Nearpod

Information: Nearpod is a really neat tool to use in the world of education. You can create your own lessons or utilize a vast amount of free lessons provided on the site. Lessons can be used for any and all subjects and there are options for quizzes for progress monitoring purposes. 

Benefits: There are many benefits to using a tool like Nearpod in the classroom. The biggest benefit would have to be engagement. Nearpod is appealing to the eye and there are games, field trips, and activities that you can build in to each lesson. There are also ways to incorporate the use of Nearpod through whole group or individual devices.

Challenges: I struggled to come up with an idea for a lesson because most of my classroom lessons revolve around small group lessons and activities. As I have mentioned, I am a special education resource teacher so my students have specific goals that we work on. One of the goals many of my students work on is the 5 Ws (who, what, when, where, and why). So, I decided to do a small Nearpod lesson to introduce the skill. I read a story and included a matching game to demonstrate the skill being applied. Another challenge I faced that had to do with Nearpod directly was adding audio to my slides. I clicked on the microphone but there weren't any boxes or notifications to click on to begin recording, stop recording, or play recording. I tried multiple times on various slides but I was unable to figure it out.