Product Review of NearPod

Create interactive PowerPoint presentations and send them out to your learners’ devices using NearPod. It has creative features such as polls, quizzes, drawing activities, fill-in-the-blank, and open-ended questions. You can include 3-D illustrations in your lessons to engage our learners. Get immediate feedback on your device for questions you include for your learners.
Website: https://nearpod.com/
What Users Love About the App
“Nearpod is a high-quality, user-friendly, reliable presentation program that could be a valuable asset in every teacher’s classroom. There is a fee, but it’s definitely worth the investment individually or at the school-wide level. For starters, it’s easy to create slide decks, but what’s amazing is that these presentations can be pushed to student devices or phones instantly and with ease.”
“I like the functionality of nearpod in allowing the creation and sharing of a lesson in a fun format. With Nearpod, I can import a lesson that I have already created in Google slides, powerpoint or I can create them through nearpod.”
“Nearpod is a teacher-friendly digital platform used in face-to-face, remote, and hybrid learning contexts. Lessons offering interactive slides, games, and collaborative activities encourage active learning and engagement for all students.”
“Nearpod has been a lifesaver this year. I love the fact my students can each login to Nearpod individually, and yet still work on the content together as a class. I love having the option of assigning tasks that students can work on at their own pace at home or with the pace of the class during a live lesson.”
“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.”
What Users Dislike About the App
“It would be great if they could add on some sort of homework feature for students who may not have access to WiFi. I know they are exploring several potentials here, and I think they’ll figure out a solution, but this would be helpful for flipping the classroom in Title One environments.”
“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.”
“I found Nearpod very challenging to use. While there are plenty of examples and use cases, this tool simply doesn’t have the ROI for me to continue using.”
“It is difficult to grade the results of the students’ responses because the software does not notify you when a student has submitted an assignment nor does it upload to learning management systems. When a student submits an assignment late, I do not know evaluate their performance and post their results in the electronic gradebook.”
“I do experience some issues with saving from time to time. Nearpod does not seem to function well if you have more than 1 presentation in edit mode. Sometimes I like to work side by side to double-check both presentations follow the same format. Unfortunately, this means that Nearpod does not always save my work.”