Pear Deck: Teachers (and students) love this fun learning tool
Adults were bored with PPT at office till they got animated. Now kids are enjoying an un-boring slides experience with a highly interactive and innovative add-on to Google Slides and PPT. It’s called Pear Deck, and it is one of the most popular teaching tools in the post pandemic world.
What is Pear Deck and how does it work?
Pear Deck is a live slides presentation tool that can work as an add-on with Google Slides or Power Point presentations, where students and teachers can see the slides on their own devices. Pear Deck has interactive slides that can be added to obtain immediate feedback. Student responses can also be shared anonymously by the teacher. This means no student is singled out, but everyone learns from mistakes. Pear Deck also has a lot of gamification options we will be discussing below.
What are the Pear Deck features that make it so popular?
Let’s look at some of the features that are responsible for the popularity of this app.
Gamified vocabulary expansion: Pear Deck’s vocabulary game Flashcard Factory allows the teacher to create a glossary. Students can make sentences and create illustrations with the words. They can do it as a team game with points, reflected in flashcards, which can be transferred to another quiz app.
Pear Deck and G Suite are highly compatible: Google apps are very common among students and teachers. Adding, editing and turning slides interactive is very simple. While Pear Deck has a free version, the paid one is adopted by institutes to enable the anonymous response sharing feature via Google Drive and Google Classroom.
Pear Deck Orchard: Teachers particularly like this feature. It’s a library of template decks that can be customised to make quick lessons.
Learning social-emotional skills: Pear Deck has a free socio-emotional skill template that can be used as a separate lesson, or inserted in a lesson plan to see what the students are thinking.
Free digital citizenship curriculum: Responsible, legally accepted and ethically good digital behaviour among students can be encouraged with this feature. It’s more of a game than a lecture on being ‘good’, and students remember lessons better if they win badges for it.