Five Ways Nearpod Supports the Universal Design for Learning

The universal design for learning is a framework for considering variability and removing obstacles so that each unique student has the opportunity to build their own path to learning. Nearpod is an interactive lesson delivery tool that mirrors the flexibility at the core of the UDL guidelines. Here are five ways Nearpod supports teachers and students in the UDL journey.

One way that Nearpod minimizes threats and distractions is through its intentional use of anonymity. A typical classroom discussion works best for students who are comfortable putting themselves in the classroom spotlight. When facilitating a Nearpod lesson live in your classroom, you benefit from all student voices. You will always have students who want to dominate the conversation, as well as students who are uncomfortable speaking in front of the whole class. With Nearpod, you can collect and share responses with the rest of the class anonymously. That way, you can celebrate student thoughts without forcing a student to speak or even associating a specific student with a response. Student responses can also prompt further discussion among students.

Students are given multiple means of accessing content in Nearpod, as well as multiple means of expressing themselves. Immersive reader is a built-in accessibility tool that allows students to hear any text, as well as change the background color, change the language, identify parts of speech, etc. The immersive reader tool empowers students to customize everything about the text they are presented. The immersive reader tools should be modeled by the teacher so that students know how and when to use it appropriately, and don’t feel stigmatized about accessing learning tools. Immersive Reader will only work on content slides that are created with the Google add-on. If the content slides are imported after the fact, they are treated as flat images.

Nearpod offers a variety of ways to gather formative assessment data in real time. Basic activities like quizzes, open ended questions and poll questions let teachers see what students are grasping during a lesson and what they need more support with before the class moves on. Advanced activities like draw-it slides, Time to Climb, drag and drop, and matching pairs engage students and create opportunities to tap into a wider variety of thinking skills. Being able to share student responses anonymously means that you as the teacher can model feedback to a student’s response without anyone else in the class knowing who submitted it.

There are many ways for students to respond on Nearpod. A teacher may choose to pose an open-ended question for students, to which they can respond by typing their answer or recording themselves speaking their answer. With Draw-It slides, students can type a response, draw a response, or even do a quick google search to include picture results. The pace of response can also be varied in Nearpod. In a live lesson, the teacher moves students from slide to slide. This is excellent for keeping students focused and on track. However, students respond at different rates, so it is not always ideal to have to hold some students while others finish responding. Conversely, rushing some students through a response to keep the lesson moving forward creates an environment where they feel uncomfortable engaging. To address this, Nearpod provides a student-paced toggle. The teacher can at any point turn on “student-paced mode” for a selected number of slides. This means that the teacher can provide direct instruction and then open up a subset of slides for independent practice. This feature could also be used to provide students a choice of different slide types where they can provide the type of response that works best for them. Additional slides might be included to challenge students who finish early. Then, once responses are collected, the teacher can switch back into live mode and use student responses to facilitate a discussion or model a reflection.

One way that Nearpod empowers teachers and students to activate background knowledge is with reference media. Nearpod allows any activity slide to be paired with reference media, which could be a PDF, image, video, audio, or web content. Including reference media with a question or activity allows students to reference the necessary background knowledge to appropriately respond. Teachers might include a slide with information that students can enlarge to clarify vocabulary, or a website that provides statistics related to a complex issue students are debating. Reference media is neatly contained in the top corner of a Nearpod activity and can be brought up and enlarged when needed.