Ed Tech Tuesday: Pear Deck

Have you ever wanted to make your presentations more engaging? In today's blog post I'll be highlighting a pretty awesome tool called Pear Deck which can help to make any presentation more engaging and interactive.

Pear Deck is an interactive web tool that allows you to create presentations that are engaging and interactive. You can upload any type of document or video, and then start adding in questions for the audience to answer. For example, if I uploaded a PowerPoint presentation on "The Importance of Creativity," I could ask my audience what they think creativity means before getting into the meat of the presentation.

This is an excellent way to help students get interested in the content even before you start to present!

Not only is Pear Deck great for grabbing student's attention, it can also help to monitor their understanding. You can poll your students with different types of questions or you could use the built-in annotation feature that allows students to draw on slides and highlight important information, which is great for checking in with student comprehension after a class has ended!

The best part about this tool? It's free!! And it works across multiple platforms, and works particularly well with Google Slides.

Pear Deck even allows you to add audio, videos, animations and GIFs to your presentation for even more engagement with online students.

The Pear Deck website also offers awesome resources to help you start using Pear Deck in your online class. It includes a teaching blog, helpful videos, trainings and webinars.

The Pear Deck Community is an excellent resource for online instructors looking to enhance student engagement with interactive activities! I would definitely recommend checking it out if you have not already heard about this tool before.

 I'd love to hear your ideas on how you might be able to use this tool in your own online course. Share them in The Online Educator Facebook Group!