Nearpod Final Thoughts / Summary

Hi all! I am a 6th grade math teacher, in case you didn’t know already. For my final project for Teaching With Technology, I chose to look into a resource called Nearpod and how it could help me to better engage my students during remote learning. Below this post you will find a thoughts log I created as I played with Nearpod. This post is more to serve as a summary and more organized post on my final thoughts for Nearpod.

For my 6th grade class, we use the Glencoe workbook. I am not sure how familiar anyone is with this book but it includes many amazing resources for my students. For every lesson in the book, there are many worksheets with answer keys, there are powerpoint slide decks, there are “tutor“ resources that the kids can use, there is ENL support, and much more. I really enjoy using this book because it comes with so many things I could use in my classroom without me really reinventing the wheel.

During remote learning, rather than just teaching out of the ebook, I have been leaning more on using the slide decks that the textbook provides. It has seemed to engage the kids more because of all the animations that are already included and made for me. As with anything though, I am still not reaching every single kid. I had previously heard of Nearpod as a way to make slide decks more engaging and interactive. So I figured I would give it a try. I browsed through the never ending nearpod library without much success. It seems that Nearpod provides many pre-made lessons for the higher grade levels, but not so much for middle school.

I then decided to try to turn one of my glencoe powerpoints into a nearpod slide deck. This was extremely unsuccessful since I realized that the glencoe powerpoints have the answers already embedded into a screen where the question is. When presenting as a PowerPoint, the answer is animated as a transition to come after I choose to advance. When I uploaded it in nearpod, the answer was already there.

I really like what Nearpod can do, but it did not seem to be working with the pre-made slide decks that came with the online book my students use. So, I went back to the drawing board to make my own slide deck so that I can make it work with Nearpod. I learned that I had to create one slide with the question, and the next with the answer so that I could add a nearpod question slide in between those two. These seemed to work much better for what I wanted to accomplish as a math teacher.

For ex. I made this one slide

And this had to be the next

This worked much better because I could now put a nearpod open-ended question in between these two slides, asking students to answer the question.

Overall, I think my students were much more engaged and involved in their own learning through using nearpod. I was able to spot correct common mistakes instead of waiting to see their homework and I was able to see who was paying attention throughout the lesson and trying their best. Here are some of my nearpod results

As far as student participation goes, 95% is really awesome if you ask me! Unfortunately I don’t really have a way to rate my student participation “before” using nearpod. But I am going to take a guess that 95% is a significant improvement.

My students got 66% of answers correct, which is not great, but it was their first day learning a completely new topic, so it is to be expected. They are putting mixed numbers, improper fractions, decimals and percents all in order from least to greatest. This is a tough subject for even most full-grown adults nowadays! I will take high engagement/participation over high grades any day. I just want to see that my kids are trying and that they are putting in an effort.

Through this project, I determined that Nearpod is an awesome tool for trying to help student engagement and participation. I think I will continue to use it on lessons where the material is difficult and I need to see how students are doing throughout the lesson. However, creating a slide deck on Nearpod is no joke. It took me over an hour just to make one nearpod slide deck. I would not recommend using this to teach your lessons every single day, since I think I would drive myself nuts (I’m also a perfectionist, which doesn’t help.) Unless you teach only 6th grade and could possibly use this lesson 5 times in a row in one day, then one hour of planning does not seem so horrible. However, I am brand new teacher at my middle school and I have been teaching 3 curriculums a day, while also trying to engage remote students. Therefore, I will use nearpod whenever possible, but likely not everyday. If I at least knew that I would be teaching 6th grade again next year, then maybe I would find value in all the work for these nearpods, but I think next year I will be switcched to a different grade level again.

All in all, Nearpod is an awesome tool to engage students in their own learning, however it is very time consuMing. Whenever I can, I am going to turn my lessons into Nearpod lessons.

Thank you to Dr. Ardito for pushing me to find a tool that can help my students be more engaged in remote learning and thank you for a great semester!