 Hi there, my name is Kristina Neal and today we're going to talk about using Nearpod for student engagement. Nearpod is an online learning platform where you can create content that is very engaging for your students, whether you are teaching virtually or face-to-face in the regular classroom. To get started with Nearpod, you will first need to create an account at nearpod.com. Use your Gmail username and password to get all the features. You can then choose to add Nearpod on as an add-on in Google Slides. You will begin a new Google Slide presentation and then go to File, go to Page Setup, and change it to a standard 4 to 3 ratio. Many of the slides in Nearpod use that standard 4 to 3 ratio, so it just makes things transfer over a little neater and look a little nicer. Once you do that, you will choose your background for your slides. I've already done that, and then you're going to click Add-ons, and then you're going to choose Nearpod. As you can see, a new dialog box opens over to the right for Nearpod, and this will house all of the tools that you can use when you're creating your slides for your students. The next thing I'm going to do is insert a new slide, and you can choose to make this strictly an informational slide like you would just create for your students as part of your presentation, or you can choose to use a tool. If you look as I scroll down, these are all of the tools that you have available to you. I think I would like to start my lesson off with an open-ended question. So to do that, I'm just going to click Open Ended Question. This will open a new box, and now I will be able to type in this box my question for my students. As you can see, I could change my text. You can even add timers, meet multimedia, or you can even enable student audio recordings by toggling this button on, and that way it meets the needs of all of your students. When you're finished, click Save. This will now save it into your Google Slides. It takes it just a minute to load each time. Keep in mind this will create a blank slide in between each of your slides, so you can choose to delete it and then insert a new slide, or you can just simply pull it down past the slide you just did. As you can see, there are many other things that you can choose from. If you wanted to insert a video about main idea for your students, then you would simply click Video, and this will open up a new window as well. And as you can see, you'll have access to the Nearpod video library. You could choose to put in YouTube videos, your own videos, or even upload a video. I'm just going to use Nearpod. Main idea. And here's a Nearpod original video if I've already previewed it, or even if you haven't, you can select it and you can preview it right here. You can even trim the video, so if there are certain parts that you want your students to see and not others, because those parts get straight to the point, you can do that. When you're finished, click Save. And now you have an embedded video within your slides. The next thing you're going to do once again is either click Insert, or you can simply pull your slide down to the next one. Another tool that I really enjoy using with my students is the tool called Draw It. So when I want my students to be able to express or draw and write what they are thinking about a topic, that is when I would like to use that. Again, you can add timers or multimedia instructions or videos. And I'm just going to type in what did you learn about main idea. And so my students would have watched the video. Now they're going to tell me what they learned. You're going to click Save once again. This will now save it into your slide. And then again, don't forget to take out the blank slide if you do not want that slide in your presentation. Now, if you want to go over to Nearpod to see what you have created, you're going to click on this button, Save and Go to Nearpod. This will take you to your Nearpod library where it will begin saving the presentation you just made. But if you look, you can also have access to your school and district libraries, as well as the Nearpod library for lessons that are already created. You can even create yourself folders to keep your items organized. Here is the presentation we just made. You will need to decide if you're going to do this live participation, which means that as the teacher you have control of the slides or student pace, which means that your students would work on this asynchronously. If you need to edit at any time, you can just click this Edit tool. We're going to click Preview so you can see what we just did. This will bring up your slideshow and your slide deck that you just made. So you can see Main Idea. We're going to use the toggle button to slide over to the next slide. This was our open-ended question that students will read and respond to in this box. You will then see the video that we uploaded. You can play it as the teacher or the students can also push Play and Pause at any time that they want. Here's the Draw It tool. What did you learn about Main Idea? Your students would then be able to use all of these tools at the bottom in order to write and draw their ideas. I'm going to go back to the main menu for Nearpod. If you choose Live Participation, for example, you have control of the slides now. Your students will need to get out their devices. And what they will do is they will go to the app Nearpod or type in join.nearpod.com and they will enter in this learning code. This will take them straight to your lesson. Or if you want to send them a link on either CSaw or Google Classroom, you can do that as well. Or you can even use Google Classroom and upload your items there. So thank you so much. I hope you learned something new about using Nearpod for student engagement. And please be sure to check out our other resources on Facebook and on Twitter.