Blog 11

I chose Nearpod from Mr. Wang's assessment tools because I think it has a lot of beneficial ways in which students can learn. Nearpod has lots of both fun as well as engaging activities that keep students engaged in classroom lessons.

Nearpod has plenty of opportunities for students to learn through activities such as polls, collaboration boards, game-based quizzes. Teachers also have opportunities to ask open-ended questions where students can work together or individually to draw out or write a response.

Ease of Use

Nearpod is a very easy tool to use as an educator because it gives the option to create a lesson inside the platform. From there a teacher can incorporate slides, videos, 3D models, and even VR field trips. A teacher can also work with premade templates, flip grid, draw it, and a class collaborative board. Nearpod has readily available access to all these different uses all while being simple to navigate through. Teachers can easily navigate through lessons in the library and keep track of which one goes where. As for student access, all they have to do is get on the app and insert the class code that goes with the lesson. Apps are really convenient to use with students because most schools have laptops available for use. If not most students could access this information at home from a laptop or smartphone. 

Here's a terrific instructional video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVmkS4nGq5E 

Versatility

I think it is very safe to say the Nearpod has extreme amounts of versatility for teachers to have the availability of using. This could range from lesson ideas all the way to templates to use and even involving fun interactive ways to learn. A couple of the lesson ideas a teacher could use are polls, collaboration boards, game-based quizzes. Nearpod can range from many different grade levels to subjects making it extremely beneficial to all grade bands. I love the options of differentiation it allows for in both teacher and student work. The sharing aspect is very nice students can work together and the teacher can link the lesson to fellow teachers through Nearpod itself or even good slides. Nearpods best attribute may be its thousands upon thousands of pre-made lessons that are accessible to all teachers. This is a very effective tool to know how to use in any classroom setting.

Likelihood of using it

I think after learning more and more about Nearpod I would love to dive into it deeper and see what kind of lessons are available and how easy they are to create. As of no I heavily incision myself using this platform because of how easy it seems to be for student use, teacher use, and teacher sharability. Having a platform to share lesson plans with other teachers is a great tool. I also really enjoy its template to choose from which is another amenity that makes this tool so great.

Connections to the course

I believe that Nearpod connects directly with the 7 strategies of technology by presenting the content, gaining attention, and presenting the learners the content.  Presenting the content would be any lesson you create through the tool since it would be how you share the lesson with students. Gaining attention would come easy with this tool because it has so many options that include games and group work. Also, anything online-related seems to grasp student attention very easily. Lastly, all the different lessons and templates make it convenient for a teacher to present students with lots of content. I believe Nearpod connects to all 3 of the TLCs. T1 planning is creating the lesson plan a teacher works on. From there T2 assessing can be done with interactive games and questions during or at the end of a lesson. As for T3, it connects to Nearpod by instructing the lesson that you are teaching, this means how are you engaging the students. Nearpod connects perfectly with all 3 of the TLCs no matter what lesson is being taught.