Learning English by fiddling with your phone 📱 - Nearpod

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In most cases, phones are forbidden in Chinese schools. Students are not supposed to use phones since their parents and teachers consider students would like to use phones to play the games or surf on the internet which will lead to divert their attention.

HOWEVER, using your phone to assist your teaching or learning is a creative way! Believe it or not, an increasing number of teachers or students have focused on the potential of their phones.

Today, I will introduce a website for learning or teaching in your phone in a positive way. This website is Nearpod 💡! (please click)

   

🔺Nearpod is a tool which can help teachers to create presentation, quiz, activities or integrate tasks in an interactive way, which can be used in students' electronic devices, such as mobile phone and ipad.

🔺The biggest difference between Nearpod and normal teaching techniques is whether teachers can create a flexible class. 

The functions of Nearpod

🔹First, teachers can use their phones to control the progress of their slides or images, which provides the possibility for moving around the classroom instead of standing in front of the computer. 

Teacher-pace📱

Teachers can combine presentation, collaboration and assessment. Moreover, they are able to manage information on their students' mobile device. Using Nearpod, teachers can insert video, image, polls and many activities into their presentation. After that,  the results of tasks can be retrieved by teachers.

🔹Second, there are two ways of learning for students. 📱

1️⃣ Asynchronous Nearpod use

 Teachers can send the code to their students. Students need to log in by entering this code. The code is created by teachers when when they upload the contents as the task, which can be quiz, poll or mixed activities. In this way, student can complete this task without any limitations of time or place.  They can complete tasks and answer the questions on their phones by setting 'student-paced', which can be more interactive and exciting. Students have a chance to control the progress according to their pace of learning. It is noteworthy that it is not limited by time or distance. That is the reason why it can be used in the long-distance teaching and learning.

➡️It provides the possibility of many education systems. I take the flipped teaching as an example.

  

 👩‍🏫 Flipped teaching

The notion of the flipped classroom has been popular in China recent years. An increasing number of schools prefer to use this mode to teach students. In particular, some pre-homework can be allocated by flipped teaching. Students can watch the video or other learning materials on Nearpod in order to learn knowledge on their own in an effective way. It is a very useful method to attract students' attention.

2️⃣ Synchronous Nearpod use

In the classroom, teachers can share the code to students and ask them to open Nearpod app or website to log in. Students can move around the classroom or outside the classroom to complete their tasks rather than sitting.

👩‍🏫 Large scale of class

It is a normal situation that you are in a large class and maybe you have 100 classmates. If you have some experience about this situation, you may consider it is hard for every student to interact with their teachers. Therefore, Nearpod can help to build the connection between teachers and students. Teachers can create a poll or relevant activities on Nearpod and capture information from their students. Every student are able to express their ideas to teachers.

👩‍🏫Field trip activities 

Field trip activities should be under teachers' control strictly. Nearpod can give a support for teachers to release tasks effectively and obtain students' pace in time. 

In my course, I experienced this function of Nearpod. My classmates and I were divided into 5 groups and each group were supposed to reach to different places. We need use Nearpod to understand steps of our task on our own. In the process of task, we did all the activities step by step and we need upload our result in every step. As our teacher, she could know which step we were in and our results of every step.

Although we arrived at destination without our teacher, we were still guided by the tasks on Nearpod and upload our feedback. Nearpod could provide us a platform to encourage our autonomous learning to some extent and we all felt motivated in the whole progress.

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There is a simple guidance for you.

➡️https://nearpod.com/

As a teacher, you can not only explore lessons on Nearpod but also create your own lesson.  If you are not good at create your own lesson, you can access to the 'Explore' page and learn or use these lessons for free. 

Please click 'Filters' to find the proper lesson for your class.

🔺price 🔺subjects 🔺resource type 🔺grades

There are four types of lessons which are provided for you. 

After learning from resources from the website, you may want to create your own lesson! There are some tips for you.

There is no doubt that the easiest way to create a lesson is to upload your slides directly. 

At the same time, you can upload various files to support your lesson, like PNG, PDF, PPT, etc.

You can choose three types of tasks.

1️⃣Add content

A number of contents will be supported to use in your lesson. For instance, I would like to upload a PDF file. 

My PDF file will be in the first page.

2️⃣ Add web content

3️⃣ Add activity

Like the first option, there are all kinds of activities which you can choose. For example, I would like to make a quiz for my students.

🔺Time 🔺Question(s) 🔺Answer(s)

Three factors should be includes in my quiz.

                   

After editing my lesson, we can use it in two ways, live lesson or student-paced.

There are also various functions on Nearpod which you should explore on your own.

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Judy's ideas about Nearpod


After knowing the relevant information and contents of Nearpod, I prefer to share some merits and limitations in my mind.

🔺Merits

I've already share a number of advantages of Nearpod in this post, but there are also other merits which I want to introduce to you.

1️⃣  Nearpod can provide a lesson for teachers who have a number of online students. Students in the class with Nearpod can interact with their teachers frequently. Nearpod helps teachers and students to communicate with each other effectively.

(💁🏻In my course, I found my teacher could observe the pace of our task and received our answer of each task in time. It could be a useful tool for teachers to supervise students in a positive way.)

2️⃣  Teachers would like to create a lesson and use it into two ways. Live lesson and student-paced lesson provide various teaching mode for teacher, such as flipped teaching or field trip activity.


3️⃣ Nearpod enables students to pay more attention to the learning materials and learning contents rather than their teachers. Each student in Nearpod lesson has a mobile device. They can focus on their own devices instead of sharing with others, which is the most effective way to learn.

🔺Limitations

1️⃣ As a teacher, you have to make sure each student in your class must have a mobile device because using Nearpod depends on the electronic device. For most Chinese schools, it is hard to be accomplished because students are under the risk of being distracted by mobile devices.

2️⃣ Most of lessons in the website are not free, which means you need to pay for it if you want to use one. Moreover, this website ha only 30-day trial period. 

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❤️ If you enjoy this website or find it useful to your language classes, please give me some comments or share your experience.
If you consider it has other drawbacks, please let me know. ❤️

Obviously, there are also other interesting functions in this website. Please navigate and explore by yourself. You must love it! ❤️

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💁🏻More information about Nearpod 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3GVkM_GVa4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQ8z3y4ICFU