Pear Deck in the classroom

I recently bought a subscription to Pear Deck. Pear Deck is an instant response Assessment for Learning tool for 1 to 1 classrooms.

Pear Deck allows you to import Powerpoint and Google Slide presentations, as well as PDFs, and turns them into Pear Deck slides. You can then build questions from several types: multiple choice, text response, draw response, etc. I chose to run the session with a laptop and projector while controlling the presentation with my tablet in Dashboard mode.

The platform allows me to see who is answering what and I can project anonymous responses onto the screen. The teacher can lock responses but I have found the students get much amusement from realising they were incorrect and quickly try to change their answers before I can lock the submissions.

I particularly like the draw and drag question types. The drag type can be used with the thumbs slide that Pear Deck provide as a template; the students drag a red dot to wherever they believe it should be.

My lesson, on rusting and acids, went very well. The students were really engaged and trying to answer within the short timeframes I was giving them and then went to write more equations as posters in their groups. The lesson finished some recap questions and a couple of harder extensions; all-in-all, a pretty good lesson. I found that using the questions built into the presentation allowed me to finish exactly on time, whereas I can tend to overrun a little and not complete my lessons exactly as planned.

Question: do I continue to use Pear Deck regularly, risking the students getting used to it?

Redefining the Exercise Book

I had the pleasure of presenting at the Deep Learning Malaysia conference where I talked about using Google Slides as an eBook. I paid attention mostly to the application of the SAMR model in order to demonstrate how I was using the technology to change the task and make possible the previously impossible. My main focus for the eBooks is to enhance tmy students' presentation and collaborative skills; you will find links to my rubrics and templates that I use with Doctopus and Goobric.

Hypermedia lesson

The lesson plan below outlines the use of hypermedia--YouTube-- to enhance a lesson. Students access the clips and make cooperative notes on the different scanning techniques. As a form of Jigsaw activitiy, the students would then present to technique to their teammates, speed-dating is fun for this, and follow the notes, enhancing them if need be. All students would be asssessed on each of the scanning techniques.

Relative Advantage of Slide Presentations

I am a dedicated SMART Notebook guy so I may struggle with describing the relative advantage of slide presentations in my teaching as it has been years since I have used MS PowerPoint to build a lesson with. I do use it but that is because my department bought some presentations with awesome Flash animations embedded into them; the company is going HTML5 now!

I think Prezi is a cool program and my school bought a subscription last year for everyone; I didn't use it! I can't interact with it and I don't give presentations I do workshops and collaborative lessons. Don't get me wrong, I tell my students to use it 'til the hearts are content but they must follow my "Let's not make our audience sea-sick guidelines!". Mainly though, my students use it a a collaborative board for dropping into the notes and ideas the same way one might use Padlet.

As far as Google Slides goes, I don't use it to present to my students either but they like the way the slides give them a frame to write and present their work within, and so that they can build flash cards. I can share out a GSlide to my students using Andrew Stillman's Doctopus script and have the framework for their work built into it. Since I own the GSlides they are using, I can access them anytime I like and comment on their work as it progresses in a formative fashion or grade it when they are done.

It is interesting that we were assigned 25 slides to create for this task. The last time I did a presentation in public was during a Middle Leader's course. I had a lot of slides but they were built to the standards described in "Five ways to reduce PowerPoint overload" by Cliff Atkinson and Richard E. Mayer. Richard Mayer has published a lot of research on the the effects of presentation on learning during E-Instruction. What was interesting about the evaluation after my presentation was that the two coaches told me I should have had three slides maximum! Having 25 slides means I am standing in front of people and as the center of attention; I don't do this in class! I had the privilege of watching George Couros present his "The Networked Leader" keynote in Hong Kong at the 21CL Convention in December 2013. His presentation followed all the advice provided by Presentation Zen's Top Ten Slide Tips. The imagery completely supported George's keynote and made very emotional ties to what he was saying - he included very little text, the images were a pictorial representation of what he was talking about. Mayer's segmentation, coherence and redundancy principles all apply when it comes to instruction, but George wasn't trying to instruct, he was creating an emotional response and text on his slides were not necessary for that.

During school assemblies I have had to sit and watch presentations where students and teachers have put yellow text on a white background! Or white text over a bright blue and cloudy white sky! Rainbow coloured Word Art! It is painful. Death by PowerPoint or death by the incompetent presentation builder! My students try to do something similar in the GSlides I send them. They like to use all the coloured background templates; especially the Trek themed one that looks like the computers on Next Generation. The irony being that they don't even know that it is Star Trek. The theme is black and they proceed to drop white background images onto it. Some of them print them out and hand to me "Can you mark this Mr. Mullan?", "I can't, my pen won't write on all that black printer ink you have used...how's about I comment onto the GSlide like I said I would! And perhaps in future if you want to print, use the plain white template."



So for me, presentations need to be done right, for the right purpose and for the right audience. In class I will stick to my interactive software where I can get the students up to manipulate and draw. When I have to do an assembly, there will be very little text, beautiful images and me hopefully nowhere in sight with the microphone - they should be looking at the pics and listening not looking at me and listening, otherwise what is the point of the presentation?!