Avriel A.

Taylor
Instructional Strategies
Dr. Hicks
February 19, 2015
Speaker Reflection
David Kelly, an alumnus of Claflin University shared insight on his experience as an
educator and his position in the Orangeburg 5 School District. He taught at both Mellichamp
Elementary and Marshall Elementary and now he works at Brookdale Elementary. There he
promotes the push for technology by incorporating helpful and useful programs in the
classrooms. He mentioned that technology is becoming more and more important inside and
outside the classroom. Technology keeps people engaged. It is a known fact that children have
many different learning styles and learn at many different levels; therefore technology addresses
the students at the same time at different levels. Mr. Kelly mentioned three different programs
that are accessible to anyone. Two of the programs free and he highly recommends that we use
them to as future educators.
The first program he talked about and demonstrated was NearPod. The main purpose of
this program is to bring the classroom to life with interactive mobile presentations that teachers
create and customize themselves. NearPod has benefits. These benefits are that it engage and
amaze, follow the students, share content and assessments in real time, great for BYOD( bring
your own device), monitor classroom activity and easily control students devices, easily create
interactive classes, download ready-to-use lessons, and it could be used for distant learning.
The second program Mr. Kelly introduced was Kahoot. Kahoot is a game-based
classroom response system for schools, universities, and businesses. It allows students to take
control of their learning. Most importantly it is easy to use, inclusive, and highly engaging.

Avriel A. Taylor
Instructional Strategies
Dr. Hicks
February 19, 2015
Kahoot flips the classroom with a pedagogy based on encouraging a loop from learner to leader
within the learning space, which maximizes the precious learning time spent in the classroom
and empowers learners to lead. This program is different from most existing classroom respond
systems because allows learners to both respond and create with any device that has a web
browser and works over wifi or 3G/4G, creating a variety of trusted learning spaces. It also
provides additional engagement, motivation and rewards through learners' participation, with a
game-based pedagogy which is proven by academic research. Most importantly Formative
assessment and adaptive teaching happen through our data providing educators with a snapshot
of each learner's current understanding and longer term tracking of progress.
The third program was Compass Learning. From lack of time we were not able to go into
detail with it but Mr. Kelly did share a little bit of information. The down fall of this program is
that it could only be used if the district purchases it. On the other hand, it has an individualized
learning plan and the teacher could use for instruction. Hopefully Mr. Kelly returns soon to go
discuss in detail because I feel that it could be very helpful in my future endeavors.