Pear Deck Transforms Vocabulary
Pear Deck is a learning platform that many middle schools are starting to adopt. Based on the information provided by a Pear Deck representative, Klein ISD has 450+ teachers utilizing the program. At Hildebrandt Intermediate, one of our teachers has really taken off with integrating Pear Deck within instruction.
Tammy Crannie is Hildebrandt’s local Pear Deck Ambassador and it’s for a good reason. She adopted Pear Deck last year after attending the TXGOO Conference and it’s taken off from there. This year Tammy presented at the Technology and Curriculum Conference of Aldine (TCCA), which is a conference that highlights the newest and latest technology used in the classroom. She had such an overwhelming turn-out for the sessions, that many participants had to stand.
Word quickly traveled about the great things Tammie was doing in the classroom with the program, and before we knew it, Pear Deck Fever was upon Hildebrandt. I asked Tammie to share her knowledge with the campus and she willingly agreed to offer a training. The turn-out was wonderful! Teachers loved to learn from another teacher, and Pear Deck continued to grow.
Catching on Like Wildfire
Teachers at Hildebrandt love many features about Pear Deck, but the one that caught on like wildfire was the Flashcard Factory. The feature allows students to work in pairs, and on a team to create flashcards for vocabulary terms. To reimagine learning, students are “factory workers” trying to produce the best quality product (i.e. flashcard cards). What Flashcard Factory does is make students work hard to interpret terms, and create visual representations that authentically represent vocabulary.
At the end, the teacher has the class discuss whether a card meets “quality control”. The class now must discuss, “If what has been submitted is the best representation of the term?” Students must back those answers up with solid reasoning. A student simply saying “I don’t like it” is insufficient, and does not provide constructive criticism to help others grow. That in turn makes students work harder on creating quality cards, because believe it or not, they really want their card to pass “quality control”.
Student Creation Matters
Students having the ability to work in collaborative groups raises the stakes of student learning ten-fold, and makes students invest when they are creating the cards. The part that students love is seeing their own definitions and artwork on a flashcard being chosen in front of the class. The part that teachers love is that they can make the flashcards created by the class into their very own personalized Quizlet deck. Taking student-created work and using it as a review tool is ingenious and the students love it too.
All in all, Pear Deck completely transforms vocabulary, and it has various features that promote differentiation within the classroom. At Hildebrandt, we love the program, and the amount of student engagement it invokes during instruction. However, without a curious teacher trying something new and unafraid to fail forward, we would not be able to benefit from the rewards of using Pear Deck.
Free 6 months premium subscription to Pear Deck. Here is the link to enroll:https://app.peardeck.com/jumpOnTheBandwagon/?joinCode=TCCA2017 (simply sign-in using your ‘kleinisd.net’ Google domain).
