Instant Feedback: Progress Monitoring with Nearpod by: Cathy Yenca
This week, I was looking at a selection of iBooks from Apple's One Best Thing collection. If you haven't heard of this collection before, Apple takes a group of very special educators, which they call the Apple Distinguished Educators, ADEs for short, and asks them to write a book showing the use of Apple technologies to transform teaching and learning. Each of these books features a unit, lesson, or best practice and serves as a resource for all educators.
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The One Best Thing collection holds a variety of resources from educators in all sorts of different fields. The iBook that appealed the most to me however was Instant Feedback: Progress Monitoring with Nearpod, written by Cathy Yenca.
Cathy Yenca is a middle school mathematics teacher in a school with a 1:1 iPad initiative in Austin, TX. She is, of course, part of Apple's Distinguished Educator class of 2013, graduated with her bachelor in science of Education degree from Clarion University of Pennsylvania in secondary education/mathematics, and graduated with her masters in Education from Wilkes University, Pennsylvania in the area of classroom technology. Obviously, she has made great use of technology within her own classroom and has been using her education to the immense benefit of her students.
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The iBook begins with an introduction from Yenca herself expressing how fantastic the technology she is advocating for can be. For those of you who may not be familiar, Nearpod is a wonderful little app that can be used a million different ways in a classroom to benefit not only your students, but also to help you improve your lessons, teaching methods, and in assessing student understanding right in your lesson. The app itself is free, but if you want a larger class size and additional features, you should upgrade.
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As the iBook continues, Yenca demonstrates how different features of the app work, while praising its ease of use for students and teachers alike. One major key tool in this product is its ability to embed questions, whiteboards, and videos into lessons with ease. These questions, because they are embedded, can be answered by every student giving the teacher "instant feedback" on what the understanding of the students is. The feature that I truly have come to love through my own use of Nearpod however, is the ability for me to share student responses with my class without having to call out the person who submitted it. This takes so much pressure off of students who may have previously been too shy to participate while simultaneously allowing me to show off exceptional student work or to address common problems anonymously without putting attention on any one student. This privacy feature also allows my students to tell me privately, during the lesson, if they are feeling lost without having to let the class know or interrupting the lesson.
All in all, this iBook opened my eyes to new ways to use technology in the classroom without it being a distraction or a hinderance. Sometimes more technology can be better than less, as long as its educational expectations are being met. I love using Nearpod and this iBook made me appreciate it even more. I'm especially excited to look at more of these One Best Thing iBooks to learn more about new ideas in education that can make technology integration a little less intimidating.