Community reviews for Nearpod

I love love LOVE NearPod. It has every student engaged 100% of the time. The only negative I have about NearPod, is that it is difficult to create engaging lessons on your own within the NearPod product. What I do is, I create my lessons inside PowerPoint, and make them as flashy and dynamic as I want, and then I save them as a JPEG and then upload them into NearPod as an Image. Then I just add the slides with the polls and questions as I need to.

I love nearpod as a teaching tool. I love the fact that I can make it what I want if I can't find what I want. This program can help with data driven instruction, collects data and creates reports.

I really like Nearpod, and I highly recommend it. While it is probably more beneficial during teacher-led direct instruction, it allows for the opportunity to shift the focus back to the students quite often. Also, the ability to include regular and frequent formative assessments is great. Nearpod tool can improve student participation and engagement, because only the teacher sees individual student responses, and controls what gets shared back to the rest of the class. Also, the fact that students can literally join in on a session or presentation without having to create a separate Nearpod account is great. Students just enter the unique session id, and they're in. One thing, however, that might turn teachers off is the cost. As previously mentioned, the free version is great, but a teacher can easily eat up the 50MB of storage with a dozen presentations. If the school is not willing to pay for an individual teacher subscription for a premium account, the $10/month cost might be a bit prohibitive for some.

This was great for formative assessment throughout my lesson and allowed for me to save the data. It works on all platforms once you have created the lesson. As a foreign language teacher I found I had to be a little more creative in how I set up my question slides and student in-put. You can not get accents easily when using the webiste. Having a second window open to spanishtypeit.com solved that problem for me and for the students; just copy accented characters from that site into nearpod. On the iPad the accented characters on the keyboard work fine. I also wrote my question slides as all open ended questions & followed each slide with a slide that showed the correct answer.

My overall opinion on this teaching tool is that it's great and its worth it. I know teachers are always spending money on things for their classroom, but this is one of those tools you will use all the time. It's also easy for you to upload prior power points and embed assessments. This can certainly serve students fresh and technology based learning experiences. If you're looking to integrate something that you will continue to use, this is your tool!

Nearpod has the capability of being a fantastic synchronous learning environment for our students. The collaboration aspect in live time will allow any group creating a presentation to work seamlessly together, whether they are all together in one location or they are on two different continents! One key element I have found in NOT implementing Nearpod is the learning curve aspect for educators. One of my jobs as a TIS is to try to share programs such as Nearpod with my colleagues at my schools and hopefully streamline their large learning curve.

This is a great way to do whole group or teacher led small group activities especially if you want a good way to see students' understanding of the material. My students would ask when we were going to use Nearpod again. Their favorite part was being able to be shown students' work without knowing who's working is (they will tell everyone anyways)!

This is tool is one that I share to librarians all over. I like it because I can take a power point presentation and include an assessment piece that provides teachers data on what to do next. I would like to be able to embed videos with out a cost.

It would not have worked had I not included multiple formats. They had to follow links for online reading, respond to formative assessment and poll questions, and view graphics that I had to prepare in an organized, coherent manner. Thus, this is a great tool but not a quick fix. It takes time to develop a good presentation and some components are not free, so you either have to upgrade or get five friends to sign-up for a six-month upgrade.

I think this a great tool for sharing information on the students' screens on ipads, ipods, computers or other devices. You can choose pre-made materials or create your own. I do not like that you cannot make changes to the pre-made presentations on their site. Overall, it's a very useful app and we will be using it often in our ICTs, computer labs, and other classroom as well!