Throwdown Thursday - Making Lessons Interactive

I am thrilled to link up with Erin over at I'm Lovin' Lit for her FIRST Thursday Throwdown!

I wish I had pictures of some of the cool things that I did in my classroom this year...but of course, I was busy facilitating learning in the classroom and not playing photographer to capture the moments...I vow to be better at multitasking this year!

In any event, I attended a wonderful professional development in June about integrating more technology in the classroom. My teaching partner and I tried to integrate as much as we could, but in an older building, technology could either work or not work at any given moment. It became frustrating to plan something only to have it completely fail. We had a class set of iPads (for all teachers to share) and we LOVED the idea of using them...except the only place in the building that had WiFi was the library...and it didn't reach all the way to my room. I am not complaining, it just took a little more planning to be able to use them effectively :)

However, my new campus is said to be wireless (YAY!) and I discovered the coolest app (at the PD meantioned above) called Nearpod! It is a way for you to have a presentation that each student views on his/her device by being logged in to the app with a specific PIN number unique to that teacher's presentation. It's not just a "PowerPoint" type presentation, though. It has ways to ask students questions via multiple choice or short answer, you can share websites with information and so many other things! The best part is that they can only see what you want them to see! I have already created my first nearpod presentation to use the first week of school with my kiddos and am super excited about it. This video does a much better job of explaining the wonderfulness of nearpod:



What a great, innovative way to get kids engaged and involved in their own learning! I will be sure to report back at the end of August and tell you all how it went!

Happy 4th!