Change Up Your Formative Game - Pear Deck

Change Up Your Formative Game

To get started with Pear Deck, click on the "Teacher Login" button. This will lead you through the normal Google acceptance protocol so Pear Deck can have access to Drive in order to keep your slides housed there.

*Pear Deck does require a Google account to access.

Pear Deck will want to know a little bit about you when you initially sign in. Feel free to do this now or later. The choice is yours.

When you are starting your first Pear Deck, you have the option to open up a file from your Google Drive that you have already created, create a brand new Pear Deck Lesson from scratch, or visit the "Content Orchard" to pick from a library of ready-to-teach lessons. All Pear Decks are built through the Google Workspace app Google Slides. However, you can import a previously made Google Slide deck or even a PowerPoint (converted to a Google Slide) into a formative assessment.

Don't be like your students...name your Pear Deck slides so they don't all come up as "Untitled presentation" within your Google Slides title.

When you begin constructing your slides, you will want to open up the Pear Deck add-on to add slides that have interactive questions that your students will answer. Here you can choose from a list of template slides that are ready to go for different question types.

If you want to customize your formative assessment slides, you can always simply add a slide and choose what question type you want it to be (multiple choice, text, number, website, draw, and draggable) Feel free to add in images, text blocks, audio, or a YouTube video to enhance each slide.

When your Pear Deck is ready to roll out to your students, select the Start Lesson icon in the right hand corner of build screen. This will put your Pear Deck into presentation mode to where you will get a code to give to your students to join. If you have the premium version, you can simply share your Pear Deck to your Google Classroom, therefore bypassing the need for the code.

Choose Your Lesson Mode

What students will see on the projector screen

What the teacher will see on a separate monitor

Your participants will see something like this on their devices once they have joined your Pear Deck.

The real magic with Pear Deck begins to happen when the teacher guides the participants through the assessment. The control bar is at the bottom of the screen and gives the teacher some powerful options to dig a little deeper that what a normal assessment would typically allow.

Choose to hide answers from the screen you are projecting to.

Toggle on to reveal submitted answers for possible discussion.

Choose to lock answers for students to not re-enter their answer choices.

Toggle on for answers to be revealed from students. Answers are anonymous when revealed.

Here is what it would show on a participant's screen when the teacher has locked the responses.

You can ask a question at any time that may clarify why your participants answered in a certain way during the assessment. This option alone makes Pear Deck a valuable tool to use when attempting to check for understanding during a formative assessment setting.

The more options (3 vertical dots) icon will allow you to do several things, one of which is to "Turn on Student-Paced" to where students will go through the assessment on their own pace. This is great to differentiate depending on the assessment to where students may perform better when taking the assessment on their own time.

To end your Pear Deck session, you will click on the more option icon and click "End This Session." This will allow you to then retrieve the data from the assessment to help guide your instruction.

When ending a session, if you are a premium user, you can select Generate Takeaways, which will automatically send a Google Doc feedback form to each student in how they answered OR you can share the link to Google Classroom where students can see their individual results from there.

Pear Deck will house all of your Pear Decks here in order to share to others, simply by sharing with a colleague as you would any other Google Doc.

Report abuse