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Increase Student Engagement with Pear Deck

Pear Deck is one of the easiest ways to ensure all students in the classroom are actively engaged and participating in classroom presentations created in Google Slides. The goal of this post is to give an overview of what Pear Deck offers and how to get started with the Pear Deck Add-on for Google Slides.
Getting Started with Pear Deck
Increase Student Engagement with Pear Deck

Getting Started with Pear Deck

Getting Started with Pear Deck

A Guest Post by Stacey Roshan

Pear Deck is one of the easiest ways to ensure all students in the classroom are actively engaged and participating in classroom presentations created in Google Slides. The goal of this post is to give an overview of what Pear Deck offers and how to get started with the Pear Deck Add-on for Google Slides.

Running a Pear Deck Session

The first thing to understand is what our ultimate presentation will look like. The following video will give you a quick look at:

  • various response types (text response, draggable questions type, and drawing response) from both the projector view and the student view
  • timer option to automatically lock student screens
  • projector layout options — list layout, grid layout, overlaid layout
  • built-in Pear Deck templates
  • Pear Deck Takeaways*

YouTube video



A Variety of Viewing Options

When you run a Pear Deck session, all students join from their own device. As you move through your presentation slides, all students have the opportunity to respond from their own screen. I call this the “student view” in the video. As the teacher, you can display all student responses on the classroom projector without student names attached to the responses. I call this the “projector view” in the video. Later, you can go back and look at a separate browser tab – the Teacher Dashboard* – to see how individual students have responded. I call this is the “Teacher Dashboard — With Names” in the video.

*Although Pear Deck is free to use, Takeaways and the Teacher Dashboard are Premium features

Pear Deck Add-On for Google Slides

YouTube video

I created this video tutorial for students at my school. As more of our teachers use Pear Deck to engage their classes in presentations, we have seen students wanting to use Pear Deck when doing presentations of their own. In this way, students are able to engage their classmates when presenting and allow them to interact with the content they are sharing.

That being said, this video should be a good overview for anyone. It shows you exactly what the presentation looks like from both the projector view and the student view. As teachers who are always creating presentations, it can be helpful to take a look at things from the student end. This tutorial should provide that opportunity.

Get Started!

If you are currently using Google Slides to create presentations, I encourage you to get started by adding the Pear Deck Add-on and using some of the Pre-Made Slide Templates they have available. I hope the videos I’ve shared in this post help get you excited and oriented to using Pear Deck. And that you might consider having students use Pear Deck to engage their classmates during presentations, too!

 

Stacey Roshan is an Upper School Technology Coordinator and Math Teacher. She has a keen interest in discovering innovative tools to engage students and personalize instruction. She has spent a lot of time working to flip the mathematics classroom in an effort to shift the culture to a more participatory learning space, focused on relationships and individual student’s needs. Her work on the flipped classroom has been featured in USA Today, CNN, The Washington Post, and on PBS Newshour. Stacey is a Pear Deck Certified Coach and Flipgrid, Buncee, Sutori, and Quizlet Teacher Ambassador. You can find her on Twitter @buddyxo or at TechieMusings.com.



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