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Pear Deck Blog Series: Takeaways

12/10/2020

Graphic of And A Pear Deck in a Classroom Blog Series titled Takeaways

Special Note: This blog is about the Premium Pear Deck Feature of Takeaways™ in Pear Deck.
All Grant Wood AEA Schools have access to the Premium version of Pear Deck.
🛠Important Note:You do need to enable Takeaways at Peardeck.com under My Account → Settings.

Pear Deck Takeaways™ are this great little present that you can offer your students after they have had the experience of a Pear Deck. When you end a Pear Deck session, you can choose to publish Takeaways to your students. If you check this box, it will deliver an individual Google Doc that includes images of each of the slides of the Pear Deck along with the responses that the student entered, as the picture below shows.

Image of a Pear Deck Takeaway that has the slide on one slide and the responses on the other

You would use Takeaways when you want to be able to offer students:

access to the content that was presented in class
a record of their work within the Pear Deck

Takeaways includes a copy of all of the slides and any links you’ve included in your Pear Deck as you can see below in the image from the Takeaway Doc.

Image of a Takeaways Doc with a Picture of the slide on one side and the links on the other

There is so much potential with the use of the Takeaways. So, let’s consider some ways that we can keep engaging in the learning with Pear Deck Takeaways when you set-up your Pear Deck as...

Pre/Post Assessment. Pre-assessments can be great ways to help teachers better understand what your students know. Allowing students to access the answers from a pre-assessment through a Takeaway can help them to self-reflect as the unit progresses and focus in on areas where they need assistance. You, as the teacher could refer to the Takeaways throughout the unit of study by either having students use the Takeaway as they are learning about that piece OR have students be reflective and add to their responses directly on the Takeaway after completing different lessons.
Homework. Use a Pear Deck to deliver the lesson and add on some Pear Deck Interactives for students to complete on their own. This way, students will be able to access any of the materials you presented as you shared information to assist them with their Homework. Plus with the Teacher Dashboard, you can get a sneak peak into your students’ work. Close the session before class begins. *Note that Pear Deck says it can take up to an hour to send the Takeaway, so don’t put it off until right before! However we have not had it take more than a few minutes. When students come into class, you could structure the class to use the Takeaway in different stations to help them expand on or review different content. Have students use the commenting feature built within Google Docs to bring the Takeaway into an interactive document with you or other students.
Content Review. Whether you facilitate it as a whole group, in-class review in Instructor-Paced Mode or self-paced review or practice assessment in Student-Paced Mode, Pear Deck can be a powerful tool to check on students’ understanding of the content. When you close the session and send the Takeaway to your students, they can use it as a review guide to help the students prepare for the test. With the side-by-side view of the slide and their answer, students could even print off the Takeaway and fold the paper in half to create a physical flashcard.

Bonus Ideas! Consider this:

Standards-Based Grading: Do you ask your students to provide evidence of learning for different standards? Use the record that is provided within the Takeaway.
Parent Teacher Conferences: Share examples of Takeaways at Parent-Teacher conferences to help parents better understand what their child is working on in class. Did you know that each teacher gets a copy of all of the Takeaways shared in their Drive?

*Slide Deck shown in Takeaways was created by Lori Price & Kristan Hunter from Mid-Prairie Schools

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

Connect With Us
We'd love to hear how you are using Pear Deck. Please share with us in the comments!

~Amber, Beth, & Mindy

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Empowering Students: Student Feedback Teams

12/8/2020

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In a time when we are feeling overconnected to our devices and disconnected from one another, it is immensely important to establish and foster the relationships of our students with one another. It has become glaringly obvious how reliant our learning can be on the discussions we have with one another. As educators, we know that the more our students talk about their learning, the more powerful the experience becomes. Even in face-to-face environments, it may have been difficult to establish a classroom culture that thrived on students discussing their learning. In hybrid and virtual classrooms, this may seem practically impossible. But yet, there’s hope. In a time when nothing is normal, maybe it is time to try something new-- to build something different for our students that will provide a variety of opportunities for the future of their learning and also offer a space for students to feel connected and accepted. These relationships, however, are not built in a day and will progress through a variety of stages before becoming a successful factor in the learning process.

Student Feedback Teams (or Covid Cohorts) are teams created for the long haul. These are not the on-the-fly work groups created to perform a given task, but long term groups created to bridge the need for social learning that often disappears in our virtual and hybrid environments. The purpose of this team will ultimately be for peer feedback. But that can’t happen immediately. Just like many things in school, this takes time. And when try to cut time the results do not meet our expectations.

