Join PD: Understanding Pear Deck and How it Works.
Pear Deck is an online platform that allows teachers and educators to deliver JoinPD interactive courses and lessons for their students. This platform allows teachers to turn their lessons into real-time quizzes and quizzes to assess each student’s skills JoinPD.
As with platforms like Kahoot! Pear Deck works with the teacher to create an online classroom that all students participate in using a code. This is called JoinPD.
In this post we will learn a little more about Pear Deck and how it works.
What is a Pear Deck?
Pear Deck is a web based tool that allows teachers to create JoinPD connected giving for their students. With Pear Deck, teachers can engage students in formative assessments, deliver audio lessons, and create lessons using Google Slides or PowerPoint Online.
Pear Deck offers six ways to engage students in formative assessments, including sliding, drawing, multiple choice, numbers, and text responses.
About Pear Deck
Pear Deck is a Google Slides add-on designed to help educators create engaging slideshow content for classroom and distance learning. Thanks to the Google integration, teachers can create or edit presentations directly from their own Google account.
Pear Deck is available as an add-on when using Google Slides and works seamlessly with Google Suites, allowing teachers to use it as an asynchronous or synchronous learning tool. Deck offers a paid version and a free version, with the free version having limited functionality.
Pear also offers workshops to help departments, schools and districts maximize the use and effectiveness of the tool. These bespoke workshops are delivered by Pear Deck team members or trained trainers. Depending on the length of the session and the number of participants, additional fees may apply.
What is the pear peel used for?
Pear Deck makes daily lessons more interactive and engaging for students. It is also used to help teachers assess each student’s understanding and participation in class.
This is basically what sets it apart from other similar platforms like Google Classroom. On common e-learning platforms, the teacher cannot actively understand how well a particular student accepts the lessons and how engaged he/she is.
However, this is not a problem if a teacher uses Join PD.
How does the pear peel work?
Here’s a basic overview of how Join PD works:
The teacher logs into their account with their Pear Deck teacher credentials.
The teacher then selects one of the existing lesson templates or create one for your students with various interactive elements.
Teacher then shares the code with their students.
Students go to the Join Session page and enter the code in the field.
Pear Deck features.
The sliding grade feature allows students to drag a dot, pin, or other marker to indicate understanding of the current topic.
The drawing feature gives students a canvas and drawing tools to express their creativity, while the multiple choice feature allows teachers to quickly assess their students’ understanding.
The grading feature allows students to easily grade a question and teachers can see the range of student answers.
Finally, the text response feature allows students to provide written responses to the teacher’s questions.
The Pear Deck extension allows teachers to leave audio instructions, descriptions, or examples for their students to hear as they read prompts and answer interactive questions in their Pear Deck Slides presentations.
Teachers can create a new recording directly or upload one from their computer. Teachers can also add connected questions, quizzes and discussions to their giving allowing students to engage with the content in a more active way.
Teacher can monitor student progress in real time, making it easier to rate student understanding and adjust instruction as needed.
This is a basic overview of how the whole process works.
But we also want to give you some information about the different types of interactive content you can create with Pear Deck. In the next part, let’s take a look at the six forms of formative assessment (words taken from the official website) that you can use on this platform.
1. Towable
Such interactive lessons ask students to perform various exercises by dragging icons, symbols, shapes, etc. across the screen.
Teachers can perform different types of exercises using this method. You can ask students to match objects, find objects in a particular picture, and other similar activities.
This is the image on the official page for this method:
In the image above, you can see an example of a Drag Gable lesson on country sites. All students can complete the activity on their own screen and it is visible to the teacher.
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2. Text
The text exercise allows students to write a text response to each question or prompt from the teacher. For example, teachers can present a partially completed line and ask students to complete it.
You can also give students a list of words and ask them to provide synonyms/antonyms for them. This is a simple text response and there are many ways to use it.
Here is the illustration on the official website:
In the picture above, you can see that the teacher has given an assignment that says “Write a question about the picture” and the students’ different answers are shown below.
3. Multiple choice
The multiple choice option you can use in Join PD is similar to the text function, but a little simpler.
While the Text option allows students to type almost any text in response to the answer. This gives them a limited number of options to choose from.
A simple exercise teachers can do with this is to give students a statement and ask them if it is true or false. This is the idea we got from looking at the illustration on the main page.
But looking at how this works, we think a good way to use this option is to do surveys for students. For example, a teacher can let students decide which subject to study or whether to take a test by setting it in the form of an MCQ.
4. Web
Pear Deck’s web feature allows teachers to allow their students to visit and explore a specific JoinPD website during class. While it’s not a good idea to give students free rein over what websites they do or don’t want to visit, the web option can be used to do so under supervision.
With this feature, teachers can let their students participate in different activities. Students can visit a specific educational website and then tell teachers what they learned.
5. Drawing
The Draw option allows students to draw on the displayed screen. Well, not really doodling, but drawing lines and shapes with the mouse pointer.
According to the illustration on the website, this can be helpful when doing exercises like “spot the differences” or “circle the word”.
The picture shows an example of a teacher asking: “Circle the nouns in the sentence.”
6th issue
The number method can be useful when teachers want to get a clear answer from students in numerical form. The way the site illustrates this is very interesting. Look here.
On the teacher’s screen, on the right, you can see that the correct number, one billion, is in the middle, with the students’ guesses as red circles. The closer the circle is to the line, the more accurate the student’s guess.
Just like the image above shows a specific JoinPD question with a specific answer, you can set it up to your liking.
To block
Join PD is an original way to help students learn their lessons JoinPD. It allows teachers to make the experience immersive and interactive.
In the post above, you will learn how to use this platform and the types of exercises it offers.