Ed Tech Tips with E. Mosier
Make your classroom more Efficient!
Ripen Your Instruction with Pear Deck
Overview
Question-Type Options
A Draggable - Students are able to drag an icon to an image of their choice. Think of this as the ability to have students pinpoint locations on a map, or label different parts of the body.
Drawing - You can share an image and allow your students to draw on top of it. This could be great for those "Show Your Work" math problems or tracing the journey of an explorer or character in a novel.
Free Response: Text - If you share out an image or a piece of text, you can have students respond with either a short answer or a paragraph text. An added bonus of this is that you can display the answers anonymously on the front screen, making for a more engaging classroom discussion.
Free Response: Number - This is simply a quick way to have all students respond to a problem. It can be as simple as guess how many Skittles are in the jar, or "what answer did you get for question 2?" Then, students respond in the empty text box in the sidebar.
Multiple Choice - The most common form of formative assessment comes by way of the multiple-choice option. Send an image, document, or map to the students and provide them with their choices. Then, the results are calculated by a percentage of who selected which answer.
Two Presentation Modes
As you probably know, the great thing about Pear Deck is the ability to have students remaining on the same slide as you're on as you're teaching. They are unable to move forward to a new slide or back to a previous slide unless you change the slide on your device. But, there are two features that come along with the Premium version that is great, Student-Paced mode, and Student Takeaways.
Student-Paced Mode is just that - giving students the ability to control the pace of the slides being presented. This is turned on when you have the presentation open. You can use this to have students review a lesson, for flipped classrooms, or even for students who were absent on the day the material was taught.
Student Takeaways are described as "a notes document that lives in Google Drive." This is a fantastic way to gather feedback or allow students to reflect on their learning for that day. Once the session is ended, you can enable Takeaways. As is implied, students are able to type their thoughts onto a Google Doc, providing you with much deeper content than a short answer feedback response could provide.
Social Emotional Learning
Adding Audio to Slides
As with everything else in education, when the school shutdowns happened due to the COVID-19 pandemic, things became a little more customizable for remote learning. This is no different than with Pear Deck. A feature that was released in April of 2020 allows for teachers to insert Audio files directly into the Slide. This is such a powerful option because it doesn't matter if you're teaching remotely or a student is referencing notes after hours, the addition of an audio file can be so helpful. Teachers can easily add directions to a slide, offer positive feedback to the whole class, or clarify expectations. A great idea by Matt Miller of Ditch That Textbook is to utilize audio files to demonstrate correct punctuation in a world languages class. Regardless of the way it is used, adding audio to Pear Deck slides can increase or clarify learning more than ever imagined.
Additional Resources
Google Aha! Tip of the Week
This isn't necessarily a "tip" this week, but some information that's really interesting! LearnPlatform.com just released a list of the 40 top used Tech Tools in the last year and Google products dominate the top 10 with 8. Google Docs, Google Slides, and YouTube occupy the top 3 while Google Sites and Google Sheets make up 8 & 10. It is interesting, though, that Google Meet was 13th and Zoom took the 8th spot. With the new updates and ease of use, I am interested to see if those 2 will trade places in next year's rankings. For the rest of the list, check it out thanks to a tweet from Eric Curts.
Contact Mr. Mosier!
Email: mosiere@davenportschools.org
Website: www.davenportschools.org/sudlow
Location: Sudlow Intermediate School, East Locust Street, Davenport, IA, United States
Phone: 563-445-5120
Twitter: @emosier3