Innovative Instructional Tools

This week, we were tasked with searching some different instructional tools and choosing one to create a lesson. This was a perfect activity for me because my school follows a year round calendar and our students 1st day will be here in a few short weeks. I’ve been working on calendars, plans and tests but haven’t devoted as much time to my instructional materials. I knew I wanted to create something that we could use to teach our first Social Studies unit – School Rules. After looking through as many options as I could handle, I decided to go with Nearpod. I’ve heard of Nearpod before and had a very brief ‘training’ a few summers ago but I had never used it in my classroom and certainly did not know how to go about creating my own lesson. My first task was to figure out what Nearpod really is.

Nearpod allows you to create interactive lessons quickly and easily. You can import pictures, videos, audio files, webpages, pdfs and more. You can also add any of Nearpod’s interactive features like virtual field trips, polls, quizzes, and 3D objects as well. Your lessons consist of slides like you would find in a Power Point. However, with Nearpod you can share a live lesson with students (they will have a code to put in their device), and the lesson will be synced to all devices. I think that’s a great way to keep students engaged during lessons because they have it right there in their hands. I spent a lot of time looking at all of the interactive features they have to offer, but decided that for this lesson it was better if I did not add any. If you don’t know, the beginning of the year in 1st grade can be challenging for both teachers and students. When they get to my class, they’re basically still Kindergarteners so it’s imperative that we focus on learning and following the rules or the year could be lost. I think I will be able to add in some interactive features after mid-quarter and I’m sure my students will be thrilled to try them out! *I considered PlayPosit because I have seen it before and thought it would be fun to try, but I think that would be better suited for after Christmas break. My students are not at all experienced with computers. Seeing as I can’t be at 19 computers at the same time, I decided to wait until I’ve had some time to teach them computer skills.

Check Nearpod out if you haven’t already!

I liked how easy it was to import my content into the lesson. I was able to add in all of my supporting videos, links to activities and a pdf file. I can easily share this lesson with my coworkers and add to it as necessary. It will take away the burden of moving from site to site for all of our resources. We only have 30 minutes each day for Social Studies so there is no time to waste! In the future, I can see us using Nearpod as our main resource for Social Studies and Science because it will make things much easier for us and for our students to follow. The bulk of our day is spent teaching phonics and number sense because it is our job to build the foundation with our students. Social Studies and Science tend to get thrown in with other subjects and put on the back burner so I see this as a way to create fully functional and engaging lessons that our students can follow and eventually we can add in our tests/quizzes.

The biggest challenge I had creating my lesson was trying to figure out how to format my slides so they looked like I wanted. I’m pretty particular about how things look and how they will present and I wasn’t a fan of the available themes. I thought about uploading images for backgrounds but that didn’t work the way I wanted it to. I ended up creating my slides in Power Point and uploading them to my Nearpod lesson. Power Point has tons of themes that I already know and love so it was not very hard once I got started. This lesson only covers the first month of school, so I will continue to add to. Our unit will last for the entire quarter. Overall, I’m very excited to have this in my teacher toolkit!

Check out my lesson here! Join with this code: GBVRD