Sandra Story, ELL teacher at the Northern VA Juvenile Detention Center will be presenting this Thursday on three digital resources: Nearpod, Kahoot and Zaption. These tools are excellent for student engagement, assessment and technology integration. Nearpod is a tool to create interactive presentations that may include slides, student assessments activities such as quizzes and polls, videos, digital tours, etc. Kahoot is a game-based platform that allows teachers (and students) to create review quizzes that are just like a game, students have fun and review concepts without even knowing they are studying! Lastly, Zaption is a video-based platform that allows students to take videos from their favorite sites (such as YouTube, Vimeo, etc) and add interactive activities such as slides, questions, quizzes, polls, and open-ended questions.
These tools are great for all levels and all students and truly support differentiation in the classroom.
One of the reasons I have been enjoying TLP-C so much is because it has been giving me a chance to dive in and explore some of the apps and programs that I have been hearing about but never felt like I could take the time to learn about and add into my class’s experience. This is definitely the case with Nearpod. One of my colleagues had been telling me about it and encouraging me to get an account for a while but it had stayed at the bottom of my to-do list. Upon trying it out at TLP-C, I realized how easy it is to use, and how much of an engaging way to gather formative data from my students. I tried it right away within the same week in my math class, as a quick spotcheck on a series of skills we were working on. My students loved using it, and I loved how it gave them feedback right away with each question. One of the things that sometimes is difficult for me in class is getting my students instant feedback on skills when they take spotcheck quizzes; often they don’t receive their work back until the next day or even the day after. With Nearpod, they received feedback from the program as soon as they completed each question.
To be honest, after using it that once in class, things got busier and it fell off my immediate radar so I haven’t used it since. I think that is mostly because I only did it once and didn’t develop a habit of it right away that when things got busy with all my classes, I forgot to continue using it. I want to use it more often as the year continues because it was really helpful!
Katie, I am so glad to hear that you try it. I think it takes time to create the presentations and quizzes, but maybe you can create one per month and keep it for next year. I wish the entire district will purchase it for everyone to benefit and for teachers to share their ideas and presentations locally. It might be worth it to follow them on twitter, they have great ideas and they sent me a free t-shirt 🙂
I thought the Kahoots program was fantastic. I was able to integrate it into my items for SOL review. I teach at the high school level and the students seemed to enjoy using the program on their cell phones. The immediate feedback proved to be very useful as I was preparing them for their end of course tests.
I tried Zaption and thought the site was very easy to use. I found an edited a video for the 2nd grade science unit on plants. Since I was using the free version, I could only use one video and it took awhile to find one I liked. Once it was uploaded to Zaption, the rest of the process flew by. I especially appreciated the variety of response types that can be used to differentiate for ELs.