Nearpod

Avantages

I most enjoy Nearpod's customizable lesson platform. A teacher can include assessments, polls, virtual field trips, and even links to outside sources throughout their lesson. Nearpod's ability to keep every student on the same slide at the same time is also powerful for classroom management.

Inconvénients

The only negative aspect of Nearpod is that not all of the features are free. I wish I was able to utilize all the site's function's without having to pay, but I do feel that Nearpod is worth paying for.

Avantages

Everything was good until they stole my content.

Inconvénients

Their user policy.I am very upset about the Nearpod policies, and I am going to complain on every venue that I can. I have been a paying gold membership on Nearpod for 5 years. My account has always been paid automatic, so I did not have to concern myself. When my card got stolen and I had to replace it, of course the number had to change. I did realize that my membership had expired. When I went to do my lessons all of one class lessons that I had accumulated over the 5 years was gone. When I contacted Nearpod they told me they would return them when I renew my gold membership. I asked them how they could take the lessons that I created on a paid subscription. If anything, they can prevent me from making new one but the ones that are created, I have already paid for, they are mine. They said because it is on their platform. This is utterly ridiculous and a misuse of the monopoly. In 5 years of using Nearpod, I know I have brought them thousands of customers from my university and other educational institutions that I work with. I loved them and could not get enough of them. NOW I AM THROUGH WITH THEM. I CAN’T BELIEVE THEY ARE TAKING BACK SOMETHING THAT I PAID FOR 5 YEARS!!! I WILL LET EVERYONE KNOW.

Avantages

Nearpod offers a pleathora of features and options to make learning engaging for it's users (students for example).

Inconvénients

Personally, I found it very challenging to use. The amount of time needed to invest in creating and inputing content was not worth the return.

Avantages

Activities that you can create to engage students. Love the time to climb and interactive features. Like that you can embed videos and use what others have created

Inconvénients

It can be time consuming to create activities and turn a PowerPoint into something interactive.

Avantages

In these times when students have too many distractors and consume too many information, I found that Nearpod allows me to center the students attention and participation in an easy and fun way. It also allows me to execute my lesson plan more accurately in terms of the learning process goals and objectives. The platform is easy to use for both, teachers and students.

Inconvénients

I don´t find any cons at this moment. I rather say that it is in constantly development

Alternatives envisagées 

Pourquoi passer à Nearpod

Avantages

I like the funcionality of nearpod in allowing the creation an sharing of a lesson in a fun format. With Nearpod, I can import a lesson that I have already created in Google slides, power point or I can create them through nearpod. I can embed a virtual field trip, musical links and audio files throughout my created lesson. As I am giving a live lesson, each student sees my annotations and discovers for themselves the lesson, as it allows themm to individually work through an assignment.

Inconvénients

Nearpod does not make it easy for me to see what my students are doing all at the same time. It does not let me see the notes that they took.

Avantages

Nearpod is a must-have tool for educators. It is engaging and has students interacting with their education. Nearpod has a free version that contains a lot of features but also has a paid version. Nearpod has so many different ways to make lessons interactive. They also have an extensive library of well-developed lessons and they keep up to date with current events. Nearpod is at the top of my ed tech tools list.

Inconvénients

The free version is limiting, but it still offers a lot. Sometimes the new and amazing updates are delayed on the app, but work on the web.

Avantages

I am the director of educational technology at a school that recently shifted to virtual learning. We gave our teachers several lesson delivery/classroom management services to try out and this was their favorite. Nearpod has a great resource library with lots of great videos and lesson content. You also can track everything about how a student engages with the content you post.

Inconvénients

I am curious how expensive it is going to be. The service is free right now because of COVID-19 but we will definitely need to invest in it next year.

Avantages

I like how Nearpod has changed and adapted over the years to meet the needs of the upcoming generational interests in digital tools. It seems like every time I visit the site, there are new features available. It is also easy to integrate into an LMS automatic sign in.

Inconvénients

Nearpod would benefit from new branding because most people associate it with the way it used to be-- an online powerpoint platform.

Avantages

I like the ideas behind it and the variety of tools it offers.

Inconvénients

I think, in the end, it's software that just relies too heavily on devices in front of students and may detract from a personal connection with students. Some of its tools are redundant with other software and may be slightly unnecessary. I can see, however, how some teachers may really use it well and benefit from it.

Avantages

What I love about Nearpod is the extensive library of lessons and activities for students. I also like that Nearpod had the extension for google slides to take existing PowerPoint and import them to Nearpod to make them more interactive.

Inconvénients

The lessons can be isolated and don’t always build as a curriculum would, but it’s a great supplemental resources.

Avantages

Nearpod is an incredibly easy to navigate platform. The interface with Google Slides is seamless and allows for greater creativity in building slide decks for instruction. It has a variety of student response types (matching, drawing, multiple choice, short answer, etc.) and they are adding features on a regular basis. This program is especially helpful for providing the same instruction at asynchronous times (student-paced option) or for guiding synchronous lessons across devices (live lesson option). Reports let you know who logged in to the lesson as well as what their responses were to various prompts. There are a wealth of lessons in the lesson library that you can launch as is or modify to fit your instructional needs. Because students are able to work through it independently, you can use Nearpod as an independent work station and have students logged into remediation, practice, or enrichment lessons simultaneously. Because you can record audio over slides as well as within question prompts, this is an excellent tool to differentiate for students who need accommodations and who are emergent in their literacy skills.

