Nearpod is a cool webtool for making interactive presentations that provide live feedback from your students. They can answer your questions, draw or label a picture, take a quiz, vote on a poll, fill-in-the-blank, and more! Ms. Middleton at Holladay Elementary wanted to learn more about it, so today I showed her 3rd graders a Nearpod activity I created about Greece and Rome (SOL3.1). I tried to showcase each feature: it includes (1) a poll about the occupations in ancient Greece and Rome, (2) a 2-question quiz about the building projects of these two civilizations, (3) a fill-in-the-blank activity about the geography, (4) a map students can draw on to locate Greece and Rome, (5) a matching memory test, and (6) a free response question. If you wanted to create your own Nearpod, you would log in with your Google account and click “Create.” Then you would add different slides by clicking the type of activity you wanted. You could also upload a PDF file and each page would become its own slide. When you finish, you click “Publish.” To start a live session with your class you would go to “My Library” and click “Live Lesson” on the slideshow you want to share with them. Nearpod will give you a PIN number for the lesson, and when students go to Nearpod, they just enter the PIN number. They don’t need to log in. Let me know if you’d like me to show Nearpod to your class!
