PEAR DECK

Introduction

- This article is dedicated to the Pear Deck tool, a Google Presentations add-on (also available for Microsoft Powerpoint) that allows us to create interactive presentations or add interaction to the ones we already have. It can help us to work on writing collaboratively and encourage formative evaluation. The procedure is simple: the teacher corrects anonymous answers with the students and the students can correct their answers and learn from their mistakes, which enhances the competence of learning to learn and promotes immediate formative feedback. Pear Deck also offers a second type of little-known activity: Vocabulary Factory, a sentence factory that can be customized with the content that we want to work on. .This "vocabulary factory" promotes work in pairs and in collaborative groups, since students work together in teams, not individually.

The tool Pear Deck is a plugin for Google presentations (also available for Microsoft Powerpoint) that is used to add interactivity to the presentations that we already have or to create presentations from scratch. Its main limitation is perhaps that the interface is in English, but if you know how to use it, you can still use it and it's very worthwhile. Pear Deck is used both to make presentations with which students can interact through various questions —free response, multiple choice, relate by dragging objects or drawing— or to view web pages embedded directly in them, as well as to create flashcardsvocabulary with students or practice writing sentences, thanks to Vocabulary Factory. Its advantages for education are multiple: on the one hand, we can present content and obtain immediate feedback from students; on the other, not only can it be used live, but we could assign a deferred session for students who are absent from the classroom due to. Various reasons.thirdly, the fact of correcting errors on the screen anonymously promotes the participation of all students without fear of making mistakes, thus reducing levels of anxiety in the classroom. Lastly, Vocabulary Factory is a collaborative and gamified tool that allows students to work as a team writing sentences almost without realizing they are learning.

Explanation of Use in The Educational Field

- Pear Deck allows teachers to create interactive lessons, either using Google Slides with built-in questions, or using the vocabulary factory to create their own flashcards. You have to register to use the tool, but it's free. It offers a premium version, whose main advantage is the "takeaways" (reports are generated in Drive for each student) and the drawing question, but if ready-made templates are used, the drawing tool also works. Pear Deck works with Google Chrome and Microsoft —both on PCs and Macs or Chromebooks— without any inconvenience and it has an application to install but it is not necessary to do it to use it. It is very simple to use and intuitive. In order to use Pear Deck you have to install the Google Pear Deck Plugin. Pear Deck has an application that can be installed so you don't always have to use it from the browser, but it's not essential to have it, it's just more comfortable. Once we have the plugin installed, from any Google presentation we can run it. After opening Pear Deck in a presentation, from the Teacher Dashboard we can see our open and archived sessions. In short, Pear Deck can be used in a variety of ways: At the beginning of a session, to activate previous knowledge or review concepts seen in the previous class.As an "exit ticket" of a class, to see what ideas the students have left. .For example, interesting questions could be: “Write down 5 keywords from today's class” or “Imagine that So-and-so hasn't come to class and tell him what we've done”. During a session, to explain content and pause to allow students to ask questions or check that they are assimilating the explanations. To review vocabulary at the beginning or end of a unit (Vocabulary Factory) and to check the emotional state of the students.The tool already has templates to work on emotions in the classroom, called SEL (Social Emotional Learning) templates, and it is also possible to include questions with smiley faces to check how the students are doing without asking out loud or directly.