Student Feedback Teams can function in many ways. The primary focus will be as a place for students to connect with one another and work through or discuss a learning task and provide feedback to one another on their work. This is not "group project" work, where the task is divided between students, rather this is a space for reflection and deeper conversation about the learning. This team provides a way for groups of students to move their learning forward, releasing the teacher from that role. In effect, Student Feedback Teams is a way of handing some of the learning back to student groups.

It may be helpful to think of these Student Feedback teams through the lens of a sport team. In a basketball team, each player knows their roles and responsibilities. Their place on the team is built on their personal strengths, and they practice and hone their skills through that lens. Thinking about the Student Feedback Teams, the teams should be created with that in mind. Including students with a variety of strengths to work together to form a functioning team.

For Student Feedback Teams to be successful, there must be student buy-in. Students need to have a voice in the creation of the teams. That means including some student choice. After explaining the goals and process of the Student Feedback Team ask students to name one person in the classroom they would choose to be on a work with an another student they would struggle to work with. Use that data to create teams.

This visual was created for a presentation in one of the districts we support. It illustrates key components in a strong team, snuggly fitting together as pieces of a puzzle. Each piece is vitally important for the team to function to its full potential. Of all the pieces, TIME may be the most important. This is true because time is in the such short supply in most classrooms and because it will take time for teams to grow together.

Helping students understand the commitment to a long term team is vitally important. Based on research from psychologist, Bruce Tuckman, teams go through specific stages: Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing. Knowing about more about each stage helps the teacher support students in each team.

During the forming stage students tend to be very polite to one another as they get to know each other better. The feedback at this stage will be very surface level, lots of "good job." Students may be self-conscious and hesitant to be honest and open - or be overly honest and open. The team isn't a team, just a group of individuals sitting in the same place. That will change as they move into the storming stage. In this phase students begin vying for their place in the group. They are trying to figure out their roles, some tending toward over involvement and some checking out. Members are getting on one another's nerves and feedback may be very negative at this stage. Students may ask to be removed or have someone else removed from the group during this phase. It is very important for the teacher to be present, but not in charge. Providing a framework or protocol for students to help them focus on the job at hand, rather than personalities is essential at this stage.

Most groups will work through the storming stage and enter the norming stage. It is helpful to think again of a sporting team. Each person on the basketball team knows their position and the team works best when there is trust and respect between players. The same is true in the norming stage. Student Feedback Teams are building on one another's strengths, trusting and respecting one another. Feedback at this stage becomes more specific, helping one another move learning forward. It is important to note that many teams will move back and forth between storming and norming, just as most adult teams do.

Performing is the final stage. In this stage all the moving parts fit together well. Students are working to their potential, problem solving and moving forward. This is the epitome of group dynamics, and to be honest, many groups do not get to this stage. That is ok. Give your student and yourself grace if the Student Feedback Teams don't make it to the performing stage.

A teacher's role in this process is to be very aware of the stage each team is and nudge them toward the next phase. It is difficult to not 'save' a storming team. Handing the responsibility to students is all part of the Student Feedback Team task. How exactly does a teacher do that?

We’ve all tried getting students to give feedback to each other. And it may not have always gone as expected. You may have seen students end up with 10 post-its that read “I like your project.” Even in classes for adults, leaving the door wide open with no parameters is an overwhelming prospect. The giver of feedback asking “What do I say?” The receiver of feedback wondering “What am I supposed to do with this?”. If you haven’t set up your teams to firmly establish that you are giving feedback on the work, not the person, it can seem personal, or not specific, or helpful in moving someone forward. Feedback needs to aim towards improving understanding by helping students to focus where they are currently at and offer avenues to improve. By incorporating other students in the process, it empowers students to be active in the learning process in the classroom. A student’s voice is powerful when we as educators allow it to be. Students can explain things in ways that teachers can’t to other students. As teachers, we need to establish an effective way to avoid the pitfalls that come with open feedback.

How can we make this practice effective? Use a feedback protocol. It’s simple. Choose one protocol and ask that everyone follow it. Check out these resources to learn about some different feedback protocols.

From Better Lessons: Giving and Receiving Peer Feedback: a variety of strategies
From Edutopia: 60-second strategy: Respond, Reflect, and Review
From the Open Sharing Strategy: Talk Moves

One I’ve used before is I Like, I Wish, I Wonder (you can find out more about it under the Better Lessons link above). Each learner is asked to give feedback using a simple sentence starter.

I like… which gives an opportunity to highlight something great about the project and set a positive tone to the interaction.
I wish… offers an opportunity to address an aspect of the work that could be stronger.
I wonder….a moment to clarify a piece of the project or lean towards a suggestion.

