Using the Nearpod website and apps for a multimedia presentation/pretest on prefixes and suffixes

The geeky moment:
I love it when I spend from 5 am to 8 am cram-prepping an unnecessarily complicated iPad lesson for that same day, the whole time panicking and convinced that I had shot myself in the foot. But then it all worked out almost perfectly, and I left class with the stupidest grin on my face. Nothing like a successful multimedia presentation as an engaging pretest on prefixes and suffixes.

The geeky details:

I used the Nearpod website to create the multimedia presentation. Once I published it online (thanks to my colleague Don for teaching me that very important step), I was able to use the Nearpod teacher app to push this same presentation onto the screens of all the students, who signed into my classroom through their student accounts using a short simple pin #. 
 

I began with refresher question about what prefixes and suffixes are and why they are important. They each submitted their answers and I then pushed back onto their screens what I considered the top answers. Then I asked them a five question quiz, where they clicked on what they thought was the correct definition of eachprefix. I got data immediately and was able to use the data immediately.  
 

One of my awesome girls was multitasking for me, and she recorded on butcher board all the prefixes and suffixes I chose to assess after consulting numerous top words' lists and my students' biology class vocabulary list. For every prefix or suffix the students knew, I asked this student to write in blue, but for every word part missed by three or more students, she switched to red marker. 
 

Then, I pushed a slide that asked them an open-ended question where they just typed any sample words they knew that had the prefixes or suffixes. Again, we shared and discussed a few and recorded the examples as well. We repeated this process all period (and every Wednesday for the next two weeks to finish up all the long list) and the students participated both using the iPads and also by blurting out examples. Both were helpful.

After the pretest and butcher paper aspect was over, I had about ten more slides with challenging words that included some of the prefixes and suffixes. We played a game where they tried to figure out the meaning of the words using the knowledge they had just gained (and the butcher block posters that their classmate was nice enough to create). They really got into the competition aspect of it and really pushed themselves to figure out the meaning of the words. Perhaps I'll need to use the competition idea again.  

One of the best parts was that Nearpod also notifies the teacher in red when a student has left the app and gone to other apps or timed out, so I could always keep track of student engagement.

Trouble shooting/mistakes I learned from:

While frantically creating it that same morning before class, I accidentally posted two slides asking very similarly worded questions. Fortunately The app lets me see each slide before I post it, so while in preview mode, I noticed that during class and just skipped that slide, and the kids were none the wiser.

I must have "made a mistake on my key," as all 14 students and my tech coordinator who was observing all said they knew the prefix "pre" but it immediately popped up in red for all of them, so I confessed my error and we moved forward. Better go back and fix that for the future--although now that I've published it, that'll require cloning a new one, but that's pretty easily done on the website.