The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) have been adopted by 42 states and the District of Columbia. The goal of the CCSS is to provide students with consistent learning standards across math and English language arts and to prepare them for college and career success.

While some states have decided to opt out of the CCSS, there is no doubt that the vast majority of U.S. schools are relying on these standards to provide a curricular framework for K-12 classrooms.   Plus, many of the states who have not adopted the CCSS still have state standards that bear a strong resemblance to the CCSS.

For teachers who have to create lessons that are consistently aligned with the CCSS or their individual state standards, challenges can often arise. This is especially true in terms of finding and designing quality content.

That’s where Nearpod comes in.

Creating CCSS Aligned Lessons with Nearpod

As any teacher knows, the one thing you never have enough of is time. No teacher wants to spend hours searching the internet for that perfectly standard-aligned resource.

Luckily, Nearpod provides an enormous collection of CCSS-aligned and state standard-aligned lessons, all of which are customizable to students’ needs. Many of these lessons have been crafted by trusted education authors like Common Sense Media, LearnZillion, and Newsela.

Teachers can select prebuilt lessons to customize, or they can upload their own lessons from PowerPoint, Google Slides, PDFs, and Sway. Existing presentations can be spiced up with formative assessment and multimedia activities, then delivered to any student device with an internet connection.

Increase Engagement with Interactive Learning Activities

Once you’re working on a lesson in Nearpod, you have access to features that can help make your lessons more engaging and interactive. As research shows, increased student engagement leads to increased achievement. This means that students will be more likely to reach mastery levels of the CCSS.

“Researchers have documented what our intuition tells us to be true: that more engagement results in higher achievement.” Lawrence Baines and Robert Romano

Nearpod allows teachers to insert interactive learning activities like quizzes, polls, drawn responses, open-ended questions, 3D objects, and virtual reality experiences, all within their previously static lessons. These interactive learning activities allow students to explore content in a variety of new and engaging ways.

Teachers can lead students through lessons, or deliver them in a way that allows students to move through the content at their own pace. This means students can take additional time to explore ideas that interest them, making more connections to the material. This is particularly beneficial for teachers in online learning spaces or flipped classrooms, where asynchronous lesson possibilities are a must-have.

Using Formative Assessments to Improve Student Learning

In addition to making learning more interactive, teachers can also use Nearpod to increase formative assessment opportunities. Research has suggested that formative assessment can improve student learning, thereby increasing student achievement levels on CCSS related assessments.

“Students who receive formative assessment perform better on a variety of achievement indicators than their peers do.” Hanover Research

Teachers who use Nearpod activities within their lessons can get instant formative feedback on how their students are doing. This information can then be used to group students, change the direction of the lesson, differentiate instruction, or make any other instructional changes a teacher might need.

Curriculum consultant Monica Burns says it best: “I love how Nearpod makes any lesson interactive and engaging while giving teachers actionable formative assessment data.”

Moving Forward with Nearpod

If you’re interested in learning more about how Nearpod can directly impact student achievement, these case studies from Nearpod offer additional insight.

Or if you’re ready to jump in and begin using Nearpod’s CCSS-aligned lessons today, you can sign up now!

The Nearpod Team

Nearpod’s award-winning platform is used by thousands of schools around the globe, transforming classroom engagement.

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