Giving this simple frame helps to establish momentum and focus for the feedback to help it become clear for the learner who is giving the feedback. It also helps the person receiving the feedback to see what others see in their work and gives them thoughts to consider for improvement.

--> Want to learn more about COVID Cohorts, check out this link.

We'd love to hear more about how you involved students in the feedback process. Please leave us a message at this blog post.
~Amber, Beth, and Mindy

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Making Pear Deck a More Inclusive Experience

12/8/2020

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Our students learn in a variety of ways. Adding audio can be a great way to make your Pear Deck more powerful and engaging. Audio can be recorded live with Pear Deck’s tools or can be uploaded from a previous recorded file. To add audio, go to the Pear Deck sidebar and choose add audio from below the question types, as seen here.

Once you click on the ‘Add Audio to Slides’ button, you will be prompted to record or upload a file. You can read the text instructions, add additional clarifying instructions, or provide audio content (think SHORT personal podcast).

After you have recorded the audio, click on the add audio button. Students will know audio has been added to the slide when they see this icon. (To delete the audio, delete the button.)

Pear Deck has an additional feature that packs a powerful punch. With Pear Deck Premium, instructors enable the Immersive Reader integration. Immersive Reader provides students supports to “increase fluency for English language learners or readers of other languages, helps build confidence for emerging readers learning to read at higher levels, offers text decoding solutions for students with learning differences such as dyslexia or visual impairments, and provides translation of words or the entire text.”

You can enable Immersive Reader by toggling it on in the settings of your Pear Deck account, as seen below.

Once you have toggled it on, your students will be able to access Immersive Reader’s tools by tapping on the Immersive Reader icon found in the bottom right corner of the screen. To experience Immsersive Reader from the student perspective, check out this very short video below. (Learn more about other tools that have an Immersive Reader integration here.

Building in these supports provides a more inclusive experience for all of our students. Learning styles and needs can be diverse, but with these additional features, Pear Deck can be more engaging and accessible than ever before. Make sure to check back on December 10th to learn about how to use student takeaways!

Additional Resources

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

Connect With Us

We'd love to hear how you are using Pear Deck. Please share with us in the comments!

~Mindy, Amber, and Beth

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Pear Deck Blog Series: Whose Pace? Instructor or Student

12/3/2020

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A Pear Deck in a Classroom Whose Pace: Instructor or Student

Pear Deck offers two amazing ways to facilitate & manage learning for students: Instructor- Paced & Student-Paced modes.

Instructor-Paced Mode is set-up for synchronous instruction with your students. You, as the teacher, get the opportunity to guide your students through the learning and easily interject moments of formative assessment into your lesson. Through the See Responses option, teachers can project the anonymous class responses to the whole class to be able to highlight thinking or clarify points of the lesson.

Student-Paced Mode is geared for asynchronous instruction with students to be able to allow students to work through content at their own pace. It’s important to be clear with instructions and supports students will need when designing your student-paced so that students have all the tools that they need to be able to process content that’s presented to them. Through the teacher dashboard, teachers can check in on how students are progressing through the work as well as give real-time feedback to students.

I feel like synchronous and asynchronous are teaching vocabulary buzz words of 2020, but let’s think about situations where they come into action.

Situation #1: You are working to facilitate a whole group discussion. You know that not all of your students will participate for various reasons and NOW you have a group of students who are participating from home because they are in quarantine. How can you get all voices heard in a whole group discussion?

💡 Use Instructor-Paced Pear Deck Mode.
In instructor-Paced mode, it locks the students into the slide that you are sharing in the presentation and students can’t move forward in the presentation until you advance the slides. This way, students whether they are at home connecting through Zoom/Meet Platform or in the classroom with you, everyone can focus on the same slide at the same time.

Let Pear Deck do the work for you! Consider incorporating the Text, Drawing or Draggable Pear Deck interactive Templates into your discussion.

Consider incorporating a Draggable slide, like the one below, into the discussion at different points in the conversation. It can give you a great teacher gage as to where your students are currently at in their thinking. Add this slide and customize the text to match your discussion at the beginning and end of your discussion to see if your students’ have changed their point of view.

Pear Deck Slide Image Are you Pro or Against?

This Drawing Slide can be added at a point in the discussion where you want students to pause and consider what others have contributed to the conversation.This also offers an opportunity to tune in with the engagement of the students and see if they are really listening to each other. Just note that even though this is labeled as a drawing slide, students can use typed text to build up their points of view.

