpod has designed many general templates that suitable for most of situations. But sometimes, teachers do need to create something unique. It is difficult to design your own template. But I think the general templates can handle most of the situations :)

 

 

That's it for this week, if you like my content, please keep reading! See you in my next post!



 

Comments

  1. xuteng 221783015 April 2023 at 04:36

    This time, you added subtitles to your blog and even changed them to a prominent color. This really provides me with more convenience in reading. Through your blog, I learned about Nearpod, which is really suitable for online teaching. As you mentioned, the most attractive feature of Nearpod to me is that it can help me 'control my students'. This is truly an effective guarantee of teaching quality. However, could you provide me with a video showing me how to operate Nearpod? Video may be easier to solve some technical problems than text.

    ReplyDelete
  2. KunyanICT16 April 2023 at 13:55

    You propose that Nearpod is unique in that it can control your students. However, in my opinion, it is more important to give students enough autonomy, which may encourage them to internalize their learning motivation. While I would like to say that I respect your opinion and thank you for your interesting sharing!

    ReplyDelete

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