Access Pear Deck with Google Slides
 | Pear Deck makes your Google Slides interactive to use in the classroom |
|---|---|
 | Intended for Employees and Students |
 | Categorized under Classroom Technology and Systems |
 | Maintained by Matthijs van Mierlo |
 | Up-to-date for the 2022-2023 school year. |
What is Pear Deck?
Pear Deck is an extension/add-on for Google Slides that allows you to make existing presentations interactive for use in the classroom. When you enable Pear Deck for a presentation, you can Start Lesson directly from the extension. Most of the time, you'll want to make this an Instructor-Paced Activity so that you control which slide users will see on their computers when they join the lesson. On individual slides, you can add different types of interactivity including:
- Short answer questions (Text)
- Multiple choice questions (Choice)
- Numerical answers (Number)
- External websites (Website)
- Slide annotation (Draw)
- Draggable
There are lots of ways you can combine these features to make presentations and slideshows more engaging for students. This is also a great way to gather feedback from students or share individual student responses during a lesson.
Pear Deck has wonderful tutorial videos that walk you through the basics of using this tool with existing Google Slides, and we have a paid license (school-wide) to use this on campus. Simply log-in using your Riverdale Google account (Sign-in with Google) to get started.
Tutorial videos: https://www.peardeck.com/help-videos
How do I add interactivity to Google Slides with Pear Deck?
- First, get the Pear Deck add-on for Google Slides
- Open the add-on from the Extensions tab in your Google Slide deck you want to add interactivity to
- Click on the slide you want to interactivity to (multiple choice, short answer etc.) and click on the correct option from the Pear Deck Menu
- When you are ready to present, click on Start Lesson. If you don't see this, make sure to open Pear Deck from the Extensions menu (Extensions -> Pear Deck for Google Slides Add-On -> Open Pear Deck Add-On) then press Start Lesson. Share the code with your students to join.