The New Pear Deck

The New Pear Deck

Same great tool to engage your students, new easier way to make Slides.

Technology is a tool, or so we are told, but often it may seem more decorative than actual.

However, if you are looking for a way to make your classroom a more engaging place and unlock the real potential of instruction in the one-to-one classroom, Pear Deck may have your answer. The Pear Deck dashboard allows teachers to see the responses of every child in the room, so he/she can redirect, correct, encourage, and offer feedback immediately. This immediacy is the factor that makes this technology so powerful.

Here is a scenario... Ask your class to explain the word “biography.” With hand raising, well, one student gets to answer and the others may or may not listen. Via a paper worksheet or an exit ticket, the teacher gets to grade all those answers after school, and the students wait on feedback until a day or two later. So many learning opportunities are missed.

With Pear Deck, the teacher sees all student answers in the moment, redirects a few students, and shares out some examples of student answers anonymously via the whiteboard. Everyone gets to answer the question, everyone got to be successful, and no one had to grade a paper at night. At the end of the lesson, the teacher can use Take-aways to send a copy of the slideshow directly to each student’s Google Drive. 

New drawing tools make drawing easy

Pear Deck is a Add-on for Google Slides, so to get started, open Slides and get the Add-on. You can start with a Slide show you have already made, or you can create one from scratch. Launch the Add-on and a side panel opens that will guide you to putting the interactive questions into your presentation.

Students can answer in five ways: text, drawing, draggable (they can move a marker or icon around the screen), number, and multiple choice. The tools available to students in Drawing slides have greatly improved! Students have lots of colors to choose from, they can type anywhere on their drawing, and there is a highlighter, eraser, and line tool.  

Here is my YouTube tutorial so you can see how to make a deck from scratch. 

The teacher Dashboard is the very best part of the Pear Deck classroom. From the dashboard the teacher can preview upcoming slides, see each student’s response, lock student screens, project responses to the main screen, and launch questions on the fly. The first time you take the dashboard for a spin, you may find it just a little intimidating--you have to pay attention to the real humans in the room as well as their electronic work which is on the screen in front of you. But with a little practice you will be multitasking like a champion and offering your students the kind of instant feedback that you never could have imagined. Pear Deck, however, is a beautiful example of a technology tool that actually improves engagement and learning.

Some notes to get you started. 

Complete directions here.