Community reviews for Nearpod

This is a fantastic tool, especially for teachers who are concerned about kids having iPads and being distracted by all of the other activities available for them. This can help keep them on task. It provides teacher-directed lessons smoothly.

I really like Nearpod. However, the editing is time consuming and can be restrictive. It doesn't let me modify the PowerPoint slides in Nearpod, and it does not let me move just one slide of a presentation to Nearpod (it's the whole presentation or nothing). I have found ways around this, like turning one slide into it's own presentation to add to the Nearpod one, but it can be time consuming. The kids really like it though. They like taking an active part in the lesson, and for those students who don't like to talk in class, it allows them a way to contribute their opinion and have it represented in class.

I love Nearpod in that it makes the traditional lecture slightly more engaging. However, like any educational tool, it needs to be used correctly and paired with other teaching tools and lesson structure. When I use Nearpod, I paired it with Power teaching techniques, reinforcing content with kinesthetic clues. In addition, I focused my Nearpod content on specific information, such as irony, instead of presenting a vast amount of information on literary devices. The students loved using Nearpod, even asking to use it again. Overall, Nearpod is an amazing tool in both the engagement and formative assessment data. I can see it being especially useful to transition teachers away from the traditional lecture and notes some teachers utilize.

I love using Nearpod for direct instruction. The students were engaged, and I really liked that every student was interacting with me, even those who might otherwise shy away from contributing to the class discussion. I also love the ability to share individual responses with the whole class anonymously. This feature was a great way to launch a class discussion, especially when there were conflicting viewpoints. We could do error analysis of student work without anyone feeling embarrassed that they had gotten the wrong answer. The "draw me" slides were great for students showing their work in math class. However, I found this feature to be a little "glitchy" when I used my iPad to lead the session. My teacher screen would often freeze and I would have to restart. Fortunately, I did not run into this same issue when I used my laptop to control the session. Overall, Nearpod is a wonderful tool for introducing content. It was easy to insert videos to capture students attention, and direct them safely to websites where they could discover more on their own. It was also great that Nearpod works on most platforms. Students can participate in the lesson using the internet, an iOS mobile device, or an Android mobile device. One major drawback to Nearpod is that every student must have his or own device. This may be challenging for schools with limited access to technology.

I enjoyed this app because it allows me to see the responses of students instantly. I think the students enjoyed it because they could see if their answers coincided with the majority of their peers or not. I did feel that it was a little difficult for me (the teacher) to create as there were many options to choose from, however I've been making a few more Nearpod Lessons and am getting more and more comfortable. I would like to use this more and more, however it does require each student to have their own device.

I think this was the best way to assess my student's learning. I Nearpod made it easy to collect data and have it already scored for me. The features of Nearpod help me to rise up the SAMR ladder creating activities otherwise unconvinced. This tool has allowed me to monitor all students participation and ease my grading that I have to do. One way it could serve teachers better is to have a presentation mode that is split screen with the results screen.

This tool should be part of all teacher toolkits for its benefits in teaching and engaging students in learning. The mechanics of creating presentations is somewhat difficult. I often want to edit an existing presentation to improve some aspect after using it with a class and find that particularly difficult and cumbersome. It is easy to accidentally delete a presentation which you cannot get back.

This is a great teaching tool and the students really enjoy how interactive it is. This is tool is definitely a 21st Century way for teachers to provide direct instruction to students. One of my favorite features is the drawing function, which worked great for teaching about seismograms in Earthquakes. This function would work great for math teachers as well! My students have laptops but if you have an iPad or a computer that is a touch screen the drawing function would be work even better. I really like how you can download the report for the entire class that includes a student's total participation rate and all of their answers to the questions. Sometimes I have been timed out of Nearpod and could not receive data so that made it difficult to continue with the lesson because students would have to keep refreshing their screens to be on the same screen as me. This program could serve teachers better if there was a way to get real time data as the students are completing a question and not just their response when they submit.

I really enjoyed using this app with my students. It gave immediate feedback to my students as we were interacting with the lesson. Students were able to have great discussions about what they commenting on or what was being taught. They were able to make connections with their real life situations.

I also love the variety of activities I can ask students to do--multiple choice, draw, free response, etc. Creating a presentation is easy to do and easy to share. It's also easy to run presentations either live or as homework (self-paced). It would be helpful to have more 2nd grade pre-created content.