Mo Physics Mo Problems

Pear Deck is a tool I have been using in my classroom for over 5 years now. It is consistently the #1 tool my students say helps their learning in our classroom. So, I'd just like to give a brief overview of the different ways we deploy Pear Deck for Google Slides in our classroom. Instructor Paced Notes This is probably the most traditional use of Pear Deck. Essentially having a lecture session built in Google Slides with Pear Deck interactions built in. This has been wonderful this year when I have a mix of students who are in person and virtual. All learners get a chance to interact and be heard by the teacher and their voice can be shared with the class.  While this might seem straight forward, there are some best practices to keep in mind. Start out with a question to preview content or tap into prior knowledge.This can be a good check to see what the class and individual students already know about a topic. It is also provides an opportunity use their words to help guide def...

With the holiday break only a few hours away, I decided that I should probably get one post in before the end of the year. I haven't posted in a while because I haven't really had the energy too. It's not that I haven't had things to share. It's just that I haven't had the energy to take the time post anything more than a tweet.  At my high school, we are currently in-person everyday. But, students had the option to attend class virtually. In person, we are socially distanced (at least 6 feet) in class and wear masks at all times. This means no sharing of materials, no working in groups, and no physical labs. This has challenged the way I teach even more than when we were all asynchronous virtual in the spring of this year. These restrictions could easily have led me down the path of a sit and get classroom. This is what I spent so much of my 20 year in education moving away from. So, it has been a struggle knowing that I am not giving my learners the science ex...

This week my building principal gave me the opportunity to provide virtual PD for our district on 3 tools that I think are great for supporting virtual learning: Pear Deck, Scientifically, and Flipgrid. I created informational slide decks and recorded one of the webinars I did for each of the three tools. I won't go one much more, but wanted to make these resources available to all. If you have any questions about the tools feel free to reach out to me on twitter @mo_physics or email at mohammam@elmbrookschools.org Please note that these webinar videos were the first presentations I've ever done using Google Hangouts Meet so please forgive the informal nature of the presentations. They are the raw video from the session. I could easily have spent hours making them perfect, but I figured the true purpose was not aesthetic perfection but timelessness of the information. Pear Deck Use Student Paced mode to provide asynchronous instruction or formative assessment in ...

I’m excited to announce the release of a handbook I co-authored with Mary Alys Foutz called Getting Started with Pear Deck. Get access the eBook by clicking here! I have been using Pear Deck in my classroom since 2015. I’ve watched the tool grow dramatically in its functionality but also its easy to be integrated into the classroom from a teacher and student perspective. The new book is an amazing guide in terms of how to get started with Pear Deck and even introduce you to features that I didn’t know existed until we started work on the book. But for those who are new to Pear Deck or have several other tech tools that they are using in their classroom, I want to share with you why I continue to come back to it as my number one classroom tech tool for learning.  That reason is the feedback I get from my learners. Since I began using it, Pear Deck has consistently been the number 1 thing my students say helps them learn in the classroom. So rather than me preaching about Pear ...

As a part of March Madness, my students did a EdTech Tournament bracket. The finals were between Gimkit and Pear Deck. Pear Deck won, but my students love both tools.  So when someone asked me if I ever thought of an appsmash between the two, I had to try something out. This is a triple app smash that links Pear Deck to Gimkit using Quizlet. The appsmash uses student generated explanations, definitions, and visuals to create a GimKit. If you are not familiar with Pear Deck Vocabulary it allows students collaborate in the creation of flashcards from a list of predetermined terms or concepts. These flashcards are have both a written and visual component. For all the details on Pear Deck Vocabulary, I’d recommend heading over to Getting Started with Flashcard Factory. If you are not familiar with Gimkit . It is a formative quiz game that allows students to work at questions at their own pace while competing against their classmates. In addition, participants can go to an in ...

When I learned about Closed Captioning in Google Slides from Kasey Bell & Matt Miller , I was excited but realized I wouldn't be using it much because I use Pear Deck for my Slides presentations. Well, it turns out that we can all use Closed Captioning in our Pear Deck Presentations as well! If you're not aware of the new captioning feature in Slides , it can be turned on from the presenter menu in presentation mode. You do need to have a microphone either external or internal turned on for the feature to work. It presents live text of what is being heard by the mic to the screen. Now to access this same feature in Pear Deck, it's pretty simple. You just have to click at the right time. In the video below, you'll see that if you click on the CC in the Slides Presenter bar that pops up as the presentation loads into Pear Deck, you'll get the lived closed captioning! As you can see the CC is not yet perfect and I was using my internal computer mic. But i...

With our new physics curriculum this year, we start each new unit with an anchor phenomenon. This is basically another form of a hook to build student engagement but drives students to begin making observations and asking questions. Before you say, “I don’t teach science. What does this have to do with me.” Take a lesson from Dave Burgess and realize the power of hooking your students on day 1 of instruction. It helps them not only understand the why of the unit. It has the potential to allow them to determine their own why. An anchor phenomenon could be anything that makes students curious, leads them to ask questions, and start trying to propose their own answer before digging deeper through the course of the instructional unit. This could be a hands-on experience, an article to read, an online video from the news or maybe something that has gone viral, or a piece of artwork. There are so many possibilities for different anchors to tie instruction to in order to root it and help it s...

I’ve been on the journey to bring personalized learning to my classroom for 3 years now. It seems that every time I think I’ve taken a big step forward, I look and see that in the grand scheme of bringing true voice/choice/agency to my students, I’m still add drops to a big bucket.  That’s not meant to be a cynical statement. It’s meant to see how much room I have to grow.  In an attempt to try to take another small leap forward, I tried something different with my current unit in AP Physics.  This might seems like personalization 101, but it was a big leap for me in terms of demand and supply. The unit I’m focusing on is Electromagnetic Induction.  Without getting into the physics of it, it is easily the most difficult concept for students to grasp in all of AP Physics.  This is the topic that students have shown the most difficulty with on the AP test.  In fact, it is the free response question which tends to be the lowest scoring on the en...

This blog owes a lot of inspiration from this post by George Couros . Sometimes as a teacher I have to deliver content to a large group.  Today, in AP Physics 2 was a good example.  We are covering magnetic force.   I can predict the force and motions experienced by an object when acted on by a magnetic field. This is a very complicated topic that students can't experiment with at the atomic level. I can set up a demonstration that shows what happens at a macroscopic level but it doesn't help students understand what is happening at the subatomic level. The biggest difficulty is not mathematics. It is spacial reasoning and conceptualizing what is happening. It is a process which involves "right-hand rules" which provide simple models for how charges behave in a magnetic field. Here is a sample question students learned today from scratch. Ok, enough with the physics talk. What is my point? I feel that as educators, the current wisdom ...