Nearpod also works as an excellent tool for delivering professional development as you can record audio over slides, embed videos, and link to outside sources.

Inconvénients

Audio recording is only available through lessons created within Nearpod (cannot be imported through Google Slides extension), but I'm sure this is something that will be modified in future updates.

Avantages

I love the ability to add slides, activities and collaborative tools to improve student engagement and student learning retention. I love how easy it is to share my lessons with my students and colleagues.

Inconvénients

I wish there was a bigger database of lessons I could use for my classes. I end up making most of my lessons from scratch.

Avantages

I like the already. y set up lessons that Nearpod has created in so many subject areas. I can use Nearpod in a broad overview and also has a specific lesson on a specific skill

Inconvénients

I had a bit of difficulty at first with creating my lessons and dropping graphics. It had a bit of a learning curve.

Avantages

I love almost everything about this. I started using this three years ago and it became a go-to. Since covid, it has been my most used tool. The best thing is the kids LOVE it, especially the "Time to Climb". You can create interactive lessons, as well as quizzes and so much more.

Inconvénients

NOTHING. This program has so many useful things for teaching and learning. I guess the one downfall is in order to save over a certain amount of lessons, you have to have the upgraded membership, which in my opinion, is worth every cent.

Avantages

Virtual Reality incorporation, different content such as slides, videos, questionnaires, among others. Integration with YouTube and Google Slides.

Inconvénients

You have to pay for Google Slides integration and some other features.

Avantages

Nearpod helps teachers (and others) create powerpoint-like lessons for students to go through either in whole group settings or student-paced. The slides can range from interactive ones like student drawing or typing responses or can be static slides, linking students to other resources. Students can join on a variety of device types with a lesson code, or by linking the lesson directly to your Google Classroom.

Inconvénients

While the tool can help students go through a lesson, I wish it implemented itself with other tools a little better. The fact that I can link this straight to my Google Classroom is great, but it won't allow me to keep or save any individual grades from the Nearpod easily. This means if I want this to be an independent lesson for students with a formative assessment at the end, I have to make the Nearpod, and then create a graded opportunity separately. I've been told this update will come to the program, but until then, that can be frustrating.

Avantages

This is a great interactive tool for teaching student's when they are remote. I liked that I could insert my own google slides and add quick formative assessments to the presentation.

Inconvénients

I do not like how these presentations time out and have to be reopened after a while.

Avantages

I love that the system has pre-populated lessons, lessons that other users have submitted, and allows the user to create/tailor lessons to fit their need. Most of the lessons that I have found have been extremely easy to follow and engaging for students.

Inconvénients

The search can sometimes take a little longer than I'd like, particularly when I know what I want, but can't seem to find an exact match right off the bat.

Avantages

Nearpod has a fun drawing feature that allows students to be creative while answering questions. Nearpod is an interactive studying experience that allows teachers to view the knowledge of the students while allowing fun studying games. Some features are similar to Quizlet such as matching and the quiz feature. It is used in my child's Spanish class to help the students comprehend new vocabulary words.

Inconvénients

I overall like this software, but sometimes it lags a little when people are submitting assignments. I wish there was a fullscreen feature on computers so that people are able to see it better. I feel like Quizlet is more helpful for studying, but Nearpod is very efficient on introducing new material.

Avantages

I love how Nearpod allows you to use Google Slides to upload pre-made lessons into engaging virtual lessons to involve students and check understanding in the virtual world.

Inconvénients

This does not happen often, but sometimes the slides will not save and you literally cannot teach. If the Nearpod is created fully in Nearpod, you do not have slides to fall back on for teaching or providing professional development.

Alternatives envisagées 

Avantages

The software has a feature in which you can add questions to videos, this is very effective in keeping the students focused on what they are required to learn. Addition to this, it increases the students attention span.

Inconvénients

Though this software is great, like many other it has small challenges as to what it can achieve. What I did not enjoy while using this software was that after a month the materials that you created will automatically delete itself, so you cannot recycle the same material two months later for revision with the students.

Avantages

I love that it’s so interactive and the selection bank of pre made videos and activities

Inconvénients

I really don’t have to many complaints other than having to pay for the subscription

Avantages

It is very simple tool for students interactive presentations contained quizzes, polls and videos. Very useful to make your module more interactive and interesting. Good point about it, while making the quiz and by mistake closed, once you re-logging in you are still there.

Inconvénients

Some competitors have more functions than it. But considering the simplicity, it is the best.

Avantages

Our district has been piloting Nearpod premium. I am a middle school STEM teacher. I have used Nearpod before but never in my STEM classroom. I was impressed by the number of already created STEM lessons. I have used several of the career Nearpods with my students while we have been doing eLearning.

Inconvénients

I really do not have any complaints. I love the new interactive features like Climb the Wall. We played that at a PD session and it was a lot of fun.