Here's how it works:
1. You, the teacher, create a lesson at nearpod.com ahead of time. Here is where you hit the first limitation -- the lesson cannot be created or edited on iPad. So, if you don't have a computer in your classroom, you cannot change anything mid-class. This also means that you and your students must all be connected to the Internet, since it is being run from nearpod.com and not from your iPad locally. Depending on your school's Internet speeds, this could be dicey.
- A lesson is made up of slides
- A slide can be either a content slide or an interactive slide.
- A content slide can be a page from a PDF document or an image or a movie.
- An interactive slide can be a poll, a quiz, a Q&A or a drawing the students produce on a blank page or on an image (e.g. graph paper).
- You give students a pin and they each enter it into the student version of the nearpod app on their own iPads. As they join the lesson, you see their names pop
- You control exactly what is displayed on everyone's screen. Results of interactive slides (e.g. poll) show up in real time to you and you can choose to display them to everyone. Same with anything the students produce on their own drawing slides.
A similar, but less restrictive and more feature-rich software is GoClass, but it is still in beta. It allows creation and editing of lesson elements on iPad, students can proceed at their own pace, and quizes/polls can be timed. Being in beta, the stability and buggyness of the app are unknown.
Other reviews of Nearpod:
