Nearpod is a formative assessment tool available to teachers that allows them to create engaging lessons for their students. A great tool for teaching anytime, it can be especially useful right now when remote teaching has made it really hard for teachers to engage their students’ attention.

If you’re only just discovering this tool, chances are that you already use another platform to teach your students. But this shouldn’t stop you from trying this wonderful platform as you can use Nearpod in integration with your current platform.

Even if you’re already using Nearpod, but have been using it in isolation from Google Classroom, you’ve been doing it wrong. Nearpod integrates seamlessly with Google Classroom, thereby making the teaching process even more cohesive and easy for both you and your students.

Adding the lesson to Google Classroom from Nearpod

Go to nearpod.com and log in with your account. Then, go to ‘My Library’ where all your lessons are.

Go to the lesson you want to add to your Google Classroom and hover on it. Few options will appear on it. You can either share the lesson as a live participation lesson, a live participation lesson with a Zoom meeting link, or a student-paced lesson. No matter how you choose to share the lesson, the process for sharing stays the same.

Let us choose the ‘Live Participation’ option here.

Clicking it will generate a 5- alphabet code, and underneath it will be a few options to share it – click on the ‘Google Classroom’ option.

You will be prompted to sign in to your Google Classroom account the first time you use it. Click on the ‘Continue’ button.

Then, select the class you want to share the lesson with from the drop-down menu.

A new option ‘Choose Action’ will appear. Click on it to expand the drop-down menu, and then select the action you want to take – you can simply make an announcement for the lesson (ideal for live participation lessons), assign it as an assignment (ideal for student-paced lessons), create material, or ask a question.

Click on the action you want to take – we chose the ‘Make an announcement’ option. Then, click on ‘Go’.

Enter a ‘Title’ for the announcement and click on the ‘Post’ button to share the link for the lesson with your students.

You can also click on the ‘arrow’ next to the Post button to schedule the post or save it as a draft.

This will share the link for the lesson with the classroom. Students can click on the link from their streams to directly join the lesson.

As this was a live participation lesson, students won’t be able to navigate between the slides. Only you, the teacher, will have control. If it was instead a student-paced lesson, students would have been able to control the presentation themselves and complete the lesson at a pace that would suit them.

Adding a Nearpod lesson from Google Classroom

You can also integrate Nearpod directly into Google Classroom so that you don’t even have to leave Google Classroom or go to nearpod.com to share a lesson from the latter to the former.

To do this, you need to install the ‘Nearpod for Classroom’ Chrome extension. Search for the ‘Nearpod for Classroom’ extension in Chrome web store, or click right here.

Click on the blue ‘Add to Chrome’ button to install the extension.

A confirmation dialog box will appear. Click on the ‘Add extension’ button on the pop-up window to confirm the installation.

Now, go to classroom.google.com and sign in with your Google Classroom account.

Click on the class you want to share the Nearpod lesson with.

Go to ‘Classwork’ from the tabs toward the top of the screen.

Then, click on the ‘Create’ button and select ‘Nearpod assignment’ from the list of options.

Then, log in to your Nearpod account and give Nearpod permission to access Google Classroom by clicking on the ‘Allow’ button.

Your library will then open in Google Classroom and all your lessons, whether you created them or downloaded them, will be there. Go to the lesson you want to share and hover on it. Then, select whether you want to share it as a live participation session or a student-paced session.

When you click on either of the buttons, the lesson will appear as a draft on the Google Classroom dashboard. Click on it to expand further options, and then click on the ‘Edit Assignment’ button.

If you want, you can edit it further like add a due date to it, or the points the assignment carries, any further information, or links. You can also leave it as it is. Then, click on the ‘Assign’ button to share the lesson with the students.

The lesson will appear in the students’ stream from where they can access it by clicking the link.

So, now you know the two ways you can integrate Nearpod with Google Classroom and seamlessly share the lessons with your students. No matter which method you prefer, it’ll be extremely easy.