In preparation for state testing, Bethune-Bowman Elementary School is providing its yearly Saturday Academy for 3^rd-5^th grade students. From 8am-Noon on selected Saturdays, students get a bus ride to school in order to engage in core content lessons. On Saturday, March 19, 2016, 4^th grade students utilized their iPads to participate in a NearPod lesson on quadrilaterals. NearPod is an interactive program that allows students to follow along with the teacher’s lesson through their iPad. Students cannot move on to the next portion of the lesson until the teacher advances the slides. Slides can include instructional components of the lesson cycle such as video anticipatory sets, review slides, and direct instruction slides. Slides can also include activity components such as polls, quizzes, drawings, and short answer typed responses. NearPod allows for 100% class participation at the same time while checking for understanding as all student activities are submitted to the teacher’s dashboard which can be displayed on the Starboard. Quiz results are presented in a column format that allows the teachers to quickly identify which questions the majority of the class may have struggled the most on.

During Saturday’s quadrilateral lesson, 4^th graders participated in all of the NearPod instruction and activities before going outside to take picture of quadrilaterals in real life. After taking the pictures, students used the Educreations app to create a video where they inserted the pictures, used the telestrator to outline the quadrilateral, and then either type the name of the quadrilateral on the video or record their voice narrating the video. Students presented their videos to the class before taking a quiz to end the lesson.