Since my last entry, Edtech Elixirs has hit a happy birthday milestone. My first entry was August 1, 2014. That makes the blog five years old, with an average of a thousand views per entry (as of today, 141 entries and over 141,000 views)! Not coincidentally -- as the blog began partially as a resource for Shelby educators -- I also had my five year anniversary with the district as well. As always, I thank my blog readers for giving me the audience to share my edtech findings and think-alouds, and I thank Shelby County for allowing me to follow my edtech integration passion.
And now onto today's topic focus . . .
Back in June, I attended the third annual Deeper Learning Symposium hosted by Jefferson County Public Schools. One of the presenters was Danna Pearsall, who shared her knowledge on Nearpod. I learned about a few new features, including the ability for students to take (and then download) notes while participating in a Nearpod Presentation. These notes -- complete with the slides themselves --- can even be added to their own Google Drive! (It should be noted that the notes feature is only available if the presenter gets the paid version of Nearpod. More on that in a bit.)
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| An example page from downloaded student notes. This is a premium "Gold" (i.e. paid) feature of Nearpod and needs to be enabled by the teacher. |
Before I go any further, I should mention that Nearpod itself feels like an old friend that I actually first tried out back in my classroom teaching days. When I came to Shelby, it was one of the earliest edtech tools I recommended to staff, and I wrote about our teachers using it in the first year of Edtech Elixirs. As much as I admired Nearpod in the past, I continue to be impressed as it grows, thrives and improves in 2019 and beyond.
What is Nearpod? Put simply, it is a teacher-paced, guided presentation tool with interactive elements that can help you assess your students in real time, as well as give you data reports to analyze later. Although you can create a presentation from scratch inside Nearpod, most will prefer importing a finished one into the platform, and that is where I want to make a tangent before discussing more about the tool itself. The real power of a tool like Nearpod is that it is a schema scaffold for tech-hesitant teachers to expand their edtech integration ability into the classroom.
How do we reflect on the deepness and richness of edtech implementation? Consider SAMR as a way of analyzing the net effect (pun intended!) of when technology is integrated into a classroom lesson:
- Substitution is where new tech replaces old digital/analog tools, but the task is unchanged.
- Augmentation is the same task, but there is more functionality and improvement of effectiveness because of the technology.
- In Modification, you have redesigned parts of the task, and begin to see the transformative nature of the technology use.
- Redefinition is the ultimate transformative experience that usually reaches an audience or collaborators outside of the four walls of the classroom. Here, we design and create tasks previously inconceivable thanks to the technology.
The act of going from S/A to M/R means going from tech enhancement to tech transformation of what a learning experience can be, as well as going from a teacher-centered to a student-centered environment. Who is making the tech choices? Are students creating or consuming? Put another way, if the electricity and Internet go out, a S/A lesson can theoretically be improvised and continue ("I'll guess I'll lecture without pictures," or "I'll hand out a multiple choice quiz on paper instead") whereas a M/R lesson would be dead in the water.
Understanding SAMR is all well and good, and most teachers can make a Substitution move fairly easily, such as going from an overhead projector to a PowerPoint. The struggle is finding a pragmatic way to get to "AMR" edtech integrations. Here it is a question both of appropriate tools that stretch without overwhelming the educator, as well as finding a judgment-free way for the educator to grow their pedagogy. While Substitution often (but not always!) is typical of a traditional pedagogical environment (i.e. direct instruction, lecture-minded, teacher-centered), it is unrealistic to assume an experienced teacher can or even should jettison all of their former skills and tools to move into a transformative pedagogy. Indeed, there are times that Substitution (or no tech at all!) might be best, or traditional lectures and direct instruction may be necessary to properly meet the specific and contextual academic objectives at hand. The only concern is being stuck in an instructional rut of always doing Substitution/traditional approaches when other ways might be more effective or impactful on learning.
