Back to School: Chart Your Course!

This week is the second installment of our three part back-to-school series. Follow along as we serve up cargo-loads of helpful resources to prepare you and your school crew to soar this year. Missed last week? Catch up over here!

We’re all about being flexible when it comes to the classroom, but when it comes down to lesson planning, winging it is for the birds! Chart a foolproof course (read that as you will 😉) with some premade, flexible, ready-to-teach content that will help ensure a smooth, direct flight to your education destination!

Back to School Icebreakers
Before you reach cruising altitude, you’ll need to be sure your class is comfortable and properly situated. To ensure a smooth takeoff, begin with some icebreaker questions and activities using this Pear Deck. The activities in this deck will provide you immediate insights into the individuals in your class, and will build students’ confidence in responding to open-ended questions.

Be Internet Awesome
If you took a break from the Internet this summer, you may have missed this monumental announcement. Pear Deck has partnered with Google’s Be Internet Awesome team to bring you 19 pre-made Pear Decks (made with the add-on for Google Slides, of course) that house each of the Be Internet Awesome digital citizenship lessons. Deliver premiere dig cit curriculum in the most engaging way possible. And we’ve done all the work for you! Simply save a copy of the files to your own Google Drive, be sure you have the Pear Deck add-on installed, and present with Pear Deck. It’s pretty much the best invention since autopilot!

Critical Thinking Skills
As if 19 premade Pear Decks aren’t enough to get you off the ground, we’ve also added a new section of templates to the slide library in the add-on for Google Slides! In addition to templates for beginning, middle, and end of lesson, you can now elevate your lessons with 12 new templates featuring critical thinking prompts. As with the existing templates, the slides are fully editable so you can tailor them to the right grade level and subject matter. You can find these, and all other slide templates in the Pear Deck sidebar.

How are you engaging your classes with Pear Deck this year? Tweet at us with your students’ icebreaker artwork or the ways you’re deploying critical thinking in your class! It’ll inspire us and all our friends in the twittersphere!

This week’s blog post was written by Pear Deck Teacher Advocate Risa Fadenrecht.