Pear Deck: A Google Add-On to Engage Your Students
Teachers! The pandemic and remote teaching has taught us many things. One huge take away for us was a new found love of a web based app called Pear Deck. We absolutely loved using Pear Deck for our remote students this year, and we love it even more now that we are back in the classroom full time.
What is Pear Deck and How Does it Work?
Pear Deck is a Google Slides add-on feature that becomes an interactive presentation tool that is used to actively engage students in individual and social learning. Teachers can create presentations or use existing presentations using their Google Drive account. “Imagine if you could engage every student in your class, every day. What if you could instantly see who’s confused and who’s ready for more? That’s the power of Pear Deck. And now, with the Pear Deck for Google Slides Add-on, you can add the magic of formative assessments and interactive questions to your presentations right from Google Slides.”
Pear Deck slides can be presented and paced by the teacher or can be shared with students and be student paced.
What are the different Pear Deck Tools and Features?
Text - Students answer questions on the slide. Questions can be open-ended, short answer, even essay based.
Multiple Choice - Create multiple choice, true or false, and yes or no style questions for your students to answer. This is a quick and effective way to check for understanding during a lesson.
Number - Students type in a number based on the prompt on their device. Questions can be anything pertaining to a number.
Website - embed a website directly onto a slide. When the students click on the slide it will take them to the desired website.
Draw - Students can draw anywhere on the slide. This is a fun feature for so many reasons. If you teach math, this is an awesome feature for showing linear equations.
Draggable - Here, students can drag an icon to any part on the slide. This could be used for This or That style questions, to mark an answer on a number line, or even to take attendance. We create a chart with all of our students’ names on it on the slide and then students drag their icon to their name to mark themselves present for the day.
Another great feature that Pear Deck provides is recording and/or placing audio onto a slide. This is especially awesome for student paced presentations. A teacher can provide verbal directions, read a piece of text, pronounce vocabulary words, explain answers, and even add music or audio recordings to the slide.
Why We Love It
Pear Deck can be used in so many ways. We love several of the templates in the template library. If you’re new to Pear Deck, start with the template library to help guide your thinking and introduce you to all of the amazing features, questions, and ways in which you can use the Pear Deck add-on features.
We love Pear Deck because it enables us to see every single student’s thinking and learning in real time. It is awesome for checking for student understanding of a concept being taught, and we love that we can reteach immediately if needed. We also love that students can see our presentation directly on their computer screen, and they remain engaged during our presentations due to the constant and consistent check-ins for understanding. For more ideas on how to create Pear Deck slides and ideas for how to use the slides, check out this awesome post from Ditch That Textbook.
Until next time teacher friends,
Bottoms up!