Trends in EdTech

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Online Learning Design

After reading an article from ISTE, one of the biggest challenges educators faced during the pandemic was moving lessons designed for in-person teaching to an online classroom. When the 2020-2021 school year started my district was entirely remote due to COVID-19. At this time I was working as an inclusion teacher in first and fourth grade for ELA and Math. During a collaboration meeting between my fourth grade co-teacher and myself we kept asking the same question: "How can we increase student engagement?" That is when we discovered Nearpod. We initially began using Nearpod during our math lessons and immediately noticed students participating more throughout the lesson.

I have not used Nearpod since we were teaching fully remote. As I have been thinking about ways to incorporate more technology into my small groups I wanted to take time to learn more about how it can benefit myself as well as my students. When we incorporated Nearpod into our daily math lessons my co-teacher took the lead while I acted as an observer so I never had the need to use Nearpod on my own. Now that I am working with students in a small group setting I want to explore how I can use Nearpod in my own teaching. 

What is Nearpod?

Nearpod allows teachers to make any lesson interactive through the use of quizzes, polls, videos, collaboration boards, and much more! Teachers are able to upload their existing lessons created through Slides (or any other format), and then make it interactive. You also have the option to choose from pre-made lessons that are aligned with K-12 standards. Teachers have the choice to go through the lesson Student-Paced or Live Participation (moving the class through the lesson with students interacting with material as they go). Teachers are able to view student work as they move through the lesson. This work is also saved so you can go back after the lesson and review student responses. 

Here is a video with more information about how to use Nearpod.

Pros and Cons

Nearpod is a great resource to use in the classroom for different reasons. Students can access Nearpod with any device. It allows the teacher to track on and off-task behavior. Before beginning a lesson, you can make sure there is 100% student participation. Teachers receive immediate feedback as well as post-session reports. Nearpod encourages independent work and promotes student accountability. After a lesson teachers can assign Time to Climb which is a tool to assess and measure students' understanding, similar to Kahoot. 


Even with all the benefits, Nearpod is not perfect. Unlike other online design tools, such as Classkick or Seesaw, Nearpod does not have the capability to differentiate work for students. As a co-teacher, I am unable to view student work unless logged into the lead teacher's account. This makes it difficult to track student progress on my own. 

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