NearPod as a Teaching Device

When I began teaching I felt safe and comfortable standing in front of a PowerPoint presentation and giving out questions on paper. Now, I feel that I have grown into the role of teacher and have been looking to bring more variety to my lessons.
It is not that PowerPoints are an ineffective way of teaching, I just felt that my lessons were becoming formulaic and predictable. I needed new ways to engage the learner.

This is where NearPod comes in.

Introduced to me through the E-Learning module, NearPod is an interactive presentation tool that connects with the learners through an app on their mobile devices.
When I first analysed the website i wasn't that impressed. I found the slide tools to be clunky and limited and I found very little room for customization.
However, my desire to use technology in the classroom drove me to look for a way around this. I discovered that I could screen-cap my PowerPoint slides and insert them as images. Although this limited the slides to a now still image, I was able to create effective and engaging presentations.

The beauty of NearPod is that both the presentation and any activities you may insert appear on the mobile device screens. This means that the students can interact with the presentation and answer questions in either a:
Poll
Multiple Choice Question
Open Ended Question
Matching Game
Fill in the Blanks Activity
And the answers to those questions appear on the whiteboard shortly after the students post them.

Although it may not seem as world changing as I am making it out to be, the students did really enjoy the experience. The novelty of being allowed to use a mobile device in the classroom and having the ability to create humorous nicknames for their answers provides an exciting and engaging change of pace for the students. So much so that they have fervently requested more lessons which involve the app.

For anyone who is pondering using NearPod I would advise you to stick at it. There may be an initial dislike of the clunky features but once you work around these the variety of activities available and the enthusiasm students have shown towards the lessons are more than worth it.