Using Nearpod for Collaborative Learning

I am sure you have heard about Nearpod and seen it on the district website of online learning resources, alongside many others.  I know that there are sooo many resources our district has graciously purchased or shared with us to support us in our online learning.  So I am going to spend some time just talking about ONE aspect of Nearpod here today. 

First off, what is Nearpod? Nearpod helps educators make any lesson interactive whether in the classroom or virtual. The concept is simple. A teacher can create interactive presentations that can contain Quiz's, Polls, Videos, Collaborate Boards, and more.

In this blog, I am only going to be talking about how to use the Nearpod Collaborate Board as a collaborative learning tool.  I think the biggest part of online learning that's killng me (and the kids) is that they're missing the student interaction and collaborative learning structures that we use so routinely in the classroom. If you've been through Kagan training and implemented those collaborative learning structures in you classroom before, you know the power behind them and how positively they effect student learning, growth, and confidence.

"Collaborate! is a Nearpod feature that allows you to set up an interactive board for brainstorming, sharing text and images. You add the boards, students simply add their ideas. You can moderate these boards from your Teacher Dashboard, reordering them and sharing them." CLICK HERE to learn more about his feature.

Ways I use the Nearpod Collaborate Board in my 5th Grade Classroom:

1)  ELA Wonders Curriculum: I use this feature in many ways throughout the Wonders curriculum.  I use it with the Day 1 introduce the concept question that is in the Reading Writing Workshop book.  I also use it at the end of the week with the essential question to help them brainstorm ideas before they start their RACES writing.  I also use it with the Making Connections questions that are throughout the student stories in their text books (you can see this below).

2) Community Circle Discussion Questions: I also setup Nearpod with our community circle question.  We start our day with a community circle question each morning, and most days we do it on Nearpod.  I read their posts aloud as they post them.  I then ask if anyone wants to share their thoughts outloud.  This way, every child is held accountable to responding, but for those super shy introverrted kiddos they're not forced to share out loud if they feel uncomfortable

3)Eureka Math Student Debrief: Often times I pick one of the student debrief questions and have them do it on the Nearpod collaborative board as you can see here. This is from the 5th Grade Eureka Math Module 1 Lesson 14 student debrief. It's really amazing to see all the connections they're making in math.  If I didn't provide them this opportunity to share with each other, they'd be missing out on this really powerful component of a Eureka Math lesson. 

So if you've been searching for a way to bring that collaboration piece back into your virtual online classroom, I hope this helps!!

Virtually Learning,

Megan Brown

megan.brown@omsd.net