Ten Things to Love About Pear Deck

1. You Start Somewhere Familiar. 

Pear Deck is a Google Slides add-on. It gives you additional tools to use with Google Slides. To begin creating a new Pear Deck lesson simply open Google Slides and click Pear Deck for Google Slides Add-on from the Add-ons menu. This opens a side menu next to your Google Slides presentation where you can access the Pear Deck tools.

2. Pear Deck Increases Engagement by Giving a Voice to Every Student. 

Pear Deck gives you tools to turn your Google slideshow into an interactive presentation. Students will be prompted to respond to Pear Deck Questions from their device in order to share their thinking during a presentation session.  Now you can hear from every student instead of just the ones who raise their hands!

3. Pear Deck Helps You Build Interactive Activities.  

Pear Deck's interactive activities have the potential to flip the narrative from teacher-centered lecture to student-led inquiry and encourage creative/critical thinking. 

There are five Pear Deck Interactive Question types to choose from.  

• Text allows students to type a written response
• Choice is for answering multiple choice questions
• Number gives students a box to write a numerical response
• Draw* gives multiple tools for expression including a pencil, a highlighter, an eraser, a line tool, and a text tool to respond on top of templates or on a blank page. 
• Draggable* allows you to drag a shape to a point on the screen 
  *Premium only

4. Student Responses are Recorded. 

This makes Pear Deck a powerful assessment tool. Users with free accounts can export student responses from Text, Choice, and Number Questions to a Google Sheet for review once the presentation session is closed. During the session student answers remain anonymous to the teacher. 

Premium users can make use of the Teacher Dashboard to review responses by name during a session in real time.

All teachers can share anonymous student responses with the group making it possible for students to learn from one another.

5. The Template Library Helps You Get Started. 

All users have access to premade Interactive Questions from Pear Deck’s template library. Build your lesson from their Beginning, During, and End of Lesson templates; search through the critical thinking or SEL sections; or view sample Questions by content area. There’s even a section dedicated to our youngest learners. All users, even those with free accounts, can use templates made from Draw and Draggable Interactive Questions.  

6. Embedded Websites Keep Students in Pear Deck. 

This is HUGE for little learners who get easily lost when links open in new tabs. Send your students to informational websites, learning videos, Google Forms, and so much more right within your presentation.

7. Pear Deck Decreases Distractions During Live Sessions. 

With Instructor-Paced activities you get to control what’s on your students’ screens. These synchronous lessons can be in person or done remotely. In Instructor-Paced mode only you can advance the slides.  When you move on to the next slide it changes the slide on your students' screens. You can set a timer so students know how long they have to complete their interactive slides and lock or unlock their ability to change their responses. 

Premium users also have the option to set up Student-Paced activities where students can move through the slides on their own. This is great when you need to post asynchronous activities for group or independent work, flipped classroom homework, or virtual learning. Premium users can also turn on student-paced mode at any point during live lessons as well. 

8. It’s Easy for Students to Use. 

Students join a Pear Deck session by either clicking a link or entering a join code. They do not need to connect add-ons or extensions and there is nothing to install. Once they’re a part of a session they are guided by easily identifiable icon-based navigation and tools. Teachers can collect student Google accounts automatically to use for assessment. Best of all students can join a Pear Deck session from any device.

9. Premium Features are Free for 30 Days. 

Pear Deck Premium is free for 30 days (at the time of posting, 9/1/20). Premium users can enjoy all of the additional features mentioned above plus:

• A built-in audio tool for adding audio to slides
• Google Doc Takeaways to give to students after a session has ended.  These docs provide copies of the slides from the session and a record of their responses with space to take notes and reflect.  Teachers can go even further by adding to their Docs to provide feedback.
• Google Classroom integration for assigning activities and handing out Takeaways.
• Send live feedback to students during a presentation session.

10. It’s Easy to Learn. 

• If you’re like me you can learn by clicking around.  See number 1 above to review how to begin. 
• Another great way to get started is to visit the library of help videos.
• Looking for more? Join one of the free live training sessions or watch the prerecorded Pear Deck 101 session.
• Walk through The Orchard of premade template packs, ready-made activities, and blog posts.  Make sure to check out the Newsela daily decks!
• Read the Pear Deck Knowledge Base help center articles. 
• Watch this playlist to learn how to use Pear Deck during remote learning.

Image Credits:  Muséum de Toulouse / CC BY-SA | Raphaël Poupon / CC BY-SA | Ken-ichi Ueda / CC BY