Increase Student Engagement with Pear Deck

Pear Deck is a Google Slides add-on that allows teachers to make their presentations more interactive. It supports active learning and turns presentations into conversations.

WHAT IS PEAR DECK?

Student engagement is important as it demonstrates better student learning. Sometimes it is difficult to measure or monitor students’ engagement while going through a presentation.

The add-on also allows teachers to add Pear Deck features to their existing slides, or create a new presentation using their many pre-made templates.

Pear Deck’s mission is to help teachers deliver powerful learning moments to every student, every day. It transforms the lesson and puts the ownership of learning on students. It transforms their learning role from passive recipient to active participant. 

GETTING STARTED WITH PEAR DECK

Setting up Pear Deck for Google Slides is easy. This presentation offers a short and easy-to-follow tutorial. For those who are just getting started, you’d need to complete steps 1 and 2 first.

1. From Google Slides, open the Get Add-ons through the Add-ons menu.

2. Search for Pear Deck for Google Slides Add-on on the G Suite Marketplace and select Install.

3. Once the add-on is installed, the teacher can access it by opening the Pear Deck Add-on through the Add-ons menu.

4. The teacher can add interactive slides from Pear Deck’s library or create their own custom questions. Templates can be found here.

5. Once the lesson is complete, the teacher clicks the Present Lesson button to start the interactive lesson. 

Once the Present Lesson button is selected, the teacher is prompted with two Lesson Modes: Instructor-Paced or Student-Paced. I’ll go through the difference between the two below:

INSTRUCTOR PACED

Instructor-Paced lesson is perfect for synchronous learning and engaging students in real-time. The teacher projects the slides in a classroom (or personal device) while the same slide deck is also projected to the students’ personal electronic devices. Students follow along the slides as the teacher moves through the presentation. Students aren’t allowed to move forward or move backward on the slide deck on their own.

On an interactive slide, the teacher has the question slide and the students have the answer prompt. As responses are rolling in, the teacher can showcase the class’s responses to check for holistic understanding.

STUDENT-PACED

Student-Paced lessons is what I found myself gravitating towards with Online Learning. These lessons are perfect for asynchronous learning or flipped learning, where students go through a slide deck on their own and the teacher tracks their performance. 

In Student-Paced, the teacher can share the slide deck on Google Classroom or ask them to log-in using the generated Join Code. I personally liked the one-stop-shop nature of Google Classroom, so I placed my own slide deck there.

Students must be logged into their school’s Google ID in order for the teacher to track their progression. When Student-Paced mode is on, the teacher can track students’ progression on the slide deck on the Teacher’s Dashboard. There are three main pieces of information on the Teacher’s Dashboard:

• Number of students and name of students on the presentation

• Number of students and name of students on a particular slide

• Number of responses collected on the interactive slide

In any given interactive slide, students are prompted to answer it accordingly; the same as the way interactive slides are presented during an Instructor-Paced lesson. On the Teacher’s Dashboard, the teacher can choose to view the responses in different layouts to get either a more in-depth look at specific students’ responses or a general overview of the class’s performance.

Students’ view of the slide

Teacher’s View on Teacher’s Dashboard

STUDENT FEEDBACK

Upon ending either Instructor-Paced or Student-Paced lesson, the teacher is prompted to name the session. By checking the Publish Students Takeaway box at the bottom, the students will be e-mailed an editable, personalized Google Doc that contains all the slides from the presentation, including the students’ responses as a summary. Students can input their key understandings and thoughts on the concepts after the lesson and use this Takeaway document as a supplementary note.

These Takeaway documents are stored under the Pear Deck folder in the teacher’s Google Doc.

---

Pear Deck sets out to increase active learning in the classroom, and I think they were it was very successful in making lessons interactive and engaging. I particularly enjoyed the fact that I could still have a classroom community where students completed the slide deck and checked-in with me afterwards to see how they have performed. Even though the interactive slides sometimes have the correct answers (namely multiple choice slides), when the students weren’t given the correct answer right away, they were more motivated to work through the slides for a deeper understanding of the material.

From the ready-made template library, to the generated individual students’ takeaway documents, Pear Deck is a powerful tool that I think teachers should consider using to increase active learning and student engagement in a lesson.

---

SPREAD THE WORD

Did you find this resource informative? Spread the word and Pin it to Pinterest! 👇

---

Let's Get Social