Spice Up Your Slides with Pear Deck
Featuring tips from Austin Glaub, Northside Middle School, 8th Grade Social Studies Teacher
After weeks of eLearning, we may feel our students struggling to stay engaged as the newness and novelty of eLearning has worn off. As teachers, we may feel we are spinning our wheels to incorporate new, fun tools into lessons, only to find our students less eager to use these new tools than we anticipated. eLearning does not require tons of fancy, flashy new tools to be successful or exciting. Too many new tools, concepts, and experiences may do the opposite for our learners: deter them from the learning experience. Therein lies our dilemma as educators: we want to find ways to excite our students, without overwhelming them with too much newness at once.
So, how can we find new ways to excite our students while teaching during eLearning without disengaging them by accident? How can we strike a balance effectively? We may be able to accomplish this by using something familiar, but with flair. Consider if you've ever ventured to a new restaurant, the first time you go, you may peruse the menu for something that sounds a little familiar. In our eLearning environment, we can present our students with a new learning tool or experience, but with a level of familiarity. An example: using a familiar, traditional teaching tool like a slideshow but with a little more flair.
Slideshows are tried and true instructional tools. Businesses and educators rely on slideshows often to communicate information quickly and visually. Our students are familiar with slideshows as typical direct instruction tools in a regular classroom setting. You might even be utilizing slides to share information during eLearning days. While slideshows are great for communicating information quickly, all of us, at some point in time, have experienced boring, ineffective slideshow presentations. A disengaging presentation is the last thing our students need during extended, emergency eLearning. What our learners might need in their learning environment, however, is the familiarity of a tool like slideshows, but used in a more interactive, different way.
Enter Pear Deck, the dynamic presentation tool that spices up traditional, bland slideshow presentations with active learning questions, reflections, and critical thinking components. Created for teachers, by teachers, Pear Deck is the perfect balance of familiar and newness that relies on educational research to transform passive learning into active, student-centered experiences.
What
Pear Deck is an add-on for Google Slides or Microsoft PowerPoint that allows teachers to seamlessly insert questions into slideshows for more interactive, engaging learning. After adding the Pear Deck add-on, a teacher can easily select from a library of question templates-from lesson starters, critical thinking question templates, social-emotional learning, to end of lesson reflection questions. Plus, the interactive question types provide students with a variety of means to show their understanding, including, but not limited to, multiple-choice, draw a response, or written response. While students respond to questions throughout a slideshow presentation, a teacher receives real-time information on student comprehension and what concepts need to review. With a few clicks, learning is transformed from a passive, static slideshow to an active, student-centered learning experience.
Why
Pear Deck's unique, interactive novelty could be a welcome change for students after weeks of virtual learning. Furthermore, Pear Deck's formative assessment questions provide students with means to sustain effort by connecting back to the lesson goal, options for comprehension with checks for understanding, and ways to communicate in a less intimidating means. Also, research shows active learning where students are involved in the process of learning-such as discussion, practice, review, or application-yields better results. According to a study of active learning and formative assessment strategies at Stanford University, students taught with active learning outperformed students taught with traditional lectures by six percentage points on exams.
Additionally, active learning helps boost student engagement, belonging, and interest in school. In a study from Scott Freeman et al. in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers noticed that students who were taught by teachers using active learning strategies (such as formative assessments, discussions, and reflection questions) noted feeling more connected with the teacher and completed assignments for the class at a higher rate. We know the more connected a student feels with the school environment, then the student is more likely to stay motivated to continue learning.
Pear Deck can help improve learning outcomes during extended emergency eLearning in the following ways:
- Boost engagement with active learning
- With Peardeck, add interactive questions and reflections to any presentation for a more dynamic learning experience rather than passive listening to presentations.
- Give everyone a voice
- Minimize threats by providing all students-even shy students-an opportunity to share their understanding, ask questions, and more in a more discreet manner
- Quick formative assessment to check for understanding
- Get real-time results to gauge student understanding
- Improve organization and executive functioning
- Support students as they navigate through many eLearning resources with a PearDeck presentation- a presentation, assessment/questioning, and reflection tool all-in-one
Lesson Ideas:
- Use in the "live" setting during a video conference (instructor-paced)
- Utilize "student-paced" mode to empower students with the ability to answer at their own pace
- Incorporate the social-emotional learning Pear Deck questions to check-in with students
- When using Pear Deck the first time, use without connecting to academic content so students can focus on mastering the tool first rather than the tool plus new content
- Begin the lesson asking students what they know about the day's topic (template in the library)
- Ask students to explain their thought process (drawing or text slide template in the library)
- Create a mindmap mid-lesson to check for understanding (template in Pear Deck library)
- Predict what happens next in a story or history (template in Pear Deck library)
- Label a diagram
- Ask a question
How:
Ready to spice up your slideshows with PearDeck?
To use PearDeck, be sure you create a free account first. Be sure to add the Google Slides PearDeck add-on if you plan to use Google Slides or the add-on for PowerPoint.
Next, check out the guides below.
Have an idea you would like to share? We would like to hear your ideas!
Submit the survey or via the "Contact" tab.
Image Courtesy Alexander Mils
CAST, "UDL: Universal Design for Learning Guidelines", The UDL Guidelines (website), accessed April 11, 2020.
Pear Deck, "Active Learning Makes a Difference", The Pear Deck Blog (website), accessed April 27, 2020.
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