In this video, I'm really excited to share with you Nearpod's Fall 2020
update and that's the ability to add
interactive video content to your lessons.
If you watch this channel you probably already know that I'm a huge fan of
Nearpod. I'm not aware of any other programs that are as content rich as
Nearpod, while also offering so many different
ways that students can interact with lessons.
Their free Google Slides add-on allows teachers to add a wide variety of
interactivity tools to your pre-made lessons
and then on their website, Nearpod has so many integrations with different
programs that there's literally content for every
single subject area and grade level. Now with the ability to
add interactive video content to lessons, Nearpod is continuing to build a pretty
strong case that it can almost be a one-stop shop app and of course, since
it's Nearpod, they've also just gone above and beyond here. So not only can
you bring in YouTube videos and add interactive elements to them,
they've also gone back into their own video content library
and added interactive questions to those videos as well
and along with this update, Nearpod has also added a ton of their own
educational videos to their program that have
pre-built in interactivity elements that you can edit and use
as you'd like. And a personal favorite feature is the fact that you can also
upload your own tutorials into Nearpod and add interactivity tools to those as
well. So in this video I can't wait to show you what this interactive video
tool in Nearpod is all about. My name is Sam Kary and this is my
YouTube channel for The New EdTech Classroom.
If you like the tips that I share in this video, you can show your support by
hitting the like button, sharing it with other teachers that you
know, and subscribing to my channel and hitting the notification bell
to make sure you don't miss any of my weekly updates. All right let's jump in
and take a look at what this interactive video Nearpod update is all about.
First I do just want to say that if you're not familiar with Nearpod, I
recommend you check out my introduction to Nearpod video before you watch this
video. That will give you a better sense of
what you can do in Nearpod and this tutorial is really just going
to be focused on the interactive video update.
So let's start off by going to the Nearpod lesson library. At the top
select 'Video.' And there you'll see that Nearpod has uploaded a bunch of
different educational videos. You can of course filter these videos
based on subject area and grade level, then you can select a
video and hit 'Preview' in order to check it out. At the bottom
of the video you'll notice the blue dots and those indicate interactive questions
that Nearpod has already created for this video. So the basic idea is that
if you have interactive mode turned on, when students
watch the video, as soon as they arrive to this place in
the video, it will trigger a question to pop up
that they have to answer. So you can see that this first question
is an open-ended question, whereas the second question is a
multiple choice question. So let's say that you watch this video
and you like the questions and you just want to jump right into
presenting it to your students. You can go here and click on 'Teach' and
there you'll see a drop down menu where you can either present this video
in live participation mode, in student paced mode,
or in teacher in front of the class mode. The live participation
mode implies that you are presenting information on your screen
and then students also all have a computer that they are able to use to
answer questions that come up on the video. And
then for student paced, that just means that students can do the lessons at
their own time. And teacher in front of the class would
just be a situation where you were presenting this information
in front of your students and they didn't necessarily all have devices.
Now that we've looked at some of the educational content that Nearpod has put
together and added interactive questions to, now I
want to show you some of the other content that you can find on Nearpod
that also has interactive questions built into the videos.
So let's go back to the Nearpod library and then I'm going to click
on the publishers tab. Here you can see a bunch of different programs that have
created content for Nearpod. So let's go to one of my favorite
content creators here, Common Sense. Common Sense is a great resource for
digital citizenship lessons. Here you'll notice that if you only have
a free subscription to Nearpod, some of the lessons will show up as free,
whereas others will require you to pay for them individually. But let's just
look at one of these free lessons. So when I click on the video, I'll also
see those thoughts below that indicate that interactive questions
have already been built into the video. Now that we've
looked at the basics of how this works, I'm also going to show you how you can
customize your own questions. So let's go back to the Nearpod
originals. This time I'll look for some video content about math.
So I'll select this free lesson about geometric shapes here.
We can still see our interactive questions popping up at the bottom
but now let's look at how to actually add our own questions as well.
So let's say that I get to this place in the video where it's presented some
information about angles and I want to add a check for
understanding. All you need to do is click 'Add
Activity' and that will allow you to select whether or not you want to add an
open-ended question or a multiple choice question. So I'm
just going to create a multiple choice question here
with some different answer choices, I'll be sure to select which answer choice is
correct, and then you'll see that that also shows
up as a question that students would need to answer
while watching the video. And then you can also click 'Save'
and that will just add that video to your own personal lesson library
so that you can assign it from there to students as well.
So let's say you want to take it a step further and build out your own lesson
within Nearpod that adds interactive video. On your 'My
Lessons' page. Select 'Lesson in Nearpod.' That will open up the
lesson builder that allows you to build in different types of content
as well as interactive activities. And again, I show
all about this in my other Nearpod video. So let's just say for example that I
want to build out a lesson here about digital citizenship. First for the
engaged part of the lesson where I'm just going to hook students' interest
and also find out more about what they already know,
I'm going to quickly just add this collaborate tool here,
which functions very similar to a Padlet bulletin board, and I'll have my students
answer a preview question about the content
that we're going to be studying. Now I'll bring in a follow-up activity
where I'm going to have students watch a video about digital citizenship.
