New Tutorial: Nearpod for the iPad

I was able to spend much of the morning working with an iPad app called Nearpod. Honestly, I was impressed with many of the capabilities, and I saw real potential to do great things with the shared iPad carts.  Essentially, Nearpod is an all-in-one presentation/polling application that allows users to deliver presentations to a group set of iPads. The interactive features include some traditional ones such as polling Q&A, self-paced student quizzes, and free response questioning.  However, the Draw It feature is easily worth the efforts of downloading and installing Nearpod alone. Students can ink on blank canvases or preset background images and submit their drawings to the teacher for review and potential sharing. Here are just a few examples that came to mind when I demo'ed the app to our teachers:

• annotation of text
• showing steps for math problems
• balancing chemical equations
• labeling maps
• translating sentences
• illustrating concept maps
• graphic organizers

Basically, anything that can be saved as an image (Powerpoint slides can all be exported as .JPG or .PNG files) can serve as a background for the student to draw on.  Again, this is a very simple yet elegant solution to real time communication using the iPads in a classroom setting.

Nearpod is available for free from iTunes with upgrades available for additional features and storage.

My Nearpod tutorial page is available here at makingtechsimple.com.

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