Thing 7: Presentation Tools

In my position people ask me what I think of Google Slides. There are still the tried and true Power Point lovers who don't want to make the switch to slides. While I know they are mainly averse to the time it takes to learn something new,there are some things I think Power Point does better -for example, animations/slide transitions. Our district utilizes the Google Suite, so people who hang on to Power Point tend to get confused and frustrated if they are asked to use slides. I explored Thing 7 with hopes of learning ways to enhance slides and to get familiar with Pear Deck. I think Pear Deck is snappy and I like how it engages the learners/participants in your lesson/slides presentation. Students can type or draw, they can answer a question or check in with how engaged they feel, they can do a quick check for understanding poll. The presenter controls when the responses are showing and students can use their device to engage/interact with the lesson and the class. I have used Poll Everywhere and I like its features, but I have to say that I think Pear Deck is pretty great for enhancing student presentations. I made a Pear Deck to use for literature circles comparing two books. I included a slide here with a response that was entered on an iPhone. The response takes up the whole slide. It was hard to response with a finger as a stylus on the phone. The text features are great and I would definitely have to think more about how I would have students use the drawing feature. I don't think using chromebook mousepads would be much easier for drawing.

Here is my Pear Deck. I am not ready to buy my own Pear Deck account, but I think it would be nice for teachers to in our district to have access to it. I explored Adobe Spark some more. I recently acquired a copy of this book-

and I have been looking at ways to use it with students. I wish the age for using it was lower so students could use it freely in upper elementary. I like the possibilities and I see teachers using it more to create posts for Seesaw and Class Dojo feeds. Back to Pear Deck - I hope to explore it's use with a 4th grade class while I still have the free trial. I am going to meet with the teacher next week to see how we can use it with her class for their current unit of study. More on this after we get going with our project!