tool – nearpod

saw on lookang‘s fb feed yesterday this tool, and meiyin mentioned it to me today. what a coincidence. decided to take a quick look at the tool and examine its functionalities.

Screenshot 2015-08-12 16.05.50

it’s essentially a tool that builds interaction with live audience during a live presentation, somewhat like a PPT+Socrative 2-in-1. offline student-machine ‘interaction’ is available for a paid account that allows students to view prepared contents and answer preset qns (akin traditional e-learning **zzz**); click here for an example.

supports mobile apps on Android, iOS, and Windows phone. these apps would afford a teacher to ‘interact’ with students with access mobile devices w/active internet connections by gathering live feedback throughout the session/class. good for assessment for learning (AfL) (:

when a session goes live, control is only available from the main slide-to-slide view. if a slideshow is embedded as one of the slides, the teacher will have no control over the viewing of that slideshow.

besides pre-prepared content, teachers can also push website URLs, and Open-ended questions to students during a live session (somehow i got an error trying this on my droid).

teachers who would like to co-create presentation can do it through the Share via email function (not tested).

functionalities available to FREE account:
0. easy to navigate interface
1. create slideshow by importing PPTx files, images, PDF, and Google images search and insert directly
2. 50MB total storage & 20MB presentation size
3. export only PDF reports (per session)
4. 30 students per live session limit
5. UNICODE support (good news for CL teachers)

limitation of FREE (aka Sliver) account:
1. image upload size limit: 3MB
2. video upload size limit: 20MB
3. slide content eXcludes webpage, PDFs, live twitter feed, audio files
4. no self-paced homework/presentation mode
5. no CSV reports export, nor per student report
6. no export slides/presentation as PDF

paid account will set one back USD120 (annual billing). did not get to try the homework feature since i did not pay a fee.

to summarise, nearpod is a frontal presentation tool (~PPT) that affords teachers to build in feedback from students (e.g. for the purpose of AfL). students will need internet connected (mobile/laptop) devices to get this going. it may afford CoL where teachers/students may come together to co-create contents (not tested). however, using a free account, users would be limited to mostly static content #ithink (due to file size limit, and no linkage to external websites).