Pear Deck

Did you know you’ve got access to Pear Deck premium? Once again, Iowa's AEAs purchased Pear Deck for ALL Iowa educators!

🍐 Ninjafying the Unicorn of Pear Deck: The Teacher Dashboard

Wait….Ninja and Unicorn in the same sentence? Sold! Tell me more….one of the unicorns of premium access to Pear Deck is the teacher dashboard. You might be familiar with using the projector view when facilitating a session in Pear Deck. However, if wanting to ninjafy your Pear Deck skills, you need to dive into the teacher dashboard and discover the additional features you can unlock to create a more dynamic experience for your learners. 

Here are just a few ninja level skills the teacher dashboard provides:

• Spotlight specific student submissions when showing responses by staring their replies
• Provide real-time feedback to individual student responses
• Hide replies that might distract from the overall learning experience
• Open the dashboard on a separate device (phone, tablet, etc) for greater mobility

We hope these teasers about the teacher dashboard spark some insights on how you can ninjafy your Pear Deck skills further. 

For more information or to share your favorite Pear Deck features and ideas, check out the AEA website!

Get started with Pear Deck

Did you know you’ve got access to Pear Deck premium? Once again, Iowa's AEAs purchased Pear Deck for ALL Iowa educators!

🍐 Numbers, Tacos, Dots….Oh My!

You might be asking yourself, “What do numbers, tacos and dots have to do with Pear Deck?” Well, one of the awesome question types that Pear Deck offers is the draggable question. Believe it or not, numbers, tacos and dots are all types of draggable elements you can add to your Pear Deck slides. Can’t decide on which one you want to use? Don’t worry because you can use multiple and even change the color of each one. 

Here are just a few creative ways to leverage draggable items: 

• Use math symbols for students to make number equations true
• Incorporate different colored pins for students to showcase locations around the world
• Leverage a variety of colored numbers for students to sequence events
• Include multiple dots for students to identify certain parts of a speech in a sentence

This month’s tip about draggable questions might have you thinking about tacos (sorry about that) but we hope it also sparks thinking of additional ways you can engage learners and empower them to visualize their thinking.

For more information or to share your favorite Pear Deck features and ideas, check out the AEA website!

Get started with Pear Deck

Did you know you’ve got access to Pear Deck premium? Once again, Iowa's AEAs purchased Pear Deck for ALL Iowa educators!

🍐 Making Pear Deck More Inclusive with Immersive Reader

Want to make Pear Deck even more engaging and empowering? The integration with Immersive Reader is an amazing option!

When students activate Immersive Reader in their Pear Deck session, the text from the slides is extracted, opening in a window that provides scaffolding and customization opportunities. Students can make choices to:

• To have the text read to them (and adjust the reading options), 
• To change the appearance of the text in terms of size, font, spacing and background contrast color 
• To highlight parts of speech and syllables
• To use additional features like line focus and translation

This month’s tip about using Immersive Reader is a recommendation from Michelle Gebel, 5th grade teacher in Indianola. She loves the access to the text students have when using the text-reading feature of Immersive Reader. Take a look! 

Immersive Reader and Pear Deck

For more information or to share your favorite Pear Deck features and ideas, check out the AEA website!

Get started with Pear Deck

Did you know you’ve got access to Pear Deck premium? Once again, Iowa's AEAs purchased Pear Deck for ALL Iowa educators!

🍐 Canva and Pear Deck Go Hand in Hand 🤝

If you’re a K-12 educator, you can access Canva for Education for free! You’ll get all the benefits of Canva premium features such as millions of images, fonts, graphics, videos, animations, and templates, plus a dedicated classroom workspace to invite students and teachers to share, review, and manage your work.

AND if you’re an Iowa Educator you get Pear Deck Premium for free! You’ll get all of the bells and whistles of draggables, immersive reader, student paced mode, locks, timers review and reflect and more! 

Combine the two and you have a plethora of ways to engage your students. Explore these ready-to-use Canva templates designed for Pear Deck — along with many more or jump on into Canva and create your own!

• About Me — build connections with your students by sharing an “About Me” presentation
• Social Emotional Learning (SEL) — understand your students with a Mood or Feelings check-in
• Science — teach a ready-to-use Science presentation template
• Social Studies — engage students with an eye-catching Social Studies lesson 

Pear Deck also partners with Newsela! This month’s tip is a recommendation from Stephanie Hnesh, 5th grade teacher in Iowa City. She loves using the Daily Decks with Newsela content that are new every day to engage students in rich conversations. Take a look! 

Pear Deck & Newsela Daily Decks

For more information or to share your favorite Pear Deck features and ideas, check out the AEA website!

Get started with Pear Deck

Did you know you’ve got access to Pear Deck premium? Once again, Iowa's AEAs purchased Pear Deck for ALL Iowa educators!

Each month, be on the lookout for a variety of tips, tricks and testimonials shared via our newsletter. To kick things off, Andrew Fenstermaker from Iowa City Community School District shares how you can use Pear Deck’s IceBreaker Templates to build community in your classroom!

Get started with Pear Deck

For more information or to share your favorite Pear Deck features and ideas, check out the AEA website!