This December we bring you Premium Pear Deck! Make sure to follow along with us on Tuesdays and Thursdays to learn more about your Premium Pear Deck Account as a GWAEA Educator! Let's get started!

​Google Slides just got better.
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Pear Deck Premium was recently purchased for all of our Iowa educators as an excellent add-on for Google Slides for teaching in both synchronous and asynchronous learning environments. It allows the teacher to create and add interactive elements to a Google Slides presentation to engage students, gauge social emotional well-being, and gain data and feedback about student learning. Additionally, Pear Deck allows students to respond during an instructor-paced or student-paced mode, providing a variety of learning opportunities for any learning environment.

To get started with Pear Deck there are a few things you need to do. First of all, log into Pear Deck by using your school domain Google account to authenticate. Once you are logged in, your profile picture should be wearing a crown (see below) to signify you have a Premium account.

Next, start a Google Slides Presentation and click on ‘Add-ons’. Then, select ‘Get Add-ons’ and search for, select, and install Pear Deck. Now Pear Deck will be accessible in each Google Slides presentation you initiate.

Lastly, you may want to install the Pear Deck Power Up Chrome Extension. It helps run videos and gifs more smoothly in Pear Deck. After installing it, you will see it in your Google Slides toolbar. 

Now you are ready to explore Pear Deck! By clicking on the Pear Deck icon in your Google Slides toolbar, you will instantly open up a side panel to help you begin building. At the top of the panel, you will find a template library full of lesson builders, learning development, and content area slides ready to be selected and added to your Slides.

Feeling creative? You can build your own interactive slides from scratch by choosing a question type to add to the Slide and building from there. Additionally, you can add audio files to your Slides for a multimedia approach to your questions (more to come about that in a later post).

A few things to consider during the building phase of your lesson:

1. Add a social emotional check in from the template library at the start of each lesson.
2. Decide on whether the Pear Deck will be shared as an instructor-paced lesson (synchronous) or student-paced lesson (asynchronous). This might help form the types of Pear Deck templates/questions you choose. (Watch for a future blog post about why and when you might use these different paces.) 
3. Add content you would like students to engage with onto Slides between the added Pear Deck Slides, especially for student-paced lessons. Pear Deck Slides should be used as a processing, reflecting, connecting or formative assessment tool. 
4. Once your build is complete, it will be time to share the lesson with your students. In the side panel, you will find the green ‘Start Lesson’ button. Once you click this, it will give you two different options to deliver the lesson to your students. Choose instructor-paced or student-paced.

If you have chosen instructor-paced mode, students can go to joinpd.com and enter the code that is generated at this time. Or click on ‘Give Students a Link’ below the big pear and send the link through a Zoom/Meet chat or in your learning management system, like Google Classroom.

Now you are ready to play! We suggest pairing your Pear Deck with a colleague to try it out before using it with students. Let us know what questions you have! Check back on Thursday to learn when to use instructor-paced and student-paced sessions!

DLGWAEA's Pear Deck One-Pager
DLGWAEA's Pear Deck Handbook
Edtech Take Out: Episode 81: Perfect Pear Deck Presentations

We'd love to hear how you are using Pear Deck! Let us know in the comments below!

​~Mindy, Amber, and Beth

Here is the link to this month's update!

Please feel free to share with other educator who may be interested in the content! There is a great new podcast The Edtech Takeout that can be some fun professional learning as well as info about this year's iPadU and Building Bridges conferences. 

Please let me or one of the technology consultants know if you have any questions!


Stacy Behmer, Coordinator of Digital Learning, Grant Wood AEA

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We have all had the chance to attend a PD session or take a class for recertification.  Of course these learning opportunities are valuable and needed, especially in the eyes of the Iowa Board of Educational Examiners.  But is formalized PD the only option for growing, learning and expanding as an educator? I would argue not.  Within our technology coaches class at GWAEA one of the main charges of the coaches is to provide learning opportunities for their staff to serve as a point of departure to lead into follow-up tech coaching opportunities. Educators need to see ideas or models of how to integrate technology into their classrooms, and those models don't necessarily need to be show via a traditional PD session.  Here are some ideas of how to create professional learning outside of the conventional mediums utilizing technology.

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Keeping a professional blog
A professional blog is a great way to record your learning and exploration for your audience. Irony of irony, I am the worst professional blogger that ever lived, however, several of my colleagues keep amazing professional blogs: Jonathan Wylie's blog is full of useful app/program tutorials, pedagogy ideas, and tips and tricks for using technology in the classroom. The work of the professional blog is twofold: first, it serves as a vehicle for delivering new learning to an audience. Second, it serves as a tool for reflection for the author. Tools that can be used to keep a professional blog include Blogger or Wordpress. 

The Power of Podcasts
At Grant Wood we are experimenting with podcasts as a medium to augment our traditional professional development offerings. The advantage of podcasts are the potential for anywhere, any time listening. You can learn while walking the dog, on your commute to work, or at the gym. The choice is yours. Our podcast, The EdTech Take Out is hosted by Mindy Cairney and Jonathan Wylie. It is aimed at giving educator's bite-sized technology tips that they can use in their classroom today. Check it out on iTunes or in all good podcast players. Learn more here.

Curating resources
In Gayle Allen's new book The New Pillars of Modern Teaching she describes the act of curation as one of the new essential skills for all teachers and learners.  She argues that since we have moved from a world of knowledge scarcity to one of knowledge abundance our job to to teach students (and other teachers) how to curate resources around a topic by applying the 3 S's - scanning, sense making, and sharing.  Scanning means to wade through the vast amount of information that is out there and select only those resources that are valuable to solving a particular problem.  Sense making is arranging the found resources in a logical order or pattern and providing context for the resources, why did you select this particular resource?  Finally, sharing refers to sharing your curated resources with the world.  Tools that can be used to practice curation include Flipboard, Pinterest, Storify, and Symbaloo.

Expanding your PLN
Some of the most engaging an authentic learning can come from expanding your PLN and participating in Twitter chats around a specific topic that you are interested in. If you are new to the Twitter world here is the key difference between a hashtag and a twitter chat.  A hashtag, denoted with the # sign is a way to tag a tweet so it can be organized and searched for. For example, I might use the hashtag #ELAchat to tag tweets that have to do with English/Language Arts. Then folks on Twitter interested in learning more about English/Language Arts will search that hashtag and find all the tweets out there with that hashtag. A twitter chat is a specific time/date during the week that a virtual discussion takes place on Twitter. The format for the discussion is Question/Answer and the discussion is moderated by someone who is active in this only community.  Here is a comprehensive list of educational twitter hashtags and educational twitter chat times (in CST) developed by Jerry Blumengarten (@cybraryman1).

Gina Rogers
Technology Consultant
​GWAEA