Pear Deck

What is Pear Deck?

Pear Deck is an Google Chrome Extension that allows teachers to be able to create interactive lessons on Google Slides.

There are a number of different question options that teachers can input into the slides for students to answer either in real-time or asynchronously on another day.

Pear Deck is free and is linked to your College Google Account.

There are templates of lesson slides available if you are struggling to find inspiration.

Features of Pear Deck

There are different things you can do on Pear Deck depending on your learner and lesson needs. The features are as follows:

Ask Students a Question - This will put a question on the slide for students to answer

Template Library - This is where all templates that are available from Pear Deck are kept - there are templates for Lessons Starters to full sessions.

Add Audio - You can record audio from yourself to add to a Pear Deck Lesson slide.

How to get Pear Deck

There are two main ways to get Pear Deck onto your Google Slides. You can either select this as an Add-on directly from Google Slides or download it from your Chrome Extensions.

If you click on the ‘Get add-ons’ section, you will be taken straight to the Google Workplace Marketplace for you to download Pear Deck. Simply type in Pear Deck and click on Install for this to be added to your Slides and Chrome.

Or you can go straight to the Chrome Workplace Marketplace to download Pear Deck - this is the exact same way as doing it through Slides.

Once this has been downloaded, you can get started creating your very own lessons through Pear Deck!

How to Use Pear Deck

Depending on your learner’s needs or how you wish to plan your lesson, you can use Pear Deck in different ways. It can be used as a great tool for a lesson starter for a quick question and answer session. Or, it could be used to create a completely asynchronous lesson for your students.

The main feature of Pear Deck is to create interactive questions that your students can answer in real-time or have their answers collected when doing it remotely.

The main question types are:

Text - Students type a response to your prompt on their devices.
Choice - Students interact with a multiple choice question on their screen
Number - Students type a number in response to your prompt on their devices.
Website - Students view and interact with a website embedded on their device.
Draw* - Students draw an image or text on their device in response to your prompt.
Draggable* - Students drag icons on their devices.

*Only available on Premium

When using Pear Deck, you have the ability to add audio files directly into your lesson for your students to listen to.

When you click on ‘Add Audio to Slide’, you will be given a pop up which will allow you to record and upload the audio. It will also show you how long the audio lasts.

When you’ve downloaded Pear Deck, you will have access to a number of pre-built templates for your lessons. You can alter any of the templates to match your lesson.

The main areas of the templates are:

Lesson Builders - These are tools to help you create activities during a lesson.
Learning Development - These are specific templates aimed at developing learners specific skills such as Critical Thinking.
Subject Areas - These templates are split depending on what subject is available. These go from Maths to World Languages.

Starting a Lesson

Once you have created your lesson and added all of the resources and questions, you can start your lesson. To do this click onto your Pear Deck add-on in Slides and press ‘Start Lesson’.

When you start your lesson, you will be given the option to either set this as a Student-Paced Activity (asynchronously) or an Instructor-Paced Activity (synchronously).

Once you start your lesson, you will be taken to the Teacher Dashboard for you to see responses from students to the questions you have set.

Sharing your Lessons

An issue with Pear Deck is that if you save the Slides document into a Shared Drive, you cannot share the lesson.

But - if you have saved the lesson in your own Google Drive, you can publish and share it with other lessons and with Pear Deck. You can put it in separate subjects for other teachers who use Pear Deck to use this as a Template!

If you save the Slides in a Shared Google Drive, you can still share it the same way you do with other Google documents by using the Share button in the top right corner.