So here I'll click 'Add Slide,' then I'm going to search for digital citizenship,
see what pops up, take note of the interactive questions
and edit them if needed, and then add that slide to my lesson
as well. Now let's get to the part that I really love. Let's say that you've also
recorded a tutorial overview of this entire lesson
in a program like Loom, Screencastify, or Screencast-O-Matic.
You can also bring that video content in and add interactive features to it as
well, so to do that I'll add another slide, and
this time rather than look for a video that's already in Nearpod,
I'm going to upload my own video. You can choose whether or not you pull this file
off your own computer or off of Google Drive for example. And
then just like I showed with the geometry video,
as soon as you get to a section in your tutorial
where you want to add a check for understanding, simply click
'Add Activity' and that will also allow you to add an open-ended question
or a multiple choice question to your tutorial.
So for example at this point of the tutorial, I might be walking through
our learning target for the day and talking about keywords,
and I might want to add a check for understanding that just makes sure that
students understand what that keyword is. And then of course
you'll see after you've selected which answer is correct
and added the question that it will show up as a blue dot below,
so that students will have to answer that question as they proceed through
the video. And then since I want this tutorial to
be the first part of the lesson, I'm just going to drag it over so that
it's the first slide that students see. I just really love this ability to add
checks for understandings to your own video tutorials
and I also just really appreciate that everything in Nearpod is self-contained
so that students aren't going to have to go around to a bunch of different sites
and I don't have to worry about link management or document management for
that matter. Now let's take just a quick look at what
this would actually look like when you're using it with students.
Let's look at the live participation mode, which is something you could do
in your classroom if your students have devices in front of them
or you could do remotely by presenting on your screen
and having students use the interactivity tools on their screens.
And of course just a reminder, you can also set these lessons up to be totally
student paced. So for this live presentation, a student
would just enter the class code to get into the lesson and then the teacher can
decide to start the lesson. You'll notice that there's a play button
on both of the screens. In this mode, both the teacher and the
student could play the video if they wanted. Here though I'm just
going to play the video on the teacher end,
then when the video gets to the check for understanding, you'll be prompted to
start the activity and that will pop the question up on
your students' screens. After students answer the question,
you'll immediately be able to see how students responded
on your screen. Then for the bulletin board activity students will just post a
quick note to the bulletin board. I'm going to set it up here so that I
have to moderate the comments before they come through.
After students write their answers and I approve them, they'll show up on the
board. Now let's look at another way that you
could choose to present this video content as well.
When you advance to the next slide, you'll see that an option pops up
to present the video on all devices or just
on your device. If you choose to only present the video
on your device, that will pop up a message on
student screens notifying them that they need to make sure they're paying
attention to their teacher's screen. Then when it
arrives at the point where an interactive question comes up,
that question will again pop up on the student's screen
and they can answer it. And in this case the question is an open-ended question,
so students can just type in their response. Once the student has finished,
they can hit 'Submit,' and then you'll immediately see their
answer show up on your screen. Then you can also choose to share
responses back with the class by clicking Share Responses.' You'll
notice after I click it that the response pops up on a student's screen
and then once I click it off, that response goes away.
Notice as well that the answer that shows up is anonymous, so this could be a
strategy just to show the rest of the class what a good answer would look like.
Similarly once you arrive to the multiple choice question, it will also
pop that question up on the student's screen, they can
answer it, hit submit, and you'll immediately see
all the student responses. Before you end the lesson, it's going to pop up a box
asking you to confirm that that's what you want to do.
Notice that it also tells you here that you can resume the lesson at any time,
so it's okay if your students don't finish this whole lesson in a single
class. Even if you haven't closed out the
lesson, you'll still be able to pull reports on that lesson
by going over to the reports tab. That's going to allow you to see how all your
students responded for each of the elements of the lesson,
including how they answered all the interactive questions that were embedded
in the video. I love updates that make a program more
functional and this Nearpod update that allows you to add
interactive questions to videos definitely achieves that. Not only can
you go in and access all kinds of pre-made videos with
pre-made interactive questions that you can edit,
you can also bring your own videos in from YouTube or videos that you made
yourself and add interactive questions to those
as well. So I just highly encourage you to get into Nearpod and give this
update a try, I think you're going to like it just as
much as I do. And if you have any questions about how I use Nearpod for
interactive video content or just about how I use Nearpod in
general, please ask in the comments below. Thank you so much for watching my video
to the end. If you found the tips that I shared helpful,
please share it with other teachers that you know, hit the like button,
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tutorials I have on my channel by clicking on one of those two videos
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any of the resources that I've created and show on my videos, please visit my
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