Leveling Up Google Slides with Pear Deck: Creating an engaging learning experience for 21st Century Learners

Evolution of Education:

We are currently living through an extremely exciting moment in the transformation of public education.  The origins of public education in America stems from a pivotal period of American growth.  Our society was evolving from one which was based off of agriculture, to one which massed produced products using an innovative technique called the assembly line.  Our school systems ran very similar to those items being assembled in the booming factories across our great nation.  A predetermined end product was established and students went through a series of steps, we call them grade levels, where one part was assembled at a time.  As the students advanced through their assembly line of education, they should all emerge just like the Model T did, gleaming bright and exactly the same.  It doesn't take educators long to discover flaws in this system when it comes to education.  Our students come to us with all different types of backgrounds, strengths, and challenges.  In other words our students come into our classrooms already partially assembled, and what works for some might not work for others.  What one student needs to learn, another already knows.  Our assembly line does not address the individual needs of our diverse student population.  

From Sage on the Stage to Guide on the Side: Creating a Personalized Learning Experience

It is time for a critical change in the way we reach our students.  With the advancements in technology we as educators can now adapt our methods of teaching to better meet the individual needs of every student. According to the organization International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE), they state that personalized learning, "... is the purposeful design of blended instruction to combine face-to-face teaching, technology-assisted instruction and student-to-student collaboration to leverage each student’s learning style and interests for deeper learning." This allows us as teachers to get away from standing in front of a board delivering one message to all students, and allows us to work with individual students and provide personal and specific instruction to meet the needs of each student.  It is a powerful and effective method of teaching which has become increasingly more possible because of resources like Google Slides and Pear Deck.  

Google Slides and Pear Deck: A Dynamic Duo

The versatility of Google Slides allows for a variety of uses in a classroom setting.  The barebone basics of Google Slides can help deliver content and instruction to your students, or it can be an assessment tool where students demonstrate their understanding.   If you were to evaluate the use of Google Slides solely on its presentation capabilities it would be just as powerful and useful as the majority of other presentation tools out there.  But evaluating Google Slides' effectiveness by these standards would be a grave injustice to capabilities of this program.  With a couple of minor additions Google Slides can do much more than deliver information, it can provide an engaging interactive learning experience for every student within the class.  With the addition of Add-ons such as Pear Deck one can transform their slides to create opportunities for students to engage in meaningful and thoughtful interactions.

 How to Level Up Google Slides with Pear Deck:

Incorporating the functionality of Pear Deck into Google Slides is as simple as installing the add-on to Google Slides and downloading the extension to Google Chrome.  By doing this you will get the full capabilities of the program.  I wanted to take a lesson what we deliver to our students on the turning points of WWII and make a more engaging and deeper learning experience for them.  Initially the design of the Google Slides was to deliver content to students about one of the three major turning points that we discuss in our WWII unit, Stalingrad.  The students would explore the slides which provided information, pictures, videos and questions to guide them through the important aspects of the battle.  However by adding Pear Deck into my slides I could now provide opportunities for my students to engage and interact with the slides instead of passively viewing the slides.  Using Pear Deck I was able to insert slides which allowed me to ask students to predict what they think might happen, and to interpret why they think certain actions were taken.  With the integration of Pear Deck my students now have an active role in the lesson which will increase their engagement and hopefully provide a more powerful lesson.  Even more powerful than the pre-created and easy to use slides that Pear Deck allows me to insert into my already created Google Slides, is the ability to push out this information straight to my students devices.  

Remote Control Your Lesson With Pear Deck: 

When creating a lesson through Pear Deck you have full access to the Teacher Dashboard from the Pear Deck web based presentation program.  This feature is one of the most powerful features of what Pear Deck has to offer.  After creating a presentation one can launch it using their teacher dashboard. Using the dashboard will provide students with a web address and login linking them to the same slides that you have on the board.  This means those students who are in the back of the room and struggle to see what is on the board now have it right in front of them.  Using this function provides everyone in the room with a front row seat.  In addition to that you as the instructor have control over what slides are pushed to student devices.  When creating my lesson on the Battle of Stalingrad I have a slide in the beginning which asks them to rate who they think will win the battle and who will lose.  Students interact with this slide by simply dragging and dropping a thumbs up and thumbs down icon over the picture of Hitler and Stalin.  As a class we can see the student responses and have a quick discussion as to why they picked what they did.  Once we have completed our discussion, I than have an option to seamlessly transform my lesson to a personalized learning experience.   Using the student paced option from the presentation, allows me to give the controls over to my students.  By doing so the students now have the ability to work at their own pace through the materials provided by the lesson.  As students are working individually through the lesson, I can now go and check in with individual students, even look at responses to their questions as they start to answer the prompts that I have included.  Giving praise to students for their work and checking for understanding with those who might need a little more explanation.  At any point in the lesson I can link everyone back up to a single slide with a simple click of a button, giving controls of the presentation back to the instructor.  Pear Deck will even compile all of the student generated responses from the questions throughout the slides and allow me to export them to a Google spreadsheet so I can view their responses or even import them into a grade book.  Pear Deck can help teachers provide engaging interactive experiences into their lessons and develop powerful personalized learning opportunities to allow for a deeper level of learning to occur.