Peck Deck Slide Image Consider Different Viewpoints

Also, consider some other ways to use Instructor-Paced Mode like:

Content Specific Lessons
Class Meetings

Situation #2 - I assign my students homework. As we start class, we spend the first 20 minutes going through the homework. Sometimes I wish I could use class time differently and not spend time going through all the homework. Maybe just focus on problems that I know they are struggling with, but I don’t know that until they come to class.

💡Use a Student-Paced Pear Deck

Provide students with a Student-Paced Pear Deck at the end of your class and you could load it with supports to help students.
✅ Consider adding in a video in case they need a review of what was covered in class.
✅ Use a Template from the Template Gallery to provide students the space to show their work like this Drawing Slide. This way you can see how students are processing the information and where they are struggling before they come to class.

Pear Deck Slide Image: Solve & show your work here

✅ Add in a social-emotional/reflection template to gauge how comfortable the students are with the content.

Pear Deck Slide Image What was easy or hard about the lesson?

✅ Use the Teacher Dashboard to check in with the students before class. See all of their work in real-time. You could also use the feedback option to get information back to them before they even walk into the classroom. Imagine knowing this information about your students before they even walk in the door. Know who has or hasn’t completed the work. You could use this information to help reteach smaller groups of students or help to provide them with support that your students need.

Also, consider some other ways to use Student-Paced Pear Decks:

Remote Learning Lessons
Center work in a Blended Learning Classroom

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

Connect with Us
In what ways have you used these different facilitation modes?
Leave us a comment, we’d love to hear how you are using Pear Deck.

~Amber, Mindy, & Beth

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December Blog Series

12/1/2020

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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!

An Intro to Premium Pear Deck

Google Slides just got better.

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:

Add a social emotional check in from the template library at the start of each lesson.
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.)
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.
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!

Additional Resources

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

Connect with Us

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

~Mindy, Amber, and Beth

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Think, Make, Innovate: Collaboration. Connection. Community.

12/1/2020

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Building and maintaining a collaborative and creative community has been on our minds lately. The struggles of keeping strong relationships with our students and our students with one another is challenging from a distance. We've gathered some ideas that we wanted to share!

Provide Shared Experiences

We've seen so many great ideas to provide shared experiences for our students via Zoom/Google Meet. If it is pet parades, show and tell, costume dress-up days, or scavenger hunts, teachers are doing everything they can to foster the relationships between classmates. Building in these fun, community-building ideas might be the way to do it! Jennifer Gonzalez shares some other ideas here.

Create the Illusion of Being Together

Using Remove.bg gives the effect of green screen without all the extra tools! Create a class photo or have students create their own. This simple, free tool will stoke those creative fires! Check out Amber's quick tutorial below and another example of how she used it with selfies from the team!

Synchronous or Asynchronous Collaborative Idea

Creating a digital flip book with Google Slides is easy! Using the duplicate slide tool makes this idea a breeze! Create a Google Slides presentation so everyone can edit and then watch the magic unfold. Use this will small groups or as a whole class (with some guidelines, of course) and create something that represents your class! Check out Mindy's tutorial below!

Bonus tip: Check out TallTweets (use Tall Tweets Classic in the middle of the page)! It will create a .gif file of your flipbook that you can share anywhere!

We want to connect with you!

Share with us how you are maintaining connections with your students! We want to hear about how you are fostering creativity in your classroom community! Tag us on social media with @DLGWAEA and, as always....

#HaveFunMaking

~Mindy and Amber

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Forward>>

Pear Deck Blog Series: Takeaways

Empowering Students: Student Feedback Teams

Making Pear Deck a More Inclusive Experience

Additional Resources

Connect With Us

Pear Deck Blog Series: Whose Pace? Instructor or Student

December Blog Series

An Intro to Premium Pear Deck

Additional Resources

Connect with Us

Think, Make, Innovate: Collaboration. Connection. Community.

Provide Shared Experiences

Create the Illusion of Being Together

Synchronous or Asynchronous Collaborative Idea

We want to connect with you!

Connect

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Like Us on Facebook

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Our Podcast

Our Tweets!

Authors

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Categories

Pear Deck Blog Series: Takeaways

Empowering Students: Student Feedback Teams

Making Pear Deck a More Inclusive Experience

Additional Resources

Connect With Us

Pear Deck Blog Series: Whose Pace? Instructor or Student

December Blog Series

An Intro to Premium Pear Deck

Additional Resources

Connect with Us

Think, Make, Innovate: Collaboration. Connection. Community.

Provide Shared Experiences

​Create the Illusion of Being Together

Synchronous or Asynchronous Collaborative Idea

We want to connect with you!

Connect

Blog Feed

Like Us on Facebook

Our YouTube Show

Our Podcast

Our Tweets!

Authors

Archives

Categories

Create the Illusion of Being Together