Teaching VS Providing an Opportunity to Learn
I’d like to evaluate my favorite EdTech tool Nearpod against the UDL (Universal Design for Learning, CAST, 2018) guidelines. I will mention some advanced Nearpod features, so if you are a beginner user, do not worry — you are only a couple of hours of experimentation away! This will be a partially dry piece with sporadic personal opinions and views sprinkled with occasional metaphors and teaching suggestions.
The title idea has been roaming around my synapses and playing with three different facets of my mental space:
- The one that is familiar with theory,
- The second one that has first-hand experience as a learner, and
- The third one that has first-hand experience as a teacher — observing how the knowledge gets soaked and how it sticks or not once it reaches the end of the communication channel (aka my students).
As a learner, I best remember the lessons that were not necessarily formed as such, or intended to teach, but were situations that allowed me to infer from the context or read between the lines. I got to use my overall intellectual faculties and critical thinking skills to reach a conclusion. It was an opportunity to learn rather than a teaching moment.
As a teacher, I have realized that as soon as I start ‘teaching’, the students tend to assume a rigid mental mode with high expectations that are rarely met. Most of them do not remember my ‘front of class explanations’, and I would have to repeat those in the following weeks. What my students tend to remember and recall is the experience of the a-ha moment, or the relaxed non-focused activity where they came across a particular phrase or term. I often remember Douglas Adams’ SEP: if you look away and focus on something else, you might notice the Somebody Else’s Problem in the corner of your eye, only when you stop thinking about it. Looking at it directly will just hurt your eyes and disable you from actually seeing it. I therefore try to place the SEP (in my case it would be the vocabulary or grammar concept I would like them to grasp) in the corner of the room, and I make a big show in the middle, waiting for them to spot the SEP in the corner of their eyes. I increasingly integrate guided discovery/inquiry approach in my lessons, and the tool that helps me do that smoothly is Nearpod.
Guided discovery, also known as an inductive approach, is a technique where a teacher provides examples of a language item and helps the learners to find the rules themselves.
Guided discovery is regarded by many teachers as an important tool. It encourages independence, makes learning more memorable, and if analysis is done in groups is a meaningful communicative task. It is important, however, to understand that some learners are resistant to this approach.
https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/guided-discovery
Now, let’s move on to the theory: get something to drink because this is going to be salty and dry.
With UDL guidelines in the framework for testing Nearpod as a teaching tool, I hope to give clarity about its strengths as well as arguments for why to use it more and often, not just for online teaching. The three main components of UDL are creating motivation (=Engagement), presenting the material (=Representation), and enabling students to show what they have learned (=Expression). They may be represented by three question words: Why, What, and How, respectively. All of those are prefixed by one crucial phrase: MULTIPLE MEANS OF …
We further differentiate each component of instruction by three tiers: Access, Build, and Internalize. And because I’d like to follow all of these principles, I am attaching a mind map to supplement the words for the visual readers.
Multiple Means of Engagement
In the Access tier, one of the guidelines states to include individual student choice and autonomy. This is the initial stage of differentiation, which can be very elegantly done via Nearpod. Apart from the Live lessons, we can give student-paced lessons, where they can flip through the slides at their pace and preference. We can integrate choice boards in Nearpod lesson in the form of hyperdocs which would then open up a new Nearpod lesson (a lesson within the lesson).
‘Vary resources and foster collaboration’ guidelines from the Build tier seem to me the foundations of the Nearpod values: the fact that you can incorporate a website, a video, a 3D or virtual tour together with ‘traditional’ slides, which can also have audio AND be used with Microsoft Immersive Reader (just to name a few), can give you an idea of how versatile a Nearpod lesson may be, and how we can spark students’ interest in many different ways. The Collaboration Board is an excellent feature where even the shiest students can equally contribute and be appreciated.
Internalizing the motivation is probably the most crucial aspect that will give the learner enough drive to push through the tough segments of the journey. The guidelines propose to ‘develop self-assessment and reflection’. Matching pairs and Fill in the blanks are very low-risk activities where students can monitor their progress, and witness their learning being generated, before it gets tested.
Multiple Means of Representation
The Access tier suggests customizing ‘display of information alternatives to include both audio and visual media’. Nearpod is all about multimedia: there is place for images, gifs, and videos on slides as well as free standing. The Phet Simulations are excellent interactive and engaging activities to access the information and situation that is hard to recreate in the classroom.
In the Build tier, we should ‘illustrate through multimedia’. Nearpod has a vast library of Sways and BBC videos that you can add to your lessons to deepen the learning and provide a little ‘extra’ to the above-average-thirsty students. We also have a choice of giving a fun and dynamic quiz that can have either words or images as answers — Time to Climb.
To Internalize the presented material, teachers should ‘guide the information processing and visualization’. What better way of knowing that your students are processing the information correctly than by watching their work being done in real time? Not one by one — as we would have to in the physical non-tech classroom — but all at once, like a Captain of the Starship (Enterprise?) looking at your control board, observing the students’ work as they are doing it. This is exactly what Draw it activity gives us: a glimpse into the students’ thinking process, of each step as they make it. There are great tricks you can do with this simple activity. You can upload background images, but the students can do that too!
Multiple Means of Expression
Providing Access to tools of expression is actually what Nearpod is all about. The students get easy access to recording audio on Open Ended Questions, they get access to visual representation by uploading their work on Draw it, or they can express their unique opinion or angle on Collaboration Board. These also provide varying methods of response, so they are not only obliged to give written response.
While Building their response, the guidelines state that we should provide ‘multiple media for communication and tools for construction’. The ability to link any Web Content (external document) in a Nearpod Lesson, such as Google Docs, Google Slides, Padlet, Jamboard, etc. makes Nearpod superior to all other tools: it can contain any collaboration tool that the teacher is already using for communication with or among the students. We could link a Sketch Pad to the lesson, and have students create their artwork in it, and in the next slide upload it to their Draw-it activity. The possibilities are endless!
Finally, Internalizing the expression should develop some meta-skills like goal setting and learning strategically. We can explicitly show or explain the learning goals in the introduction to the lesson — this is nothing revolutionary or specific for Nearpod. What we can do at the end is run a Poll by asking the students whether the goals have been met. Many original Nearpod lessons are structured in this way. ‘Facilitating management of information’ and resources is another skill that this tier recommends. Nearpod has an excellent feature, which is only available in the School and District plans, though. The students can take notes at the side of each slide. The notes can be accessed by downloading to email or Google Drive. They are in Word Doc format, so they can be edited and reused easily. It is an excellent feature for adolescents and adult learners to help them stay on track and refresh their memory after an intensive lesson.
Engagement, Representation, or Expression; Access, Build, or Internalize — Nearpod has covered all levels and tiers of UDL. Through its 5Es, it makes sure the students get an opportunity to actualize the learning with minimal teacher’s scaffolding. The initial learning curve is not long, and the time I spend preparing my lessons reaps rewards in classroom. My students are becoming more autonomous and grasp the concepts at a great speed. I make sure I include at least four different types of activities to cover different learning styles and needs. I no longer have the necessity to teach, I just provide the opportunity to learn. Thank you, Nearpod!
