During the 2019 school year, I had a coworker who introduced me to Nearpod as a way to engage students with computers during (generally boring) note taking lessons. I was willing to try just about anything to get my on-level 11th graders to interact with the U.S. History curriculum. I created a more elaborate version of the Nearpod lesson I used for this week's screen casting assignment to familiarize them with some of the 18th century language and sentence structure, as well as to encourage students to share ideas with each other in small groups.

The tutorial video I made will show you how to add an existing slide deck to the Nearpod platform and enhance the lesson with digital activities. These include individual participation in brainstorming, open ended response, and drawing. There is so much more I have been able to do with Nearpod in the years since, but this was what I could fit into our required 4 minutes. Enjoy!



In the context of teaching history, I can see A.I. video creation as a new way to make history more relatable for students. As in my demonstration, historical figures could tell students about their experiences “first-hand” as opposed to hearing a teacher describe them. AI generated videos could also be used to create virtual immersive environments, for example a video which shows a typical day in an Athenian marketplace. In a general educational context, features like text to video can provide teachers with a fast way to animate or illustrate abstract concepts. Apps like aifreevideo.com make creating this kind of content accessible for anybody, so teachers would have the ability to customize the videos they use in their lessons to suit their students instead of curating existing videos from sites like YouTube. However, AI generated images and videos are still subject to “hallucinations,” which means some details or content in these videos may not be historically accurate or factually correct. This is certainly a significant limitation to consider before using AI generated content. It is possible that prompts could be refined and modified to fix these errors, but the teacher would have to review the generated content very carefully or risk missing errors.