Mobile Learning With Nearpod
Today, we go mobile in our journey to explore tools and resources to facilitate teaching and learning.
The mobile
phone is one of the wonders of the digital world. Mobile phones have taken the
lion’s share in the lives of 21st-century citizens. Even in the
remotest corners of the earth, mobile phones have made their way into
households. Students are not left out. In fact, they are the majority of users of
mobile phones.
There is a
hot and ongoing debate on whether to allow mobile phones in the classroom. The discussion
is proof that mobile phones have a vital role in the field of
education.
While hoping
that partisans of mobile phones in schools win the debate, let’s see what to do
with the mobile phones out of the classroom.
In this article, I take a look at Nearpod.
What is Nearpod?
Nearpod is
an all in one solution for classroom activities. It is an interactive online platform
for creating teaching and learning activities. Think of PowerPoint slideshows,
Google Slides, PDFs, Videos, and YouTube content and how you can streamline all of
them on a single platform. Nearpod offers just that!
How Nearpod works
First, get your PowerPoint, videos, and slides ready for the lesson you want to teach. If you are a busy teacher, pick from ready-to-use customizable formats from Nearpod.
The platform boasts more than 15500 ready-made formats to
choose from. So there are formats to suit all needs.
In addition
to being an incredible lesson plan builder, Nearpod also transforms the lesson
into interactive content.
The platform
can transform the content of your lesson into a game to engage your
learners. These games can be in the form of quizzes, polls, formative evaluations,
simulations, and interactive media.
Also, with
Nearpod, a teacher can assist learners in groups or individually to improve an
area of difficulty. Nearpod offers a report on a student’s performance. Teachers can
give assignments to students and receive a report of their performance via
email.
You might now
be asking what mobile phones have to do with this. Nearpod works like
Kahoot. It has a lesson planning platform and an interactive platform for
remote learning. Each content created by the teacher has a code to
interact with the content.
There are
two options to deliver the content. The content can be delivered in a live
session with students participating in the class with the teacher at the same
time. It can also be delivered in a remote session where students participate
from the comfort of their homes.
Students
can access the content through their mobile phones and at home. In a
context where mobile phones are not allowed in the classroom, the live
session might be challenging for the teacher using mobile phones. That is only
possible in a context where the school provides other digital tools like laptops.
This is
where the remote session comes in handy. All the students need is the code to
the lesson to access it from their mobile from home. It is excellent for
flipped learning, where students are exposed to the material to be covered in
class before the actual lesson.
Cons
Like
any good tool out there, there are not always perfect. In the case of Nearpod, accessing
all the platform's features requires a subscription. There is a free plan, but the features are basic and limited. The free version makes it possible
to save data for only 100 MB.
My
take
Nearpod is a tool worth exploring. It is very useful for large classroom management where it is not possible to attend to the need of individual students within the time frame of a lesson. Via students’ individual reports, a teacher can organise remedial classes.
(All images credit: Nearpod)
