Introducing Pear Deck Vocabulary and Flashcard Factory

We’ve expanded the Pear Deck world with a new app, Pear Deck Vocabulary and our first-ever game, Flashcard Factory. We’re super excited to share it with all of you!

Studying vocabulary is often an exercise in rote memorization. Students have a list of terms they try to cram into their minds just long enough to get through the test. I remember going home every Monday in high school with a new list of words to learn and spending hours making flashcards for myself. To make it fun, and help me remember the words, my mom and I would try to come up with hilarious sentences with each term. I remember cracking myself up mid-vocab test when one of our sentences would help me remember the word.

Today, there are dozens of ways to make flashcards quickly and share them with your class. But we thought, ya know, there was some important learning in those humorous example sentences. What if we could find a way to infuse that humor and collaboration, into the whole endeavor? What if we could find a way to make studying vocabulary an Active, Social, Deeper learning experience?

Here’s how it works:

Create the List

As the teacher, you create a vocabulary list before class starts. We worked with Merriam-Webster so you can enter a term and quickly search for the official definition. You can type in terms and definitions, copy and paste from a spreadsheet all at once, or pull one of our pre-made lists from The Orchard.

Production Phase

During the Production Phase, students are divided into small groups of one, two or three and assigned to the Day Shift or Night Shift Team. In their small groups, they’ll create flashcards with an example sentence and an illustration. This Active Learning approach gets every student actively participating in the work and engaging with the material.

Quality Control Phase

During the Quality Control Phase, you’ll review the cards as a class, discussing which examples are the best and why. Here’s where the learning becomes Social! This phase is a lot of fun as the whole class participates in reviewing each other’s sentences and drawings and hearing each other’s opinions.

Shipping Phase

Once you’ve given the winning cards your official stamp of approval, it’s time to ship the set! Simply export the completed flashcard set to Gimkit and give students the link. They can study the terms using Gimkit’s review game, and the Flashcards will have their class-made examples. Or, export printable flashcards so students can review on their own. Studying from the cards they’ve created leads to Deeper Learning as students have been a part of constructing their knowledge. Rather than cramming in disparate facts, when students create and study from their own examples, they are placing these new concepts into a wider map of understanding.

Shipping Phase

Once you’ve given the winning cards your official stamp of approval, it’s time to ship the set! Simply export the completed flashcard set to Gimkit and give students the link. They can study the terms using Gimkit’s review game, and the Flashcards will have their class-made examples. Or, export printable flashcards so students can review on their own. Studying from the cards they’ve created leads to Deeper Learning as students have been a part of constructing their knowledge. Rather than cramming in disparate facts, when students create and study from their own examples, they are placing these new concepts into a wider map of understanding.

When we set out to create Pear Deck, we were looking for a way to use technology as a means of engagement, instead of a barrier to working with students. At the heart of our mission is a desire to see every student in the class paying attention, having fun, contextualizing what they’ve learned, and retaining hard-won knowledge.

Any time you are introducing new terms, use Flashcard Factory to get students thinking about the words, interacting with each other, and actively creating the cards they’ll study from later. Not only will they have fun, they’ll learn the words more deeply!

Try Flashcard Factory with your class on September 26!