JoinPD (Pear Deck) is an online platform used for interactive learning. It can be used by teachers to make virtual lessons that allow students to interact with the on-screen elements. There are different types of lessons that you can make using this platform.
In this blog post, we will take a look at what JoinPD is used for and how you can get started with it.
Let’s get started.
What is the Purpose and Benefit of JoinPD (Pear Deck)?
The purpose of Pear Deck is to give learning an interesting and enjoyable twist. Instead of having students look at boring slides and images, Pear Deck helps in making the lessons more upbeat.
If you have ever used platforms like Kahoot! and Quizziz, you can think of joinPD to be pretty much the same thing.
The benefit of using joinPD.com is that students can learn their lessons a lot better, and they can be more actively engaged in the class while it is in progress.
How is Pear Deck Used?
There are basically a bunch of different activities or interactive elements that you can use in your lessons i.e., when creating them with JoinPD. These activities are:
- Dragging (a certain icon or element on the screen)
- Drawing
- Multiple Choice
- Number
- Text
- Web
Now, we will look at all six of these in detail.
· Draggable
Using the draggable option, teachers can create a lesson activity that involves the students moving icons/markers around on the screen. This can take the form of an assessment i.e., in which the teacher can ask the students to place the right marker in its respective position, etc.
While “draggable” is one activity, there is no one certain way in which it can be used. In other words, the teacher can create different types of customized activities according to their need and requirements.
For example, if you hop over to the official Pear Deck website, you will see that they have illustrated this with the following activity:
The activity shows a world map and instructions to move the different colored icons to the respective countries. Just as this is a particular activity for a particular class, you can make others like it according to the subject and topic at hand.
· Drawing
The drawing activity is a lot simpler. With this activity, you can basically have your students draw and doodle on the screen using their pointer device i.e., mouse or stylus, etc.
You can use this activity to have your students draw a particular shape. You can, for example, ask them to draw a circle or a triangle, etc. You can also do something more immersive such as providing a picture or a sentence and asking your students to point out a specific element in it.
This is basically the idea we got by seeing the example given on the official Pear Deck website.
As can be seen in the image above, the drawing option also lets the students use different colors to draw on the screen. They can also use multiple pen thicknesses as well.
Thanks to the availability of different colors, teachers can take different types of tests and assessments easily. They can, for example, ask students to use one color for a particular shape and one color for another shape, etc.
· Multiple Choice
Multiple choice questions are a pretty old testing method. But with Pear Deck, you can make them something a little more interesting than ticking boxes on paper.
The multiple choices basically let the students pick an option from the several shown on the screen. The teacher is able to see the selections made by the students. In the illustration shown on the official website, the teacher is able to see the overall percentage of the options selected by the students.
· Number
The number-style assessment basically lets teachers get a numeral-only answer to their question. At the student’s end, the question is shown in text form with an input box for entering the answer.
And at the teacher’s end, the answers given by the students are shown in a horizontal graph-like arrangement. Here is how it is depicted on the official website:
The correct figure i.e., 1,000,000,000 is shown in the center and the different answers given by students are shown clustered around it as per their correctness. The closer the answer is to the actual figure, the closer the blob is to the center.
· Text
The “Text” assessment is pretty simple and straightforward but useful nevertheless. This can be useful in situations where teachers have to get a simple answer from their students in textual form.
For the students, the question is provided along with a space to write the answer. On the other hand, for the teacher, the different answers given by the students are shown one above the other.
· Web
The “Web” activity lets teachers give their students a particular website to explore.
Teachers can simply give the instructions to their students to look at the specific site and then answer questions or come up with observations, et.
How to Join JoinPD?
The method of using Pear Deck is simple.
- First of all, the teachers have to create a lesson according to their subject and lecture material
- Then, once the lesson is made, they can share its code with the students.
- Students can go to this link: https://app.peardeck.com/join and enter the code into the provided area
And that is it.
Conclusion
JoinPD (Pear Deck) is a useful online learning platform that makes lessons more than simple book reading and question-answering. The interactive elements available on this platform allow teachers to make their students more immersed in the lesson and learn more effectively.
Using the platform itself is easy. We’ve mentioned the steps in the post above.
