Nearpod

Smart phone and pad these technology devices have become more important in people’s daily life. The teaching classes can utilize these devices to facilitate teaching. Nearpod is one of the most effective teaching aids. To some extent, I believe it can replace PowerPoint to give students teaching instructions.

These basic functions of this software can be used freely. This software aims to facilitate teaching in class, so it can help tutors monitor the students’ activities and control the pace of teaching. Now, I want to give an instruction to you on how to use this tool.

How to use it?

Firstly, you have to set up an account. You could set it up with your Google account or Microsoft account.

Then you can design your own lesson. This design process is similar to PowerPoint. You can just simply click the “Add slide” frame to add slides.

You have three choices on how to design your content: content, web content, activity. When you add content, you can select add slide, video, or slide show, etc.

The web content allows you to link a website to your design. The last section is about adding activity, where you can involve many interactive activities in your design.

When you have finished designing. It’s time for you to start your live session.

After you click the “live session” button, the system will form a pin automatically. After your learners tap the code in their own devices, they will gain the access to this live session.

One of the most interesting functions is the polling activity. Students can vote for the activities, and the teacher can get the statistic of the answers from the software. Similar with polling, the results of quiz will show to the teachers as well. Each student's answer will be showed in the table, but the students won’t get access to that, so only the teacher can see each student's situation.

“Draw it” is also one creative features. Teacher can add a picture into slide, and the students could draw or write something to highlight the answer in pictures. After they send the results to the teacher, the teacher can select some typical work to the whole class, which can lead a discussion.

You may feel worried about if the students are following the teaching process. It is easy to monitor them. If the logo besides the pin on the top turn into red, it means one student is no longer in this session. When you click it you will find out who is not in. Thus, this is helpful for monitoring, even in a distance teaching.

China?

Since in China classes usually have a large number of students, the engagement of students is very limited. Moreover, in the traditional classroom, the students whose seat at the back of the classroom cannot see the blackboard in front of the classroom. Furthermore, the online English course is very popular in China these years, however the interactive activities are very rare, this tool can help overcome these drawbacks, as long as the students and teachers can get access to the internet and the devices are available in the classroom teaching.

Drawback

This software has a high requirement on internet quality. Once the students get lost to the internet, the students will drop off the session.

Secondly, once the teacher starts the statistics, the students cannot continue answering the question anymore.

I hope the software can be helpful in your teaching process. I saw who hold the gold membership using some cooler functions. If you are really interested in this software, you can have a try.