Getting Started - Remote Learning, Pear Deck, and More

 Welcome to Class! 
Remote Learning Style!

This is a year like no other! You've probably heard this a time or two, but how is it changing how we teach and learn? 

I'll let you know what I think in a few month's, but for now I am just trying to start the year without being in the classroom. We are full remote for a bit.  Today I wanted to share one piece of how I am trying to get to know my students while I introduce them to the way we are going to do learning.

I will be using a combination of Google Classroom, Zoom, and Pear Deck to engage my students in our first day of learning together. We will be experimenting with using Zoom, Pear Deck and Google Classroom to engage my students.

We start the year focusing on a few big themes that I hope to build on throughout the year.

• Moments of Awe
• Empathy and Perspective
• What is Learning?
• What is Earth Science? (This is the smallest piece of the first day.)

I will be using Zoom and Pear Deck with this Slide Deck to engage students in exploring. In an effort for it not to be just be me talking, I've incorporated several videos that I hope will engage students. We will watch the first as a class together through Zoom. After that I will turn on student paced for the next two videos. We will use Pear Deck text questions before, during, and after each video to facilitate discussion. One of my goals is to see what works best for students when we watch videos together.

If you dive into the presentation and the speaker notes, you will also see that we will be using Google Classroom and Google Autodraw. You can also see what this looks like in Pear Deck Student Paced mode here?

I also think this is something I could easily adapt to a face to face experience in the future. I know it might be hard to digest all of this when you outside of my classroom experience, so if you are curious about anything I've shared, let me know.

What do you think? What questions do you have? What would you add or toss out? What doesn't make sense? What would you use? If you need more details or want to know how this went, sent me a tweet or DM. (@WickedEdTech)

Additional Remote Learning Resources

• Google Applied Digital Skills Back to School Collection
• Remote Learning Daily Agenda Templates - Organization for Teachers, Parents, and Students
• Free Interactive Pear Deck Templates for Google Slides and PowerPoint
• Favorite Google Resources for Teachers and Learners
• Collection of Remote Learning Resources