aubree teaches: Digital Word Sorts

Monday, January 22, 2018

Digital Word Sorts - Nearpod

Happy Monday teachers!

Today's post is about something I'm really excited to share, mostly because it's about my favorite tech tool. If you haven't already heard about Nearpod, you are truly missing out.
Nearpod is a great tool for interactive lessons, formative assessments, and more. Basically, you can make a presentation that students can access on their own devices using a code. From there, you can add quizzes, activities, videos, etc. My favorite feature, though, is draw it. Wit the draw it tool, you can allow students to draw, write, or type on any slide. Basically, you can create digital task cards, worksheets (although yuck), or basically anything you want.

Just go play around with it. I promise you will love it.

One of my favorite ways to use Nearpod, though, is for our weekly word sorts. I love to have students thinking about words and word parts. I want them to be able to sort our words of the week but I hate the hassle of cutting and pasting...or frankly, even making 24 copies of anything.

So this year I began using Nearpod for our weekly sorts. Each Monday, students come in and enter the code. The first slide they see is the list of words. They look over them and write them down (if you use agendas, this is perfect for that). Then they go to the next slide which is just a blank sort form. Like this

I usually include 4 sections even though they know they don't have to use them all. Or, they can use more. Students use the pen tool or the text tool (what they usually prefer) to sort the words out. Once they turn that in, they go on to the "open response" part. This is where I give them a word part and they must come up with their own words that have that part.
In this sort, I asked students to type 3 plural words that use "ies", 3 plural words that use "es", and 3 other plural words.

Here is an actual student response from our word sort this week. The words use au, aw, and ough.