Making live lessons interactive - going to do a thread about @nearpod, a free app which you can use during a live or non live lessons to make your lessons more interactive and get excellent feedback from students #edtech #remotelearning #remoteteaching

1. http://Nearpod.com  is free to all teachers, you can sign up with your Google or Office365 email, or create an account. Once you do that and log in, you land on this page (image 2). Click create and then lesson

2. You can upload an existing PowerPoint or resource that you have, and it will load into NearPod - this can take a few minutes depending on how big your resource is

3. Time to add some interaction. Click on Add Slide then Activities. I've added an open ended question and a collaborate board to mine, but there are loads of different ones you can use, depending on the activities within your resource

4. When you do add an activity in, it always seems to enter at the end of my slide deck, you can drag the activity to where you want it to be in your presentation

5. Once you are finished, click save and exit down the bottom, it will prompt you to give your lesson a title if you haven't done so already and then click save.

6. Sharing it with students - start your live lesson in Teams/Google Classroom, hover over the lesson to bring this menu up. If you are doing a live lesson, click live participation. Give the code to the students, and they watch in a web browser but listen through Teams etc

7. Students go to http://Nearpod.com  and type in the code and enter their name. You as the teacher can see what students are in, and can remove them if they don't put in their correct name by clicking the participants list (bottom left) & clicking the x alongside their name

8. When you are ready to start and students are in the class, you click the arrow to start the lesson. My first activity here is an open question. This is a student view of the first question, that they can type in an answer and click submit

9. Teacher view - I can see what students have replied and their answers, I see what % of the class answers and can verbally praise. By clicking hide student names, then share, I can anonymously share and then discuss really good answers. Image 2 is what student sees shared anon.

10. Collaboration board - you can approve student comments before they are posted and by clicking the hide/show student names they can be posted anonymously, but you as the teacher can still see them.

11. What a student sees on a collaboration board - they can input more than once. If they like a post it note and agree with it, they can click on the heart symbol in the right hand corner of the post it note. Image 2: as the teacher you can change the order of the notes

12. To finish the session, click the white arrow alongside the Nearpod logo and click end session.

13. This can be given as self paced learning, which will be a different code to the live participation one. I would leave collaboration spaces out in self paced learning as every student can see every response and just use open ended questions/quizzes/matching.

14. To access the reports hover over the lesson, click the three dots and click reports. Click on the presentation and whichever session you want to view engagement and student responses for

15. This is a brief overview of two of the 10 different activities available on Nearpod and only a fraction of the things you can do. I'd suggest creating an account, upload a PPT, put in some activities, open Nearpod on a 2nd device or incognito mode to see what a student sees

16. Try it out yourself from a teacher perspective and a student perspective. Ideally the whole presentation is there and students listen via Teams etc, but you could just create the activities & nothing else, then share the code, depending on your students and their tech.

17. I will stick this as a blog tomorrow to join my other two!

Microsoft Teams Notes -> https://edtechinaction.co.uk/microsoft-teams 

My two blogs on synchronous and asynchronous approaches are here -> https://edtechinaction.co.uk/blog