Educator stories

My Favorite Nearpod Lesson – Determinants of Health

October 21, 2016The Nearpod Team

This is a guest blog post by Travis Edwards, a Health & PE teacher at Tarneit Senior College in Melbourne, Australia.

Nearpod has a variety of ready-to-teach Health and Virtual Field Trip lessons

to engage your students. Read about how Mr. Edwards engages his health

& PE students with Nearpod.

I am a Health and PE teacher, and one of the subjects I teach is Health and Human Development to Senior High School students. Every student in my class has their own Chromebook, which I take advantage of by building lessons with Nearpod.

My favorite Nearpod Lesson is ‘Determinants of Health’. This lesson looks at the things that impact on our health both positively and negatively, including lifestyle choices, physical environment and social factors.

Each of the determinants is unique, and to effectively deliver the lesson, a wide variety of resources and activities to explain each of the determinants is used.

Using Nearpod allowed me to build a lesson where all of these activities and resources are seamlessly pulled together and built into the Nearpod lesson. This assisted greatly in keeping students on track without constant instructions of ‘where to go or what to do next’ prompts.

The lesson utilizes a number of Nearpod features to explain the content such as video, Nearpod Virtual Field Trips, and links to websites. Using a mixture of media to explain concepts promoted student engagement with the lesson and their understanding of key concepts.

I previously taught this topic by presenting the information to students using a PowerPoint presentation with the use of YouTube clips throughout the lesson to help explain some of the key concepts. I also wrote URLs on my whiteboard and asked students to visit websites to find key information.

Creating this lesson on Nearpod allowed me to pull so many different resources together and deliver a lesson that was free flowing. There was no need to waste time during the lesson pulling up different YouTube videos, instructing students to type in different URLs, or switch back and forth between different applications.

Building in formative assessment activities allowed me to check for understanding after we explored each determinant so I knew the class was ready to move forward.

The learning experience enhanced greatly by the use of the Nearpod VR activity. The students compared and contrasted the determinants of health in the physical environment of a slum in Indonesia and the city of Melbourne, Australia. This gave my students a far more immersive learning experience than when I had previously taught this topic by projecting pictures on my whiteboard.