The Student Experience
In this module, you’ll explore the tools that shape the student experience in Pear Deck. From Student-Paced Mode that gives learners control over their progress, to features like Classroom Climate Check-ins, Immersive Reader, and Audio Playback, Pear Deck is designed to support diverse learning needs. You’ll also learn how students interact with different response types and how they receive feedback in real time. Understanding these tools will help you create more inclusive, engaging, and responsive learning experiences.
Classroom Climate
Receiving Feedback
Adding and Playing Audio
Student- Paced Mode
Response Tools
Immersive Reader
How to use Classroom Climate
The Classroom Climate feature provides teachers the opportunity to gain an extra layer of insight into how their students are learning. By gathering feedback about student mood and feelings of achievement, teachers can gain insight into the success of a lesson while helping students become more self-aware.
Instructions
1. Go to your Settings tab at peardeck.com and turn on Classroom Climate. Set it to "On".
2. Choose the type of feedback you want to gather. You can decide whether you'd like to gather mood data at the beginning of class, lesson feedback at the end of class, or both.
How to use Classroom Climate
3. Present your Lesson.
Now each time you present a Pear Deck, we'll present students with a mood gathering question on the first slide, and a lesson feedback question when you end the Session (depending on the options you chose in the last step). You don't have to do anything else to make this happen.
How to use Classroom Climate
4. Use the data.
There are a number of ways you can use the data once collected.
Immersive Reader
We know that students with learning differences face real challenges in developing reading, writing, and mathematical skills. Often they might need extra time to complete their tasks and individual support during classroom activities. Using the right assistive technology can help these students become confident, independent learners who feel empowered to participate fully and share their ideas with their teachers and peers.
Immersive Reader is a service developed by Microsoft that encourages reading and improves comprehension with a full set of proven literacy-enhancing features. With Immersive Reader, students can activate multi-sensory, multilingual learning techniques like having text read aloud or translated into different languages, highlighting specific lines of text, and changing fonts and sizes to improve readability.
Immersive Reader
Immersive Reader
3. Next, present your lesson as usual. Students who join your Session will automatically see the Immersive Reader button on every Slide with readable text.
Here's what Immersive Reader button looks like on the Student View:
Immersive Reader
4. By clicking the button, students instantly access a host of tools to help them read the text on the slide. For example, the tools include the option to have text read aloud, break text into syllables, increase spacing between lines and letters, highlight parts of speech, change text size, and more. Students can click the back arrow at the top left of their screen to go back to the regular slide view.
Adding and Playing Audio
With the Pear Deck for Google Slides Add-on, you can add audio instructions, descriptions, or examples for your students to listen to while engaging in Interactive questions during your presentation Sessions. You can make a new recording or add one from your computer. The recording will be playable on the Student View of your presentation sessions.
For best practice, we recommend keeping your slide recordings short to help students concentrate more easily on both the audio instruction and the prompt on your slide. While they can be longer, we recommend two-to-three-minute recordings. You can add a recording to each slide in your presentation, letting you stagger and customize instructions.
Adding Audio to a Slide
1. In Google Slides, open the Pear Deck for Google Slides Add-on.
2. Open a slide.
3. In the Pear Deck Sidebar, scroll down and click the Audio button.
4. Allow Pear Deck access to your microphone when prompted in your browser.
5. In the new window, click Record or Upload.
6. When you're done, click the Add to Current Slide button to confirm.
7. A small object is inserted into the slide. You can move, resize, or drag this object off the slide. Do not delete this object unless you want to delete the audio file.
Playing Audio in Student View
When your Deck is ready to present, click the Start Lesson button in the Pear Deck Add-on sidebar to start a new Session. You'll be prompted to choose Student-Paced or Instructor-Paced activity. Audio recordings can be played on the Student View (only) of any live Session. Here's what students do:
Student-Paced Mode
When Student Paced mode is active, a navigation bar appears at the bottom of Student View. Now students can move through the slides and respond to Interactive Questions at their own pace.
You can open the Teacher Dashboard to view the Progress Bars and number of students on a slide. At the bottom of each slide thumbnail, a progress bar shows how many students are done with the slide. The blue person icons tell you the number of students on the slide.
Open the Dashboard and click the blue person icon to see who's on each slide. This can help you see students who are struggling with a slide or ahead of the class.
Leave a comment for a student by clicking the Feedback button. Students receive their feedback on the Student View.
How to Navigate in Student-Paced Mode
Student Response Tools
When in a live session, students have a variety of ways to response to interactive questions within the lesson. On a drawing slide, students have the most options for customizing their responses.
3. Line 3 has the arrow buttons for navigating between slides (in student paced mode) and the� immersive reader tool. If there is an audio file included, that button will also appear here.
Student Response Tools
Receiving Feedback - Steps for the Student
1. Join your teacher's session with the Join Code (at joinpd.com) or the Join Link to open the Student View.
2. The Feedback Button appears in the bottom right corner of your Student View with an unread message notification. Click Mark as Read to remove the notification - your feedback will be saved!
3. To review it again at any time, click on the Feedback Button.
4. You can choose to change your answer on the slide. All of your answers in Pear Deck are saved automatically and your teacher can see them in the Teacher Dashboard.
Receiving Feedback - Steps for the Student
You have reached the end of Module 2.3 slides. Please reach out to the BISD Digital Learning Team if you have any questions about this module.
Thank you!