10 Ways to Get the Most out of Nearpod

10 Ways to Get the Most out of Nearpod

by Mike Neumire. Published 10/12/2022

Nearpod is an interactive instructional platform that makes it easy to gather instructional materials and deliver them with relevant and engaging formative assessment tools. Nearpod helps teachers make instruction accessible, engaging, and flexible for students. A mix of powerful tools, flexible teaching options, and premade content makes Nearpod a must-have. Here are 10 tips for getting the most out of this dynamic platform.

1. Facilitate discussions that blend students’ written answers and spoken contributions. When having a class discussion, Nearpod allows you to honor all voices in the room. There will always be those students who confidently participate with the spotlight on them, but not all students will engage in that way. Instead, pose a question using Nearpod’s open-ended question activity, and give students time to think and respond. Encourage them to discuss with a partner before typing a response. Then, use those responses to move the conversation forward by sharing them anonymously and having students respond. You may find that some of the most thoughtful responses come from those who wouldn’t volunteer them vocally. Because written answers can be shared anonymously, all students can participate safely.

2. Record yourself talking through each slide. Every Nearpod content slide offers the option of recording audio. This is a great way to practice your delivery while simultaneously making a version of the lesson that is accessible at any time. If you find that some students need more time to make sense of the instruction, you don’t have to necessarily teach the whole class over again. You can make the self-paced version of the lesson available to students. Bonus- when you run a student-paced lesson, you can adjust your settings so that student can’t move onto the next slide until they’ve completed whatever activity is in front of them.
   
   

3. Get creative with the draw-it slide. The draw-it slide is a blank canvas, and you can add any background on top of which you would like students to draw. This might take the form of a T chart, venn diagram, graphic organizer, or even a chunk of text. Students have the ability to draw on the slide, add text boxes and type, pull in images from a built-in google safe search, and highlight. When combined with the audio recording tip, you can make an activity that puts the focus on students’ listening skills. You could describe something tangible, and have students listen to the audio and draw what they hear. You can also take any content slide you already have and convert it into a draw-it slide. This works well with the highlighter and textbox tools, as students might turn your content slides into their own annotated notes.
   
   

4. Explore Nearpod’s library of premade content so that you don’t have to start from scratch. Nearpod has a library of thousands of lessons that you can group and use as-is or edit to better fit your needs. The available lessons are standards-aligned and built in partnership with premium K-12 brands. This is a great place to start your Nearpod journey! Even if you don’t end up finding the perfect lesson, it is helpful to explore a variety of lessons to see how Nearpod chooses to organize and design a lesson. These design choices can be applied broadly to your future lessons.
   
   

5. Use the Nearpod add-on in Google Slides. The Nearpod add-on, which is already available to all teachers at Churchville, allows you to quickly transform a slide deck into a Nearpod lesson without having to export all your slides from Google first. This also helps you get around the problem of Nearpod treating slides as images. If you were to import powerpoint slides into Nearpod, they would be imported as images, which would essentially flatten them, and render any text on the slides unreadable by Nearpod’s powerful and built-in accessibility tool, Immersive Reader. By creating a Nearpod lesson with the Google Slides add-on, Nearpod is able to recognize the text on the slides and students can benefit from Immersive Reader’s powerful accessibility features. The Nearpod add-on for Google Slides makes the process of combining your presentations with Nearpod activities seamless.
   
   

6. Treat Nearpod like a living lesson plan. When you plan a lesson, you end up with a collection of instructional materials that you’ve arranged into a learning journey for your students. Nearpod is an excellent space to house your whole lesson, acting as the foundational structure to move you through each part of the lesson. If this becomes your classroom routine, students will think less about the platform and more about the content it brings them. Embed each web page, article, PDF, video, etc. right in the lesson, along with a variety of activity slides to assess how the journey is progressing.
   
   

7. Make your first slide something your students can actively engage with while they wait for others to join. This is a great place to assess background knowledge, clarify vocabulary, and more. When hosting a live lesson on Nearpod, not every student joins immediately. For those students who do, it is useful to have an activity waiting for them, so that they don’t disengage while waiting. This could range from traditional formative assessment tools like open-ended questions, multiple choice questions and poll questions, to more game-like structures like matching pairs, memory, drag-and-drop, fill-in-the-blank, or time to climb slides. You could also take advantage of the “live to student-paced” feature which lets you turn on student-paced mode for a select number of slides, so that students could complete more than one activity.
   
   

8. Use Nearpod to structure the “I do, we do, you do” model. After you’ve gone through instruction together, turn on “live to student-paced” mode so that students can go through a selected subset of your lesson slides independently to practice what they’ve learned. This gives you and students a lot of flexibility in the pace of teaching and learning, and makes transitioning from direct instruction to collaborative and independent work much easier.
   
   

9. Take advantage of the co-teacher feature. When you launch a live session in Nearpod, you are given a co-teacher link. Anyone with this link can join your session as facilitator, with the ability to move slides, see and share student responses, and more. You can also promote a participant who has already joined your lesson to a co-teacher. You can do this by bringing up the participant list, hovering over the participant, clicking the “more” dropdown that appears next to their name, and clicking “make co-teacher”. If you have another adult in the room, this feature makes it easy to teach a lesson collaboratively. You may have different chunks of the lesson that you want each adult to lead, or maybe one adult leads the discussion while the other monitors the responses coming in. This can be especially helpful when moderating responses on a collaborate board- one adult can focus solely on making sure responses are appropriate and focused before making them viewable to the whole group. Your co-teacher does not necessarily need to be another adult in the room, but could be a student whose role it is to assist you in running a lesson.
   
   

10. Make good use of the school and district library. This is a space to share lessons with your colleagues here at Churchville. This represents a great opportunity to collaborate with your peers and create shared experiences for students across your content and grade level.
    

Nearpod is a powerful platform for transforming the way you deliver instruction. It gives teachers the powers necessary to design and deliver instruction that meets the needs of student variability. It gives students the powers necessary to take ownership of the learning process.