Pear Deck Classroom Climate Feature + Inserting Special Characters

Pear Deck Classroom Climate

Classroom climate data provides you with a new layer of information to help you engage your students and teach to the whole person. Watch the video below to learn about Pear Deck's new Classroom Climate feature.

Click here for an overview of Pear Deck's Classroom Climate feature as well as step-by-step instructions for enabling it and using it. 

Click here for more information about using mood data in class.

Tips for Inserting Special Characters (Symbols) in Google Docs, Slides, and Drawings

Watch the video below for tips on inserting special characters into Google Docs, Slides, and Drawings. A new feature enables you to search for a special character by drawing it in your screen. 

Flubaroo Updates + Flubaroo Your Pear Deck + Conditional Formatting + New Sort By Color

Flubaroo Updates

Flubaroo is an add-on to Google Sheets that allows you to grade form responses and share feedback with students.

Flubaroo has recently developed a new way to share grades via Google Docs. Click here for instructions. Flubaroo also has developed a grade by hand feature which means that you can grade free response types of questions now. Click here for instructions.

Flubaroo Your Pear Deck

You can grade your Pear Deck with Flubaroo. Check out the video below or click here for instructions.

Conditional Formatting + New Sort By Color

Google Sheets allows you to format cells based their content. This can be useful for quickly assessing entries in a spreadsheet or responses to a Google Form. Click here for instructions on applying conditional formatting to a Google Sheet. 

After you apply conditional formatting you can sort by color. This is useful for quickly identifying or grouping students. Check out the video below and click here to get the add-on. 

Pear Deck Takeaways + Kahoot Ghost Mode + Dell Deals

Pear Deck Takeaways

Many of you have already discovered the power of Pear Deck as a formative assessment tool for your classroom. The new Takeaways feature provides even more of an opportunity to monitor student progress and provide feedback.

A takeaway is a Google Document that is automatically created for each student at the end of a Pear Deck lesson. This document details how the student answered each of the questions in your lesson and is automatically shared between you in Google Drive. Take a look at the video below to get a better idea of how this works. 

If you haven't discovered how you can use Pear Deck in your classroom, start here.

Kahoot Ghost Mode

If you've ever played Kahoot in your classroom you know just how engaging it can be. Students get excited to play feed off of the competitive nature of the game. That excitement doesn't have to end when class is over. Kahoot now features Ghostmode in which students can play against their "ghost". The ghost appears as another player in the game and answers the questions just like the student did in the previous round. This allows students to compete against themselves and make improvements. After students create their own free Kahoot account they can play all of the games that you have made while they are at home.

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Dell Deals for White Bear Lake

Dell is offering Black Friday Deals through our Member Purchase Program. You can find access to them here.

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.