To Nearpod Or Not?

Nearpod is undoubtedly an incredible instructional tool, but at heart I'm a penny pinching teacher and was wondering if it was worth the potential cost. So I investigated and here's what I found:

Functionality

Nearpod allows you create interactive presentations that your students can individually interact with on their own devices. You can import in already existing slide decks from Drive, Dropbox, etc. 

Once imported you can edit within Nearpod and add interactive features. Interactive features include:

-Open Ended Question

-Matching Pairs

-Quiz

-Draw It

-Collaborate

-Poll

-Fill In The Blanks

-Memory Test

-Embed Web Content

You can create from scratch within Nearpod and access all the above listed features. There is also a huge collection of other pre-made slide decks from other educators that you can use and edit for your purposes (including Common Sense Education lessons).

Pricing

The base package is "Silver" and that is completely free. 

To move up to a more 'elite status' you can join either the Gold or Platinum package. While you get tons of features, the price tag is extremely high for an educator. 

Limitations

There's major limitations to this; you have limited storage space, lesson size and cannot access a huge portion of the online lesson library. The picture below shows that one, 6 slide presentation, takes up 7.7 MB of your free 50MB. This would seriously limit you as a presentation creator; you will probably run out of space within three presentations! 

Conclusions

The more I played with Nearpod the more I wanted to pay for it. It is interactive, easy and engaging for students. But, I'm a penny pinching teacher who cannot afford to deal with limited presentation space or paying 120 dollars! If you're going to really use the program you'd go all in and probably end up needing the Platinum plan because of storage concerns. Basically, push to get your district to purchase a district license - then you get the all the functionality and the gift of keeping your own money.