The Development and Integration of Nearpod Materials into a High School Biology Curriculum

Abstract

Due to the previously outlined benefits of formative assessment, and the increasing ability of technology of aid in its implementation there are very few barriers to experimenting with new technology in the classroom. While the technology available to classroom teachers does not need to be incredibly high tech, it should be compatible with what students and teachers already have at their fingertips. Applications like Socrative are beneficial because they allow for a classroom teacher to use technology already in the classroom (mobile phones and laptops) and utilize them in the collection of formative assessment data (Coca & Slisko, 2013). Students are typically highly engaged when using mobile devices in the classroom and while the “pay off” of student engagement does diminish over time with the increased use of an app, the decrease is not significant (Wang, 2015). Nearpod is an application like Socrative in that it allows for the classroom teacher to easily question their students and collect a large amount of data that can then be used to encourage student metacognition and learning. Nearpod has even more features that Socrative, including a drawing feature and a highly advanced data analysis report that can be downloaded after a lesson. Due to its beneficial capabilities that allow for many different types of formative assessment, Nearpod activities should be integrated into the curriculum of a high school biology classroom.