Cool Tool #3: Nearpod

 This week I am going to review another cool tool. I chose a tool that makes presenting a lesson to students on their own devices, easy. The tool is called Nearpod you can check it out by clicking here. Nearpod allows the teacher to create a lesson that can be viewed live or at the student's pace. Creating a lesson that allows students to complete it at their own pace is great differentiation for the classroom. It helps the students who may take longer to read or follow along to to read the lesson at their own pace. On the other hand students who quickly understand can also go out their pace which helps reduce boredom and distractions.

When in live mode, the students can see what is on the teacher's screen while they are presenting a lesson. Also while in live mode the opportunity for students to collaborate becomes available. This is  a really cool feature. I tried it out with one of the fifth grade students that come to my room during recess. She really liked the feature and said she can think of a few ways to use it during her class. Another feature that I really enjoy is the ability to create polls and quizzes during the lesson. This feature is much like Edpuzzle, my first cool review which you can read about here. The polls and quizzes pause the lesson to quickly check for understanding and allows for more student engagement.

Unfortunately, it seems that Nearpod presentations can only be teacher created. I wish that students would be able to use the program to create presentations for their peers. Since students are able to create Google Slides on their own and Nearpod integrates Google slides into its tool really well, I feel this would be the best way for student slide shows to be presented using Nearpod. Uploading PowerPoint presentations is also very easy for Nearpod, so that can be another option for student created work to be integrated into the tool.

Another problem I find with Nearpod is that it has very limited creativity options when creating slides. The text option that is given is standard and cannot be changed. Along with the font itself not being able to be changed, the color of the font is also not able to be changed either.  It does say that the slide component is a beta right now, so hopefully they will make more customization options for slides in the future.

A perk of Nearpod is that it is accessible on all devices. I downloaded the app on my phone to see how it fared on an Android device. The outcome was great for being a part of the lesson, but to create an actual presentation is not possible for the phone app. For schools who practice "bring your own device" this would be a great feature. I enjoy that it is easily used from a web browser. Being in an elementary school with limited technology, websites are the easiest way to introduce new tools to my students.

Another positive of Nearpod is the ability to search for images and other media directly through the tool. Some tools require you to look at Google to get certain media instead of making it an option within the tool. I definitely use a lot of images from Google if the copyright allows for it. I like that Nearpod allows me to do this without opening another tab.

To see Nearpod in action, I have created a first grade lesson below that introduces the science content standard that says "the sun warms the earth". In the upcoming weeks, you are going to see my learning process of going to a TAB classroom. This introductory lesson is step one of my journey.