In this post I’ll be showing you two new Nearpod updates for early 2021, digital whiteboards and activity templates.
As we’ve now come to expect, Nearpod is continuing to add new features to its already robust interactive lesson building platform, and these new updates only build upon what was already a rock-solid case that Nearpod has a place in pretty much any classroom.
The Digital Whiteboard in Nearpod
The digital whiteboard update is important because it allows you to do something that wasn’t really possible in Nearpod before: quickly jumping in and making instructional adjustments on the fly.
Now, all you need to do is click “Open Whiteboard,” and a digital whiteboard will pop up on your screen as well as your students’ screens. Once open, you can use the different annotation tools to type out text or draw on your board. As you are adding to your board, students will see what you are teaching in real time. Then once you close out the board, it will return to the Nearpod slide you were just on.
Quickly Reteach in Nearpod using the Whiteboard
The digital whiteboard gives you the flexibility to pause a lesson and quickly reteach concepts as needed.
For example, let’s say that students are working on a Phet simulation in Nearpod to practice fractions and then you assign a short quiz afterwards as a check for understanding. If you notice that some students are still struggling, you could pull up the whiteboard to jump in and give a quick mini-lesson. You might use the text box tool to write the steps and the draw tool to show them how to solve the problem.
Then, to make sure students understood, you could click “Add Activity” and then add a Draw It activity so that students would have to show the steps for converting mixed numbers to fractions on their own versions of a whiteboard.
Activity Templates in Nearpod
The next Nearpod update is that they’ve embedded pre-made templates directly into the lesson builder for three slide types: Time to Climb, Matching Pairs, and Draw It.
Time to Climb is a quiz game, and the way this used to work when you used the lesson builder was that you would basically just have to write up all your own questions from scratch.
Pre-created lessons did exist beforehand, but they were in the Nearpod library, and it was a little cumbersome to integrate the pre-made activities with your own custom lessons.
Now, however, all you need to do is go up to “Explore Time to Climb Library” and search for a quiz game template you’re looking for. So let’s say you just taught a lesson about character development in your ELA class. Just search for your key term, such as “characters” and see what pre-created quizzes pop up. Select the one you want to check out, and you’ll see that it auto-populates the Time to Climb game with pre-created questions and answers that you can also edit or add additional questions to by clicking “Add Question.”
Then once you get students into your lesson, you’ll have a quiz review game already set up in a fraction of the amount of time it would take you to write your own.
Similarly, you can also find pre-made templates for Matching Pairs activities. Just like Time to Climb, when you open Matching Pairs, you’ll see the templates on the right-hand side and you can scroll through them or search for something specific you’re looking for.
Let’s say for example that you’re teaching the American Revolution. You could pull in a pre-made activity where students would have to match key events with dates, and then of course you can still add your own pair to the template by clicking “Add Pair.”
If you haven’t used Matching Pairs before, the way it works with students is that they try to correctly match the cards by clicking on one and then clicking on the other card that matches. If they get it right, they’ll see a green check and they won’t be able to select those cards again. If they get it wrong, they’ll see red x’s, and they’ll have to keep trying.
Lastly, the Draw It Tool also now has embedded pre-created activities for you to pull into your custom Nearpod lessons.
Like Matching Pairs and Time to Climb, when you find a topic you’re looking for, just click on it and it will add a background that students can draw directly on top of. Then after you bring a template in, you can also write your own custom instructions for how students should interact with it.
I think the Draw It tool is one of the most useful activities in Nearpod, and now, with these embedded templates, it’s even more functional. Whether it’s the periodic table of elements, generic graphic organizers, Venn diagrams, compare and contrast charts, All About Me posters, or grammar practice, there’s a Draw It template for numerous different types of activities.
Conclusion & Additional Resources
The digital whiteboard and activity template updates make Nearpod an even more dynamic, user-friendly teaching tool. Stay tuned for an upcoming post about another exciting update exclusively for district and school accounts: Teacher Slide Annotations.
If you’re interested in learning more about teaching with Nearpod, check out these videos on my channel:
How to Teach Remotely with Nearpod
How to Create Custom Interactive Lessons in Nearpod
For additional strategies for how to use technology to personalize learning, increase engagement, foster creativity, and more, click here:
How to Use Education Technology: The Ultimate Guide
And to read more about why I believe technology must be a central part of public education today, click here:
Why Education Technology?: The Ultimate Guide
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