UEN Teacher Tips

Teaching is complicated. It requires balancing the academic, emotional and physical needs of a roomful of children while responding in the moment to a barrage of feedback and indicators. During any lesson, teachers conduct dozens of assessments to approximate students’ understanding and engagement. 

Though still valuable in their own right, these quick, informal assessments are often limited in their depth and level of interactivity because they occur while the lesson is already in motion. 

However, while time and classroom management constraints have previously restricted teachers’ abilities to create games, quizzes and assignments in the moment, artificial intelligence is providing teachers with new ways to engage their students and measure their growth. In Nearpod, teachers can now generate multiple-choice quizzes and Time to Climb activities in less than a minute using AI Create.

To use AI Create, begin by entering a prompt (for example, “Generate questions about the effects of the Cold War in American politics” or “Create definition questions for the following list of vocabulary words”). AI will compose the relevant questions, present them to you for approval and import them directly into your lesson or activity—no copying and pasting required.

Here are three example use cases—with prompts—that may spark ideas for your own classroom:

• Imagine you’re teaching your fourth-grade class how to compare numbers with one and two decimal places using greater than, less than and equal signs. During the lesson, it’s difficult to tell if students are grasping the differences between numbers rounded to the tenth and rounded to the hundredth. You decide to use a Time to Climb activity as a fun formative assessment. You ask students to create visual representations of one of their comparisons, and as they’re working, you open Nearpod and use AI Create to generate the activity. After students complete the Time to Climb game, you open the report for the session and identify students in need of targeted support. 

Prompt: You are writing questions for fourth graders. Generate ten questions asking students to compare numbers with one decimal place (tenths) and two decimal places (hundredths) using the following symbols: <, > and = (only provide three answer choices per question). Each of your questions should be formatted in the following way: "Which of the following comparisons is correct? 0.65 ___ 0.6"

• Imagine you’re a middle school science teacher, and yesterday, you taught a lesson on the structure of cells. During your first two class periods of the day, you notice that most students did not retain the information you taught them the day before. Between your second- and third-period classes, you open Nearpod and use AI Create to quickly generate a Time to Climb activity with questions about cell structure that you can use as a bell ringer to review the previous day’s content. 

Prompt: You are writing questions for middle schoolers. Create ten questions about the structure of cells. Your questions should be designed to assess students' understanding of the roles of the nucleus, chloroplasts, mitochondria, cell membrane and cell walls. 

• Imagine you’re a US history teacher at a high school facilitating a learning activity on the Cold War. You circulate throughout the classroom as students work in groups, and you notice that students seem to have a firm understanding of the key events and figures of the Cold War but a limited understanding of its lasting impacts. While students are working, you open Nearpod and use AI Create to create a Time to Climb activity with questions about the Cold War’s effects on American society and politics. After students complete the lesson’s first learning activity in groups, you use the Time to Climb activity as a springboard into a discussion on the Cold War’s impacts on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.  

Prompt: You are writing questions for high school students in a US history class. Generate ten questions on the long-term effects of the Cold War on American society and politics. Your questions should focus primarily on effects rather than dates and figures.