The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Nearpod
Nearpod has a lot to offer, but often at a price. I like that anyone can create an account and start using Nearpod immediately. It is nice to have free software available for the classroom. With your free "Silver" membership, you can create interactive presentations with slides of text, image, and/or audio. You can also insert videos from files on your computer, Dropbox, Box, or Google drive. Slideshows can also be included from your computer, Dropbox, Box, Google drive, or Google images. To make the presentation more interactive, the free "Silver" membership also enables you to insert activities such as open-ended questions, polls, quizzes, or "draw-its".
The Silver membership gives you limited features, allowing you to have 50 mb of total storage, 20 mb presentations, up to 30 students per live session, and only allowing you to download reports in PDF. For many teachers who use this intermittently, the free version will meet their needs. However, the free version does significantly handicap you if you intend to frequently use this program throughout the year. If you intend to use Nearpod for homework assignments, the Silver membership will not allow you access to this feature. The limited data storage and restricted features in creating a presentation may be enough motivation to get you to pony up the dough for the "Gold" membership.
The Gold membership comes at a hefty cost for most educators. Paid monthly, it comes out to $144/year, or paid in one annual lump sum it costs $120 (discounted rate). That is going to be too high a cost to be worth it for many in the world of education. I do not like how expensive it is to make the jump up to the Gold membership and would prefer to be able to pay a la carte for the features I need.
For those willing to swallow the $120/year price tag, the Gold membership has a lot to offer and should allow most teachers to get extensive year-long use out of the program. The Gold membership boosts your storage space up to 3 gb, doubles the allowed size of your presentations to 40 mb, and gives you the ability to run live sessions with 50 students instead of 30. For related arts teachers that may share a space with two classes, the boost up to 50 students is very desirable.
Along with those benefits comes more presentation features. Moving up to a Gold membership enables you to insert YouTube videos into your presentation, dedicated audio slides, live Twitter feeds, a PDF viewer, web content, matching pair activities, and fill-in-the-blank activities. It also gives you the option to download data in a CSV format to allow you to more readily manipulate the data in programs like Excel.
I do not like that a general cost range is not provided for the school and district memberships, but I understand it. The good part about the school, and especially the district, memberships is that the Nearpod staff can completely customize the program to your needs. If you would like the program handled through your school system's servers, the Nearpod crew will set it up that way. It also gives teachers the ability to set students up with accounts to have more powerful analytics of their data and to protect them within the school's firewall.
As with the jump from Silver to Gold, the jump up to the school and district memberships enable users to increase their storage space, presentation sizes, number of students in each live session, and gives more download options for better data management. One thing the school and district options provide that an individual Silver or Gold membership does not is a dedicated training and support specialist. This training support is essential in a school environment, where teachers come from all backgrounds and all levels of technological proficiency.
Aside from creating your own presentation, Nearpod has a whole library of presentations you can choose from. I like that Nearpod is saving teachers time with their own library of downloadable resources. Classroom teachers have a wide array of choices that should help them supplement their curriculum. What I do not like is how few resources are useful for PE teachers. There are a few presentations on physics and anatomy, but there is nothing of real utility for skills or even fitness and health. I also do not like that most of the presentations ready to be downloaded cost money. Not only do you have to pay $120/year for a form of the program with enough storage to be useable, but you must also pay $2.99 for presentations from the Nearpod database.
The Silver membership gives you limited features, allowing you to have 50 mb of total storage, 20 mb presentations, up to 30 students per live session, and only allowing you to download reports in PDF. For many teachers who use this intermittently, the free version will meet their needs. However, the free version does significantly handicap you if you intend to frequently use this program throughout the year. If you intend to use Nearpod for homework assignments, the Silver membership will not allow you access to this feature. The limited data storage and restricted features in creating a presentation may be enough motivation to get you to pony up the dough for the "Gold" membership.
The Gold membership comes at a hefty cost for most educators. Paid monthly, it comes out to $144/year, or paid in one annual lump sum it costs $120 (discounted rate). That is going to be too high a cost to be worth it for many in the world of education. I do not like how expensive it is to make the jump up to the Gold membership and would prefer to be able to pay a la carte for the features I need.
For those willing to swallow the $120/year price tag, the Gold membership has a lot to offer and should allow most teachers to get extensive year-long use out of the program. The Gold membership boosts your storage space up to 3 gb, doubles the allowed size of your presentations to 40 mb, and gives you the ability to run live sessions with 50 students instead of 30. For related arts teachers that may share a space with two classes, the boost up to 50 students is very desirable.
Along with those benefits comes more presentation features. Moving up to a Gold membership enables you to insert YouTube videos into your presentation, dedicated audio slides, live Twitter feeds, a PDF viewer, web content, matching pair activities, and fill-in-the-blank activities. It also gives you the option to download data in a CSV format to allow you to more readily manipulate the data in programs like Excel.
I do not like that a general cost range is not provided for the school and district memberships, but I understand it. The good part about the school, and especially the district, memberships is that the Nearpod staff can completely customize the program to your needs. If you would like the program handled through your school system's servers, the Nearpod crew will set it up that way. It also gives teachers the ability to set students up with accounts to have more powerful analytics of their data and to protect them within the school's firewall.
As with the jump from Silver to Gold, the jump up to the school and district memberships enable users to increase their storage space, presentation sizes, number of students in each live session, and gives more download options for better data management. One thing the school and district options provide that an individual Silver or Gold membership does not is a dedicated training and support specialist. This training support is essential in a school environment, where teachers come from all backgrounds and all levels of technological proficiency.
Aside from creating your own presentation, Nearpod has a whole library of presentations you can choose from. I like that Nearpod is saving teachers time with their own library of downloadable resources. Classroom teachers have a wide array of choices that should help them supplement their curriculum. What I do not like is how few resources are useful for PE teachers. There are a few presentations on physics and anatomy, but there is nothing of real utility for skills or even fitness and health. I also do not like that most of the presentations ready to be downloaded cost money. Not only do you have to pay $120/year for a form of the program with enough storage to be useable, but you must also pay $2.99 for presentations from the Nearpod database.
Nearpod Membership Levels
Membership information graphic: http://www.nearpod.com/upgrade/