Skip to main content

Generate Instant Pear Decks

By
  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. 
Post a Comment

Summer Spark Day 1

Image
By

It takes a special type of educator to attend a conference in June. Many teachers have only been out of school for a couple of days. These are professionals who thrive on reflecting on their practice and gaining new ideas to improve their practice. These are the teachers who look at the world and see ideas that they can bring into the classroom tomorrow. These are the type of educators who attend University School of Milwaukee Summer Spark.

This is my second year attending USM Summer Spark and I am amazed at the talent that they bring in to share out at sessions. With such an engaged groups of educators, I imagine it is one hell of a draw.

Angela Maiers gave a rousing keynote focusing on the connections we make with learners and making them realize they matter. While there were many takeaways, one that stuck with me was setting up a structure to make every student in the classroom feel awesome at least once a week. The idea of recognizing 5 students from my classes a day in a personal way is something which I need to do a better job of doing. It’s easy for me to be drawn by students who need that attention at the detriment of recognizing those students who aren’t being vocal. This is a must for me next year!

Jeff Gargas and Rae Hughart introduced me to how simple it is for students to create podcasts in the classroom. The idea of a podcast as a form of goal setting & reflection is an amazing idea. I have also thought of it as a means of expressing understanding. The power of it being a podcast is that it could be shared to a targeted audience of teacher and parent. Or, it could be shared with a global audience. Seeing how simple it was to create with Anchor on smartphones or Chromebooks was very exciting. I plan on playing around with the app this summer and ideating on different ways to infuse this as an expression option for learners.

Tisha Richmond is a transformational educator I have been following for a while. It was amazing to hear her tell her story. It’s an amazing story of an educator who lost her passion for education and regained it through finding ways to make learning magical for her learners.
Memorable Beginnings
Authenticity and Agency
Gamified Experiences
Innovation
Creativity, Collaboration, and Curiosity
Authentic Audience
Legacy
It’s one thing to read her framework in her book or in a blog post. But it was even more powerful to hear Tisha speak in her own words! To see her share examples of how she transformed her classroom with images and videos from her students was amazing. Seeing the joy on their faces and the community she created made the power of her work resonate in the auditorium.

Finally, Chris Hesselbein walked us through Google Tour Creator. I have been using Google Expeditions in my classroom on occasion for a year now and they are highly engaging. Chris introduced us to the power of Google Tour Builder to allow learners to make their own expeditions using images from Google Streetview or 360 images students upload. Learners can then add hotspots to each image and annotate with text, image, or audio overlays. Like podcasts, this opens a new door for student creation and expression. I’m excited to learn more about how students can document experiences or even create their own virtual environments to document phenomenon that we may not be able to see due to travel, time, or size constraints at a macro or micro level. Here’s a link to the great resources Chris provided.

Well, that was day 1. I also presented out on Pear Deck. If you'd like to learn more about that reach out to me or check out the FREE guide I co-author.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Twitter Cards for Blogger

By
So, I’ve been seeing people with beautiful Twitter Cards in my Twitter Stream. They make it clear that there is a web page to visit and give a quick preview of what would be found. Something like the one below: I’ve been wondering how to get one of the cards to appear when I tweet out a link to my latest blog post.  Since I use Blogger, there is not a simple button to click to turn this on.  I had to find a way to paste new code into the HTML code of my blog.  It took some searching from multiple sites to get a completely functional.   This site though was quite helpful.  But, I’d like to walk you through my process and hopefully it helps a few out. There are a few types of Twitter Cards.  Two that at most frequently see are the basic summary card and the summary card with large image.  Below you can see the layout of each, but realize that they both have the same content pieces. This is going to look like a lot ...
14 comments
Read more

Personalized Learning Tasks and Roles

By
Yesterday, I read a great post by Jim Rickabaugh dealing with the roles of learner and teacher in a personalized learning environment by looking at tasks . The roles were set up on a continuum. This article timed perfectly with a reflection on part of Students at the Center by Allison Zmuda and Bena Kallick on idea generation and task development I had in mind. These two works are the focus of my reflection here. I think a key misunderstand teachers have when it comes to digging into personalizing learning is that for planning purposes, we no longer begin with standards but with student desires.  I believe like all good instruction, we need to start with the standards.  Think about it, standards are what we want all learners to know and be able to do as a result of passing through our educational system. That is why it is essential that we make sure that standards are representative of what we believe is important for learners to be informed and productive in th...
1 comment
Read more

Pear Deck 101 + Q&A

By
  Last week, I presented as a part of Pear Deck’s Pear Fair 2020. My presentation was Pear Deck 101 for Google Slides. During the presentation, there was a live chat. Many people said it went too fast for a 101 Session. Luckily, it was recorded so it can be rewatched.  Also, many said that they wanted to know how to build a Pear Deck first. I structured the presentation to show what Pear Deck was before showing how to make one. Perhaps that wasn’t the best structure. But, I’m going to stick with my philosophy of showing what something is before showing how to make it. The presentation, which can be watched below, was structured in several different sections What is Pear Deck? Providing an overview of the experience from the Teacher and Student perspectives. How do you build a Pear Deck in Google Slides? How do you start a Pear Deck presentation? How do you end a Pear Deck presentation? Here is the Slideshow I shared during the session bit.ly/pearfair101 Time really flew in...
2 comments
Read more