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Generate Instant Pear Decks

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  I’ll keep this short as the video explains most of you. Any new educational technology can be complicated to dig into from scratch as you attempt to align it to learning outcomes.  Well, a new feature that Pear Deck has introduced has taken a giant leap forward to help educators do just that.  Before we jump into the new features, if you are unfamiliar with Pear Deck and why my students and I consider it the #1 EdTech tool that helps their learning, check out the video in the previous blog post.   But if you are more concerned with why you should even dive into Pear Deck or learn about this new AI generation of Pear Deck sessions to a learning target, check out the video below. Like I said, I’m keeping it short so you have time to watch the video. If you have questions, please contact me at mohammam@elmbrookschools.org or the Pear Deck Learning team at support@deck.peardeck.com . Also, check out the amazing Stacey Roshan's video on this update. 
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Reflect to Assess to Progress

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Over the weekend, I read Teaching Students to Self-Assess by Starr Sackstein.  It was a fantastic read.  The book focuses on the importance of reflection in the learning progress. This post only provides a few highlights. Her book has great student examples of reflections and discusses tracking progress over time using reflection.  I highly recommend reading and reflecting on what her book sets out.

Why is reflection so important?

  • If we want students to become more independent, life-long learners, they need to understand how they learn.
  • Reflection involves analysis and evaluation which are higher order skills in Bloom’s Taxonomy.
  • The results of reflection will help students make informed choices about how they personalize learning.
  • The results of student reflections will help instructors modify their instruction to reach all learners.
How does reflection fit into the learning cycle?
The graphic below is one I made last month after reading John Hattie's Learning Made Visible.




I’ve created a new graphic to highlight how reflection fits into the process.







Sackstein does a wonderful job outlining how to build reflection into the classroom over time.










I’ve formatted her guiding questions into the Google Form below.  She is a champion of Google Forms for collecting data.








Once students are ready for narrative reflection, she recommends the following guidelines to be easily accessible in guiding the process.



Ultimately, students are writing reflections for themselves but they could be very informative for others.  So, collecting reflections in a format that can be shared is ultimately the final stage of reflection.  

Essentially, this blog is an attempt to make my reflections public.  Sackstein advocates that teachers model their process for students.  I hope to be able to bring my process into the classroom and make it transparent for students in attempt to show the importance of reflection.
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