Nearpod: Using Mobile Technology for Language Teaching and Learning

If you are thinking of using Mobile technology in the classroom, Nearpod can be one of the best options. It is easy to handle and has an attractive interface. You can develop your interactive lessons in a short while if you have already got your content and general outline. Its layout and transition look like a set of PowerPoint slides but you can make them interactive enough having developed some exercises for the learners to work on. You can add activities such as open-ended questions, quiz, polls, fill in the blanks activities, collaborative activities, etc.

For students, they can download Nearpod app in their either one of the devices such as smartphones, tablets and laptops and get the lessons in a form of a live lesson which is teacher-paced or student-paced. In a student-paced lesson, students can control the pace of the lessons and move forward getting involved in the lessons. Since they have been built as mobile devices friendly, students can also go out of the class to carry out research on something, add required pictures and videos and submit finally. On the other hand, in a live lesson, the teacher can control the pace of the lessons and all the students can see the pages/slides on the screen of their devices. They cannot move to the next slides unless the teacher moves for everyone. So since everyone gets their lessons at their screen, they don't require multimedia projector in the classroom while Nearpod is getting operated. Nearpod also adds the gaming feature to the lessons involving students in a kind of competitive task.

                                         

Next interesting feature of Nearpod is, once the students submit their answers, you can show them their progress report immediately or download it and save it for your future purpose.

How to Create?

At first, create an account in www.nearpod.com and log into it. Now click on ‘create’ button on the right colourful section. There appears ‘untitled session’ and ‘setting’. Click on ‘setting’ next to ‘untitled session’ and add your lesson’s name, description, grade and subject and submit it. Now you are ready to add slides. Click on ‘add slides’ which will lead you to ‘add content’, ‘add web content’ or ‘add activities’ sections. Click one of them as per your lesson outline which further lead you to specify the content or activities as other details are seen beneath this section. Select one of them and develop activities.

Once you have developed a slide, you can preview it, and further, you can add as many slides as you need. For more information, you can visit this tutorial video.

No doubt, Nearpod can be one of the best tools for mobile teaching and learning as it has its greater affordance to have interactive activities and content; however, it has some limitations too. We will discuss its advantages and limitations in the following points.

Advantages:

1.    It is mobile-devices-friendly so the activities of the lesson can be done even outside the class in a form of group work during the same class hour.

2.    No multimedia projector is required. Therefore, a teacher can use students’ smart phones as the resources for teaching and learning while delivering lesson through Nearpod.

3.    While having debates about the effective use of cell phones for language learning in the class, the affordance of Nearpod has come as a support for mobile devices for language teaching and learning.

4.    Nearpod provides a lot of features for interactive and collaborative tasks.

5.    The post-activity evaluation report is useful for teacher to see how far the lesson delivery could achieve the expected outcome on the basis of which he/she could modify/adjust his future activities.

Limitations:

1.    It has a limited free version after which a teacher/ an institution needs to pay quite a lot of sum in a yearly basis if it is decided to be used further.

2.    While developing content, it doesn’t let you format the content and other illustrations and videos (as regards the choice of placement) in the slides.

3.    However, mobile-devices-friendly it is, doing task in the small screen of smart phones is always not so easy, and at times, the quality of smart phones also affects the pace of task completion.  

I hope that this very brief posting helped you get little about Nearpod. You may try to create a lesson for your classroom and try out.