Back to School: Wheels Up!

This week is the third 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. Need to catch up? Check out week 1 and week 2!

You’ve readied your crew and charted your course. Now that everyone is on board, it’s time for wheels up!

As you enter the cockpit, you may notice that some of your controls look a little different. We’ve made some changes to your presenter tools to help you navigate smoothly through any technical turbulence — plus takeoff will be smoother than ever with a redesigned Join Screen experience!

Redesigned Join Experience
Your lesson is the most important part of any presentation. With that in mind, we’ve created a new join experience to surface the content created by you for your students.

• Pear Deck presentations now start on your first slide, which appears below the instructions students need to join your lesson.
• Connect with your students whichever way works best for your classroom. The join modal prominently features the join code alongside the student link to your presentation.
• Premium users can now quickly access their Google Classroom powerup and Teacher Dashboard all within the modal.
• Just click “Start Class” to minimize the join modal and bring your slide front and center.
• Students can jump on at any point during the lesson. Resurface the join modal on any slide by clicking on the newly interactive join code, which sits prominently in the upper right corner of the projector.

Intuitive Controls

• New labels make the Teacher Control Bar simpler and even more intuitive!
• Gone are the days of forgotten Takeaways and unended Sessions with our prominent End Session button.
• Get a better sense of when to start discussion and project responses with the Class Completion Indicator, which displays the number of responses and the total number of session participants.

Bonus: The Need for Speed
The wait for slide loading is over. We’ve optimized presentation loading speeds in the Pear Deck add-on for Google Slides to ensure that you can get to your destination as quickly as possible! As you launch your Pear Deck presentations this year, you should notice significantly shorter delays as your slides load!

With your crew readied, your course charted and the tools you need right at your fingertips, it’s officially time for takeoff!

You are now free to move about the classroom.

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