Connect, engage, and inspire all learners at scale
Creating your first Nearpod lesson
Find lessons and videos in the Nearpod Library
Integrating Nearpod with Google Slides
Keeping up to date: The latest updates to Nearpod
Nearpod for Higher Ed overview
Nearpod OER
Open Educational Resources (OER)
Teaching with Nearpod
The Beginner’s Guide to Nearpod
What is Nearpod?
What is Nearpod?
Overview
Are you tired of the same, boring lessons? Are your students ready to be engaged by interactive video presentations? Have you heard of Nearpod, but are unsure of how to get started? Then this resource is for you.
Key Features
Nearpod Library
The Nearpod library offers 8,500+ premade K-12 video lesson presentations in all subject areas. Not seeing what you’re looking for? Simply create your own lesson, video or class activity through Nearpod with a click of a button. Nearpod can also be integrated into any Google Slides presentation already created!
Integrating Nearpod with Google Slides
Polls
While in a Nearpod lesson presentation, teachers are able to spontaneously ask questions to their students to check for understanding, take a class vote, highlight student opinions, and more. Polls, like other activities in Nearpod, can include a reference photo, PDF, video, audio, or website.
Draw It
This feature allows students to draw, underline, highlight and/or annotate while in a lesson. Teachers can also use this feature within their Nearpod lesson presentation to allow students to answer questions with an illustration.
Collaborations
Teachers can add the collaborative feature to any lesson presentation. Once your lesson is launched, teachers will be able to interact and engage students with discussions.
Matching Pairs
Nearpod offers many interactive games within a Nearpod lesson presentation. To play, the teacher creates pairs of items that can be images, text or both. When activated, students see the full list of all possible tiles/options and match them together. When students correct pair items, they will disappear from the screen. Just as in other activities, the teacher can interact and prompt students with questions as they play.
Quizzes
Quizzes can be easily inserted into a presentation without requiring students to move to a new website. Quizzes can be in the form of multiple-choice, open-ended questions and fill in the blanks. When creating the quiz, the teacher can decide one or more correct answers for the software to simultaneously self grade. When all students are finished with the quiz, the teacher can receive a final report of student responses.
Virtual Field Trips
This new feature on Nearpod allows teachers to take their students on virtual field trips around the world from within a presentation. Once activated, each student’s device will display a 3D virtual reality experience of a preselected location. While within the Nearpod experience, students will be able to explore by moving and spinning using their devices.
Summary Reports
As previously mentioned, summary reports are available for the teacher providing the grades and individual responses from all student participants from any completed activity throughout the presentation.
Student Pacing
Nearpod allows teachers to be able to pace their lessons providing synchronous and asynchronous learning. With student pacing turned on, students are able to move through an assigned NearPod presentation at whatever pace works best for them and their learning. Teachers are also able to share out any lesson or activity to their learning management system such as Google Classroom or Remind.
Sources:
The Nearpod Team. (2021, May 2). Integrating Nearpod with Google Slides. Nearpod. Retrieved April 21, 2022, from https://nearpod.com/blog/nearpod-google-slides/
How Does Nearpod Work?
Sources
Nearpod. (2020b, September 3). Creating your first Nearpod lesson [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stIWHnJx5rc
The Nearpod Team. (2020, April 27). The Beginner’s Guide to Nearpod. Nearpod. Retrieved April 21, 2022, from https://nearpod.com/blog/beginners-guide-to-nearpod/
How Does it Work for Educational Purposes?
Sources:
Nearpod. (2020, September 1). Find lessons and videos in the Nearpod Library [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TASkbHHwszY
Who is using Nearpod?
The customizable nature of the app means that it can be applied to any age range and teaching context. It saves you time with real-time formative assessment and session reports and helps build a connected culture in and outside of the classroom.
Real Life Example:
Miss Weis, Fourth Grade Teacher at Perry Elementary, New York
Miss Weis' Library:
Miss Weis uses premade Nearpod video lessons while teaching math to her 4th grade students.
Additional Example: (Youtube)
Amanda Clark, high school teacher from Blount County School District in Maryville, Tennessee, shares her Nearpod story.
Sources:
Nearpod. (2019, May 1). #MyNearpodStory: Amanda C. [Video]. Youtube. https://youtu.be/ItQDvk780PE
Why Nearpod?
Why I Chose Nearpod?
Nearpod offers a range of engagement for any learning environment. My students thrive while using their 1:1 devices in my classroom. They enjoy being immersed in the lesson while experiencing real-time assessments and activities to help with comprehension.
My favorite part about Nearpod is that it is constantly changing to adapt with the modern day classroom.
Why Should You?
Nearpod is a fun and interactive gamified tool that can be used to help teach any concept K-12.
Nearpod is simple and easy to use. Substitute any Powerpoint or Google Slides presentation with an immersive Nearpod presentation. Upload any of your lessons into Nearpod and make them interactive, or select one of the 8,500+ premade lessons to use with your students. Additionally, choose from countless activities to use throughout your teaching as live formative assessments. Your students will thank you!
Sources:
Nearpod. (2021, October 20). What is Nearpod? [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/anTtMRaQLsM
Challenges to Nearpod
Cons
It'll take more time than some competitors to get comfortable.
Content Filters could be better
Every free user gets up to 50 MBs of space, and can host up to 30 students per session
Solutions
- Test Drive the lesson prior to launching and presenting with your students.
- Play around with the many interactive activities before selecting the one(s) you want.When filtering through the 8,500+ premade lessons within the Neapod Library, be sure to select your needed criteria using the side search tool.
- To avoid having to upgrade your account, save lessons to a Google Document instead of your Nearpod Library by copying and pasting the URL. This ensures that your favorite lessons are kept safe and organized in your files, but avoids running out of space.
- If you have more than 30 students in your class, encourage students to partner up. Another option could be to share a lesson on any LMS like Google Classroom, Canvas or Schoology by using the link on Nearpod. Additionally, for live and self-paced lessons, with upgraded school-level access, up to 150 students can join your lesson at the same time. For users with district-level access, 250 students can join your lesson at the same time.
Common Sense Education Rating:
The Future of Nearpod
Check out Nearpod's blog to learn more about what is new with Nearpod!
OER
OER on Nearpod by Erika Weis
What is OER?
Open Educational Resources (OER) are free online resources, such as curriculum maps, lesson plans, and course materials, in addition to any other materials that have been designed for use in teaching and learning.
The unique thing about OER’s is that they can be Reused, Retained, Revised, Remixed, and Redistributed.
My Viewpoints of OER:
Being able to reuse, retain and revise resources allows for educational transformation in the learning environment.
“While its educational value lies in the idea of using resources as an integral method of communication of curriculum in educational courses (i.e. resource-based learning), its transformative power lies in the ease with which such resources, when digitized, can be shared via the Internet” (Butcher et al., 2011).