Nearpod from Mobile Summit | Academic Newsletter | Seneca Polytechnic

by Elisheva Lightstone, School of Nursing

in the December 2018 issue

One of the sessions that really sparked my interest at the Mobile Summit was the session on Nearpod. I found Nearpod to be a unique, fun, and innovative way to use technology in the class with students.

The Nearpod session was also enjoyable because of the way it was presented at the Mobile Summit. It was very interactive and instead of just talking about Nearpod and its benefits, the presenters actually had us sign up with Nearpod on our phones or computers; they then walked us through their presentation, showing us how to do all the things they were doing in their presentation. This was a great way to teach us how to use Nearpod because it immersed us in the product and we learned as the presentation unfolded. Also, if we had questions or didn’t know how to do something, the presenters were able to answer and help us right away, instead of having to struggle with it when we tried it ourselves at home.

So what is Nearpod? Nearpod is an interactive presentation and assessment tool. You can either import your own PowerPoint presentation, documents, or quizzes, or you can use and modify the pre-existing lessons that have been pre-loaded into Nearpod’s lesson library (though most are K-12). Once your PowerPoint presentation or quiz is loaded into Nearpod, you can add interactive surveys, polls, photos, or open-ended questions to see if students are keeping up with what you’re teaching or if they need more clarification. When students respond to the quizzes, surveys, or open-ended questions, you see their responses right away, along with a breakdown of the percentage of what was answered accompanied by a colourful pie chart. So you know immediately if something wasn’t understood, allowing you to tailor your teaching right away.

The interactivity of Nearpod is what makes it so exciting and great to play with. As well, being able to simply import my existing PowerPoint presentations into Nearpod is a strong incentive for me to use it, since it saves me so much time.

Nearpod is free to use. With the free version, 30 students can access the presentation at the same time; if your class size is bigger, your students will have to pair up to gain access. You also have 50MB of storage space.

It’s a really amazing new interactive tool for the classroom. If you’re interested or want to see how it works, you can take a look at nearpod.com.

View the December 2018 issue of the Academic Newsletter.