My Take
I love Nearpod as a means for introducing new topics to my students. It allows for check-ins, group contribution and collaboration, learning games, term recognition, and other activities. It definitely augments the ways in which I can introduce a topic or skill. It changes the layout from a lecture to a lecture with a more interactive component. It also allows students to do on their own pace individually or together with the class. This flexibility is really helpful for virtual learning. Gaining the immediate data and feedback from each student while they were learning was so helpful for figuring out what I needed to re-explain or what the students are understanding. I think it would improve the tool if students could send messages on Nearpod while the teacher is teaching the lesson in order to ask private questions or make comments to the teacher only. I used this while teaching over Zoom and having to switch over to check the chat on Zoom was tricky with only one computer. I think that a messaging component would be a great addition to this tool.
How I Use It
I used Nearpod to introduce the components of an argumentative lesson. Students were able to examine thesis statements and supporting details, provide suggestions to fix examples, differentiate between theses and supporting claims, and practice writing their own arguments. It helped students to have low-stakes practice with information that they were just learning. They were able to bounce ideas off each other anonymously and submit practice theses without their other classmates knowing who submitted them.
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