TeachMeet Highlight: an interactive tool for active learning in your classroom
Fortuna Testa, a primary school teacher in Naples, has made sustainability a priority in her classroom. She participated in our Teach Sustainability for Action MOOC where she says she had an opportunity to put into action some ideas she had in her mind already. She established a garden after her students expressed an interest in maintaining one. Now, her students water and maintain the garden every day; learning about sustainability and the actionable items they can take every day.
Patrizia Roma is an Italian English teacher, teacher trainer for new technologies and has been an avid European Schoolnet Academy MOOC participant since 2014. She found herself in our recently concluded Active Learning and Innovative Teaching in Flexible Learning Spaces MOOC where participants explored ways to bring the classroom to life.
TeachMeets are one of the most interactive parts of a MOOC: educators come together to give presentations about scenarios and resources they can use in the classroom. In this MOOC’s TeachMeet (you can check out her presentation here), Patrizia presented a tool named NearPod that she has been using in her classroom ever since discovering it in 2015.
‘’I thought it was a useful tool to promote active participation of the students and I wanted to share it with other teachers in the course’’, said Roma.
NearPod can be described as a ‘one stop shop’ for integrating interactive technologies in your classroom. Roma describes the many features that can be included in the interactive presentations, which teachers are in full control of, including audio and video, files, quizzes, collaborative boards, polls, links to web pages, games, and virtual field trips.
Nearpod Presentation
Check out an example of one of Patrizia’s presentations that she used in her classroom.
Something that Roma found most useful was the immediate feedback tool where students can get feedback right away on questions they missed. “It’s one of the strongest points of this app in my opinion. It allows the teacher to ‘have the pulse of the situation’ and adjust the strategy according to the students’ needs and scaffold weak areas”, she said.
Roma says she found it most useful to use in her classroom when introducing a topic or trying to recap a topic; and has definitely noticed her students’ engagement improve.
“They enjoy having an active role and take part in the challenges, especially the quizzes and games. One function that students like is ‘drawing’. I often ask them at the end of the presentation to draw a face to show their appreciation of the lesson, it’s a moment of fun, even older students enjoy this activity and see their drawings projected on the Interactive White Board (IWB)”
Patrizia Roma
Roma’s example was just one the many great resources that were discussed during the TeachMeet. Discover the rest of the resources from this TeachMeet.
Could you see yourself integrating this tool in your classroom?
1 Comment
Daniela Bunea · June 14, 2022 at 06:49
Way to go, Patrizia! I myself discovered Nearpod soon after the pandemic had started. Being a teacher of English as a foreign language, I welcomed the idea of having in one single place many tools useful for all the stages of my lessons: presentation, practice, production. I too recommend Nearpod for its versatility – it has been the ideal setting for technology-enhanced lessons in my classroom during the online and blended teaching.
Daniela Bunea
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