Twitter was a buzz with this app earlier this week and I can understand why. Nearpod is an app, well rather apps, which allow a teacher to send work to students’ smartphone or ipad when they are all on the same network. What it provides is a synchronous collaborative tool. It works via a teacher app and a student app. The students join you via a pin code they enter into their devices. Once the student has entered the pin they appear in a class list so as a teacher you can immediately see when they have done a task and how well they did.
http://edtechdigest.wordpress.com/2012/05/10/interview-getting-cozy-with-near...
The teacher can make a presentation or set of task via a content tool. It allows you to upload presentations in a pdf format. Once uploaded you can edit the slide order. However much more ‘interesting’ are the interactive features that you can build into the content. As you can see fron the image below, the site allows you to add videos, make polls, quzzes and set questions and answers. This is a really neat set of features. Once you added them and set them for the students devices, they do the task and their progress etc appears on your device.
If you download the app you can see a video of how it works and there is a sample for you to experiement with (assuming you have two devices so you can see the student and teacher mode). To gain access to the content tool, you need to go the website and upgrade your account (it's free to upgrade to silver though when I did this this is took about 24 hours for this to take effect). There is also a library of pre-made presentations which you can download and use. The other feature of the online site is that you can see detailed reports from the activities you give the students.
While, I am yet to test it out with a group. I've spent the last few days playing with it and it is very easy to use (there is also plenty of support). It is primarily aimed at mainstream education, but using the quiz/ poll features would defintiely work in the ELT classroom (am doing a talk later today and am going to get the participants to join in via the app). I'm just going to use the poll but in class I could extend the students work with grammr quizzes etc (and of course they could make the quizzes for you to share with all). I also think it could make excellent collobrative listening / viewing tasks - imagine studetns being able to listen to something on youtube with assignments set by you and then rather than having to put students on the spot, simply see how they did on your ipad. The third advantage of it is that it fits nicely into the BYOD movement - as it works on andriod and apple, you are not necessarily depedent on a class set of devices. Finally, if you need more convincing to try it out, it's free to download and use.