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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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Google Keep On Task

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As we embark on our passion projects, I wanted to find a way to keep up to date on what my students were up to.  Last year, I had students create task boards using Trello.  While it was helpful in 1:1 conversations, the downfall for me as an educator was the amount of time it took to go into each board to see where students were at efficiently.  Now that Google Keep is a part of G Suite, I've decided to leverage it as a tool.

I use Keep everyday in my life as a task list an note taking tool, but I never used it in my classroom with my students.  The ability to share and label notes makes it quite powerful.  So how am I using it?

Today, I had students create a task list in their Google Keep and share it with me.




I then added a label to all task lists from the same class and archived the list so they wouldn't be in my home Keep page.



During class, I had students begin adding projects tasks to their lists.  Now when I go to that label page in Keep, I can keep up with all of my students in that block.



I like that this is a quick one page look at what students have done and have yet to do.  Items can be rearranged in lists. So, I'll be making sure my students keep them in order with the current task at the top of the list.  I realize it does not provide as much depth as a Trello board would, but I'll see how this tradeoff of detail for timeliness works in the long run.

I look forward to seeing how this works for keeping up with classes of 30 students with 30 different projects. Of course it will only be useful if the students use it.  So, I hope to make it part of our project routine.



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