JMMS Students Experience Interactive Presentation

Students Experience Interactive Presentation

by Danielle Adamovich

Seventh graders at Joseph Melillo Middle School in East Haven experienced learning in a whole new way on Wednesday. Drawing on a workshop given during Professional Development on November 4th, Kathleen Doheny created a “NearPod” interactive presentation to better explain the formative, unit-ending assessment to students. The assessment is a Family Heritage Quilt Square (made of paper) that draws information from interviews students conducted with family members or friends, as well as connections from texts in the unit to their lives. They also will include a letter to a future descendant, in addition to photographs of themselves, their ancestors, their country’s flag or the family’s homeland.

Doheny created the presentation using NearPod, which is a fun and very interactive way to share new information with a large group of people. Students are given a code for the presentation, and once they type it in, they are automatically joined into it and it appears right on their own computer screens! The program allows its users to not only put text onto slides (ie. Microsoft PowerPoint) but also short answer questions, photographs, images and graphics from Google or the web, and instant polls. Any answers are published and sent directly to the presenter in real-time and allows him or her to share those responses with the whole group.

Kathleen Doheny collaborated with Danielle Adamovich and brought their classes together to take part in the presentation. With about 46 students in the classroom, all were engaged in the slideshow and participated fully. NearPod is a wonderful classroom tool that allows teachers to bring new information into the classroom in an exciting way, and more collaborative presentations are certainly in the works for these two Language Arts educators!