Promoting Student Response Sharing in Pear Deck

I absolutely love Pear Deck! I have been using it in my classroom for years, and consistently find it as an excellent way to make students’ learning ap-pear-ent.

One awesome thing during distance teaching has been working with student teachers. I know that supporting student teachers while also teaching 100% online comes with a whole set of challenges (the topic of a future blog post), but it has been a great experience for all of us.

My amazing student teacher, Ms. Cortez, and I noticed many of our 8th grade students were hesitant to share or participate out loud and in the chat, but actively participated in the Pear Deck questions. We wanted to figure out a way for students to volunteer to share their work, without adding additional stress or complications. We created a system where kids would draw a green 🙂 or a red 😦 on the top right corner of their Pear Deck response based on their willingness to have their answer shared with the class (see image below).

Students took to this system quickly! When we use Pear Deck in class, we review the responses in the teacher dashboard (we are lucky to have the premium version at school), then star the responses with a smiley face to only show those responses. Students have the option to unmute to share their response, elaborate or claim the response in chat, or allow us to anonymously review their response with the class.

We only do this for some responses, mostly drawing questions. For text questions, we do this same system by asking students to start their response with a green or red emoji. Other times, we do not give students an option and show all of the responses.

Here is a template (or see this example on Slides and Pear Deck) to help you get started! We hope it helps encourage your students to share their work with the class.

What are some ways you get your students to actively participate on Pear Deck?