12 Days of Techmas Day 10: Pear Deck

12 Days of Our Favorite Resources to Engage Learners

I always try to remember it’s not about the tech, it’s how you use it. This being said, sometimes learning about a new tool or resource will open the door to bigger discussions about, creativity, pedagogy, and learning. Sometimes exploring a new EdTech resource can lead to some incredible learning experiences. 

Day 10 - Pear Deck

Yesterday, I shared Gimkit, one of my favorite game-based formative assessment tools. Today our guest blogger, Chris Skrzypchak is sharing a great tool to help teachers engage students with interactive digital activities. 

Pear Deck is an awesome tool that you can use to engage learners and gather formative data to determine their knowledge and understanding of the content. Pear Deck has been around for a while but has gone through some significant changes in the past year to make it much easier to use especially if you are a Google Slides user. If you have never used Pear Deck before, it’s as easy as adding an add-on to Google Slides. You can get started by following this guide.

The free version of Pear Deck allows the teacher to add interactive response slides into a Google Slide presentation so that students can respond to questions during the presentation making it more interactive and engaging. The teacher can also project anonymized student responses for the class to see as well as lock the slides when presenting. Teachers can use this data to ensure that all students are responding and not just the ones that they are calling on for the answer. With this data, you can gauge whether the class is ready to move on or if you need to review the material more.

While the free version of Pear Deck is good, the premium version of Pear Deck adds some really great additional features. The premium version includes a Teacher Dashboard that can be used to control the presentation and monitor student responses in real time and project individual student responses. You can also share the slide presentation and student responses after you are finished with each student with a feature called Takeaways. You also get some additional response options such as Draggable and Drawing slides.

We are fortunate that our district has purchased the Premium version. This has allowed many of our flipped and blended learning teachers to use another premium feature called Self Paced Mode with their students. Pear Deck’s Self Paced Mode allows the teacher to create a Google Slide presentation with Pear Deck response slides and share it with the students through Google Classroom. Students complete the presentation on their own time and are learning via the slides and responding to the questions. The teacher is able to monitor the student’s responses and deliver the appropriate follow-up content based on the data received.

If you would like to see some examples of Pear Deck slide presentations, check out Pear Deck’s Orchard.

Learn more about the many great features of Pear Deck with using out Pear Deck Tips and Resources Document.

If you’ve used Pear Deck in your classroom, please share your story in the comments below. If you have questions or other ideas, the comments below are waiting for you. 

12 Days of Techmas Calendar

(Links to Each Day's Resource as They Become Available)

Guest Blogger Tania Moneim will share another resource tomorrow. No need to jump in the Delorean and had back to 2018. We are ready to move forward in 2019!

Image Source

Chris is an Instructional Technology Coordinator at Waubonsie Valley High School in Aurora, IL. Chris enjoys helping students and teachers learn how to best utilize technology to better their lives. Twitter: @biztechtchr