Whole Brain Teaching and Nearpod in the Classroom

This is my second semester in the College of Education at Jacksonville State University. So far this semester is going great. Of course, I am busy, busy, and more busy because this semester, which is Literacy Block, requires a lot more work than ECE Block. However, that is apart of becoming a successful teacher...right? All teachers have to put in that extra work to make sure that their students are receiving the best education possible; therefore, I consider it as something worth it. Although I have all new teachers in Literacy Block, I still have Mrs. Weathers on Thursday nights for EED 409. I am so excited to have her again and I will tell you why.

 At the beginning of the semester, she gave my teacher candidates friends and I a list of topics to research information about instruction in the classroom.  Once we did our research, we had to create a presentation and present that information to the class. Tonight, two of the teacher candidates did their presentation and they both did an awesome job. They shared a lot of information with us about  Whole Brain Teaching and Nearpod. After receiving interesting information about the two, I can assure you that I will be using both in my lessons and in my future classroom.

 Randolph James presented Whole Brain Teaching (WBT). Whole Brain Teaching is a consistent and predictable way to both manage and instruct students in the classroom. It relies on high motivation and engagement among teacher and students. According to Randolph, Whole Brain Teaching is a powerful tool for classroom management that can be used for Grade School to higher education. My teacher from last semester, Dr. Thornburg, explained to us that classroom management starts the very first day that the students enter  the classroom. A teacher cannot start classroom management in the middle of the school year and expect for the students to behave. IT SHOULD ALWAYS START THE VERY FIRST DAY! Below I have shared a video with you about what Whole Brain Teaching looks like in a classroom.

I believe that the goal of Whole Brain Teaching is to create a peaceful and engaging classroom.

JaQuetta Thomas (JT) presented Nearpod. Nearpod is a interactive presentation tool for teachers to engage students with interactive lessons and assessments in the classroom. The interested part about Nearpod is that the students can have access to their own device, and only the teacher has controlled of what the students do next, meaning that it is up to the teacher to move the class through the presentation and let them interact with the media as they go (which is a good  because it can prevent students from moving ahead and not paying attention to what the teacher is saying in class).  According to JT, it is accessible to different devices and it's such a powerful application because it does many different things, such as question/ answer polling, surveys, videos, and drawings. Nearpod is very effective in the classroom. Make sure you do more research about it. I hope that you find it beneficial to use in the classroom like I did. :) Below I have shared a video with you about what Nearpod looks like in a classroom.