And that is why a tool like Nearpod can be a powerful tool, especially for teachers just learning to grow their edtech practice. Nearpod's original genius was its assumption that many teachers already have a storehouse of instructional material -- PowerPoints. Nearpod makes it easy to import these pre-existing PowerPoints into Nearpod Presentations. All that's left is adding interactive elements such as polls, open ended questions, "draw it" features, and quizzes. When a teacher is ready, he/she turns the Nearpod Presentation into a live session. A nice bonus: since the session will be pushed to the students' screens, you don't need a main projector or display. A student doesn't need to create an account; the teacher's live session generates a unique code only good for the current event, and a student easily joins the session with that code and signs in by providing their name. (While there are apps for Nearpod that makes it somewhat easier to join a session from a mobile device, any device with a browser and Internet access will do.) The pacing -- that is, when the slides advance -- is completely in control of the teacher. When interactive elements occur, teachers can see the data in real time, and even share a student answer anonymously to all the screens for the sake of discussion or highlighting a good model example. At the end of the live session, a final report is generated for the teacher where you can review the data/answers from all the interactive elements as a PDF. Thus, Nearpod's potential for Augmentation and beyond can be plainly seen. Students are interacting with the teacher, content and each other in new ways; a teacher can use the assessment data to impact and change instruction in real time as well as for future planning; a student can think and reflect more deeply via the interactive assessments than a Scantron bubble test could ever reveal. And imagine if, instead of Slides and PowerPoints, students created Nearpods to lead interactive presentations, or to gather data from a user group as part of a Design Thinking invention process! In short, Nearpod allows for genuine blended learning.
Here is a video which demonstrates how Nearpod led an instructor from his former mode of PowerPoint presentations and pushed him forward to a transformative classroom (1:13):
It should be noted that while the features mentioned above can all be done with the free Nearpod version, paid versions exist (currently $120 and up annually for an individual license) that give additional tools. The licensing is based on a teacher, or "creator" account -- a student participating in Nearpods never has to pay or even make an account. Additional features for the paid version include some additional interactive/inserted material elements (such as inserting YouTube videos), increased online storage space for your Nearpod Presentations (from 100 MB to 1 GB and up**), enabling the student notes feature mentioned earlier, and perhaps most importantly, the ability for students to do a Nearpod Presentation "anytime, anywhere" (perhaps personalized to student needs!) instead of only when a teacher makes a live session.
If you are interested in pre-made Nearpod Presentations, there is an online store. Thanks to a multitude of partnerships with companies such as Common Sense Media, Teaching Tolerance, CK-12, PhET, Newsela, and BBC Worldwide, the catalog is deep, with high quality lessons across a wide gamut of content and grade levels. However, while some of these are free, many of them cost from a few dollars for a single lesson up to approximately $30 for a bundle.
Other features of Nearpod that have been added in the last few years include:
- Google Slides Add-On. There already was a free Chrome Extension (Nearpodize) that could take your Google Slides and convert them into a Nearpod Presentation. However, you can now easily insert interactive material while creating your Slides, then upload it all to Nearpod. From the Slides menu, choose Add-Ons > Get add-ons and search for Nearpod. Read here for more details.
- Nearpod 3D. You have a gallery of over 100 three dimensional, manipulatable objects to insert into your presentation. Students can rotate them and zoom in and out. The gallery categories are Ancient Times, Amazing Places and Things, Environment, Human Body, and Microscopic. Read here to find out more.
- Nearpod VR. Imagine taking your students on a virtual field trip and seeing a place in a 360 degree environment. Nearpod has an extensive amount of VR Presentations in their store -- some free, some not. Two things are outstanding about Nearpod VR. Firstly, there are incredible choices across multiple contents -- even ELA and math! (Recently, lessons were added that incorporate Historical Perspectives and Literacy, which fits nicely with new social studies standards.) Secondly, Nearpod VR works fine on any device, including Chromebooks. While phones in goggle headsets may make VR more immersive, Nearpod VR requires no special equipment or setup. For more details, read here.
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| The Nearpod Google Slides Add On allows you to insert activities while composing your Slides, which then can easily be uploaded / converted to a Nearpod Presentation. Note that some of these activity options only work with the paid version. |
If there was a downside to Nearpod, it is definitely the price point for the premium features. While I appreciate what you get for free, and that the paid licenses have likely enabled Nearpod to endure and improve for all these years, I just wish there was a tier between free and $120+. Perhaps a middle option of $20-30 a year to allow student to take notes and teachers to give students Nearpod Presentations that are personalized "anytime / anywhere" lessons/homework?
Nearpod starts with existing edtech schema and pedagogy (PowerPoints, direct instruction, lecture) and builds upon it to create a deeper learning experience. I could mention other edtech examples that do the same, such as Google Docs, which takes what teachers and students already know about word processor programs and has the potential to improve the task of writing itself (i.e., Google Docs allows students to have real-time collaboration and use Comments for more effective peer feedback). The point here is that tools like Nearpod and Google Docs stand on the threshold between traditional and transformational pedagogy. These tools are part of a much needed bridge of a larger transitional pedagogical framework, necessary for improving not just edtech integration, but the nature of teaching and learning itself.
**Update: the storage size is updated, as of 8/14/20. As with all edtech, other elements of Nearpod described in this entry may also change over time.
