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District technology coordinator highlights BrainPOP, Nearpod and tools to boost classroom engagement
Summary
The district’s technology coordinator summarized usage and teacher feedback for licensed instructional platforms, including k–8 BrainPOP, Nearpod, Book Creator and Read&Write, and described pilots with Discovery Education and partners.
Sarah Jolley, the district’s technology coordinator and digital coach, presented usage data and teacher feedback on several instructional technology subscriptions the district provides.
Jolley described BrainPOP (BrainPOP, BrainPOP Junior, BrainPOP ELL and Spanish-language resources) as a k–8 subscription the district purchased and said BrainPOP staff visited Elko classrooms and are producing an article and video about local teachers’ uses. Jolley presented anecdotal teacher feedback she collected through surveys: "I really like BrainPOP because I can use it in all the subjects," and "BrainPOP is an entertaining way to provide information," which she said came from teacher comments gathered by the technology office.
She laid out Nearpod’s classroom features — live interactive lessons, quizzes, polls and recently released AI-assisted lesson creation — and said teachers report Nearpod gives immediate student-response data that helps teachers catch misunderstandings in real time. Jolley said an elementary math teacher used Nearpod’s AI-driven Spanish lessons to support 19 English-learner students, and an elementary teacher used Nearpod AI to quickly generate stronger lesson material for a grade-level team.
Jolley also discussed Book Creator for student projects and portfolios, and Read&Write with uPAR, a toolbar and assessment used to evaluate whether text-to-speech and related accommodations benefit particular students (for example, students with IEPs or limited English). She said Read&Write provides text-to-speech, translation and word prediction tools across PDFs, Canvas and other platforms. Discovery Education was mentioned as a partner (Nevada Gold Mines also funds a subscription) and Jolley said a pilot will connect an Adobe classroom to a virtual, interactive session with Meta to showcase careers. Other tools listed included ClassDojo, Clever, Canva for Education, Adobe Express, FigJam and Prodigy.
Board members asked whether teachers had noticed measurable improvements; Jolley said teachers reported increased student engagement and that Nearpod’s immediate feedback has helped teachers identify and address gaps in learning sooner. She said many tools can be accessed at home (BrainPOP, Discovery Education and Read&Write) but some teacher-led Nearpod lessons must be launched by a classroom teacher to be used outside class.
No board action was required; the presentation was informational.
