Accessibility, Reflection, and Feedback with Nearpod

How does a teacher deliver a visual presentation with a broken projector? How can a presentation be viewable to ALL students in the room, no matter how close or far from the screen they are? How can a teacher with any size class gather immediate feedback from every student during a lesson, whether it is a planned question or an on-the-spot question? The answer is Nearpod!

A class of 60+ accessing a Nearpod presentation simultaneously.

Physics teacher at Byron Nelson, Courtney Toht, temporarily delivers content to two full classes at a time as she supports students for a team teacher who is out on maternity leave. Her Science classroom had the physical space for 60+ students at a time, but students at the back of the room could not view the projected presentation at the front of the room and it was difficult to gauge students' understanding for such a vast number of kids...until she started using Nearpod.

Nearpod enables the teacher to take existing presentations from PowerPoint or Google Slides and import it into Nearpod. Once in Nearpod, the teacher can embed questions in the following formats: open-ended, poll, or quiz. These can be added prior to the presentation starting as well as can be added in during the presentation as need arises.

To join a live-presentation, Nearpod generates a 5 character code that can be written on the whiteboard, shared as a clickable URL, or assigned to a class in Google Classroom. Once a student connects into a Nearpod presentation, the presentation appears on each individual student's computer; so, previously-projected content can be accessible anywhere. Better yet, there is an iPad app for Nearpod so the teacher can control the progress of the presentation while being mobile around the room. When the teacher progresses to the next slide in a live-presentation that is teacher-paced, so does the presentation on the individual student computers.

After content slides are delivered, an open-ended formative question uses accompanies the content to gauge student understanding. When a formative question appears in the presentation, a new screen appears on the student computers with the question that has been posed to the class and a space to answer the question.

Student View: Displayed Formative Question with Space to Answer

As students answer, the teacher can view submitted responses to gather on-the-spot feedback that can be used to assess learning at any given moment. The teacher view also shows the percentage of students that have answered. A setting can be changed the make the students names appear anonymous so a teacher can show all submitted answers without associating a name to the response. 

Teacher View: Formative Question Feedback

If an exemplar answer gets submitted, the teacher can choose to share a selected response which means that answer gets pushed through to be viewable on all student computers. Mrs. Toht uses this feature to gauge understanding of newly presented material and shares students' answers to help them interpret the information using student-friendly and student-generated responses. Note that once the teacher shares a response, the activity closes and students can no longer continue submitting responses.

All features shown in this post are included in the free version with the exception of having 60 students connected at once; the free version allows up to 30 students to connect at a time. Upgraded features include the ability to assign student-paced lessons as well as additional question styles such as a "Draw It" style question which allow students to use their touchscreen or mouse to draw a picture or solve an equation by showing their work as pictured below. Same as the open ended questions, the teacher can view all students submitted work and share a selected response.

Moodle and Google Classroom are great places to store the actual presentation (PPT or Google Slides) for later access. Nearpod does not replace either of these Learning Management Systems; rather, it a tool used to present the content while gathering real time feedback from every student. A report is generated in Nearpod so the teacher can access the formative information after the live presentation has ended so the data can be further used to drive instruction.

ISTE Teacher Standards: 

1C - Promote student reflection using collaborative tools to reveal and clarify students' conceptual understanding and thinking, planning, and creative processes.

2D - Provide students with multiple and varied formative and summative assessments aligned with content and technology standards, and use resulting data to inform learning and teaching.

Overcoming Challenges

Does a person's past determine their future success? That is the exact question 6th graders at Gene Pike Middle School had to answer while reading Holes by: Louis Sachar. After reading the book students did research on famous people that have overcome a difficult situation and still become successful. They then created a Haiku Deck presentation to demonstrate their perseverance. Hannah, a 6th grader at Pike said that she immediately thought of Stephen Hawking based on a film she had heard about. She didn't quite know what adversity he had overcome, but knew she wanted to do some research on him. Using Haiku Deck was also new to her, but she was able to collaborate with a classmate and share the things they had learned about this presentation tool so that they both could create a more dynamic product.

                             
                                               Steven Hawking - Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires;


                             
                                                     Jay Z - Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires;


                             
                                                       Jim Carrey - Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires;

After creating the Haiku Decks, Mrs. Morrow had her students break up into groups to share their presentation. The group then needed to collaborate on the common character traits among each of their individual research subjects. These traits were combined with the rest of the groups in the classroom to create one consolidated list. To take it even deeper students did a personality analysis to really dig deep for the character traits that are the most important in overcoming adversity. These students will be able to carry this lesson with them through life as they themselves and/ or people they know are faced with tough times.

Cell Analogy Project - Making A Real Life Connection

Digital age learning lends itself to create and promote a culture that provides rigorous, relevant, and engaging education for all students.  In Mrs. Greiner’s 7th grade class at Wilson Middle School, students were asked to create an analogy to show their understanding cells. Analogies help students make connections that enhance comprehension and no longer makes a topic difficult to grasp. Students got to choose which tool would best help them present their work.  Below are two outstanding projects that show depth of thinking and understanding. Both of these projects will be showcased in TechnoExpo 2016.   

  

Nick did an excellent job and compared his cell to a football stadium using the format of Smore. 

Haley transformed her learning into an interactive experience using the tool of ThingLink. 

Through student collaboration and a bit of research, students were able to quickly create an informative and creative presentation.  The final product provided students with a link that can be shared via the internet so that others can learn from their discoveries beyond their own classroom.  You will see these and many other GREAT technology based projects at TechnoExpo2016.