Nearpod

What do you like best?

Nearpod is a very useful website for reviewing and holding students accountable. There are a multitude of features that make reviewing and teaching new material easy and hands-on. The feature I use the most is the draw feature. This feature allows me to upload any math problem and then lets students draw and show their work by hand or typing. If it is a graphing problem, they can even graph it on another website, screenshot, and upload within Nearpod.

What do you dislike?

The downside is that students do not get a saved copy of their work. I wish it could export their responses so that we can have a PDF of the completed study guide at the end of class. That feature would help students retain the information more. The heavier features like Time to Climb the game are also sometimes too much for the internet to handle. The students sometimes get kicked off and have to rejoin.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Try uploading PDFs or PPTs of previously made resources to quicken the start time of your use in class.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

For hybrid learning, Nearpod has increased accountability. It is like a class set of whiteboards but some of my students are in person, and some are at home. That way I can track who is participating, and I can see all of their responses at once. It also does give reports about who joined and how many screens they completed, which is helpful when communicating with parents. The students also really enjoy it because it allows them to doodle and share their responses with the class and receive quick feedback from me. Overall, the students and I enjoy it.