Formative Assessment with Pear Deck & Nearpod

Here are your Tuesday tech tips!

This week's tech tips feature two great presentation tools that can be used to increase student engagement and gather formative assessment data from students.

Tip #1: Pear Deck

Pear Deck is an app that connects to your Google Drive account allowing you to take existing Google presentations or PDFs and turn them into interactive lessons with embedded formative assessments. Students can join the presentation and participate through their devices. You can also create new presentations in Pear Deck. Click here for more information (including some great videos) on using Pear Deck.

Tip #2: Nearpod

Nearpod is a website that functions similar to the Pear Deck app in that it allows you to add interactive formative assessment features to existing presentations or to create new presentations with these features. A Nearpod app is available for Apple and Android devices allowing students to easily join in on presentations. Click here for a video overview of Nearpod and visit Nearpod.com to get started.

So which should you use? Give both a try! Both have features that the other doesn't. For example, with Pear Deck you can ask "pop" questions that weren't initially part of the presentation and with Nearpod you can ask questions in which students can submit a drawn or handwritten response.