My Favorite - MTBoS Post #2

For this week's (late) post, I am going to write about peardeck.

Some back history...last year I was a ICT consultant for my school board for 1/2 of the school year. Before entering into this job, I had used some student response systems in my class, namely NearPod. Going back into the classroom in September, I had access to a 2:1 set of chromebooks for my class and I was able to get a paid subscription ($100 USD - which seems really ritzy right now considering the state of the Canadian Dollar).

Using pear deck in the Math class for me has been mostly for formative assessment and to review old(er) concepts and make sure that students are on the same page. For example:

or

or

or

It has been great. Some of the benefits has been:

• increase in productive student talk
• increase in students willing to take risks when answering questions (when I display student answers, their names are not shown)
• ability to quickly identify areas of student confusion and then immediately take it up and clarify

Why peardeck? Well, I am in a GAFE school board and Peardeck is amazing within google drive. Here are the perks in my mind:

• Peardeck files you create are made in google drive
• Peardeck results include student name (as made within their GAFE id) - awesome to know who exactly needs more help or drew something innapropriate)
• ability to display whole class or individual responses
• TAKEAWAYS!!!!! Students recieve a copy of their own responses to my questions within a google doc. This allows them to review their work and get feedback from me or they can do some reflective self evaluation
• the ability to drag dots/arrows/numbers/etc - called draggables.

• ability to draw on other pictures
• Easy to share via Google Drive's sharing abilities ~ check out #giftadeck on twitter.

I also did some follow-up the other week, and the student feedback was overall very positive around the use and effectiveness of this tool in our math class!