Pear Deck’s app helps teachers engage in real time with every student

Pear Deck, an interactive presentation Google app for the classroom, is live worldwide. The tool has been in beta since March, with thousands of users in select school districts across the country. Now the final version is available in the Google Chrome Web Store.

Pear DeckIOWA CITY—Pear Deck, an interactive presentation Google app for the classroom, is live.

The tool has been in beta since March, with thousands of users in select school districts across the country. Now the final version is available in the Google Chrome Web Store.

The app lets teachers and trainers create interactive presentations and formative assessments allowing every participant to answers questions simultaneously. It’s been getting five-star reviews from 18 users so far. The market is aimed at K-12, but college professors and business people have used it for training and workshops, too.

Co-founder and COO Michal Eynon-Lynch, a former teacher, said the inspiration for Pear Deck came directly from the classroom.

“It’s challenging for teachers to know where each student is and what they are learning,” Eynon-Lynch said. “Pear Deck helps teachers connect with even the quietest and most reluctant students; these are voices that mainly go unheard.

“It makes it easy to grapple the material on their own screen and takes away the element of fear for being wrong since the answers are anonymous.”

She said there are elements of metrics, mainly exporting to spreadsheets, but they hope to develop more in-depth metrics in the future.

The platform is on a freemium model with plans starting at $11.99 a month or $99 a year for educators to access features like more interactive question types, data analytics, unlimited PowerPoint imports and up to 50 classroom participants. 13958_e1b1b3ea2d_full

Pear Deck has been testing the software in classroom and presentation environments since March, working with beta users in school districts across the country and other disciplines like work training programs. Eynon-Lynch says they’ve had very few bugs.

Sabina Bharwani, director of EdTech for Teach for America, was one of the testers.

“It has the ability to technologically enable personalized and collaborative learning simultaneously,” she told the company.

It’s also really easy to setup. All it takes is a Google Drive app on any kind of device. For schools participating in the Google for Education program, it’s a simple minutes-long process to install it district-wide, Enyon-Lynch said.

“Technology in the classroom is definitely a changing landscape,” she said. “Schools across the country are bringing tech either through one-to-one device-to-student ratios, laptop carts or a bring-your-own-device model.”

She hopes it opens up new avenues to learning, instead of just explaining something, having students memorize it and repeat it rote.

“When you start a class by placing an open-ended question on the screen with Pear Deck, you get every single student thinking about it and start to figure out how to go about getting the answer,” she said. “For instance, you put a ball flying through the air on the screen and ask about how you find out how far it will travel.

“You get them thinking about the elements you need to know to figure out the answer: distance, speed, etc.”

She says they plan on reaching teachers through Google Apps for Education conferences around the country, Twitter and word of mouth. She also said teachers can expect a lot of fun stuff in the next year, though she declined to reveal the startup’s plans.

Pear Deck was founded in January by Michal Eynon-Lynch, Anthony Showalter, Riley Eynon-Lynch and Dan Sweeney. This is the second EdTech startup for the team after selling ActiveGrade to Haiku Learning.

In July, Pear Deck was awarded $100,000 in matching funds from the Iowa Economic Development Authority. Last month they won the “New Startup of the Year” at the Silicon Prairie Awards and became one of three finalists in the Iowa Business Plan Competition, with the winner to be announced Sept. 18.

PearDeck works out of the IC CoLab.

This story is part of the AIM Archive

This story is part of the AIM Institute Archive on Silicon Prairie News. AIM gifted SPN to the Nebraska Journalism Trust in January 2023. Learn more about SPN’s origin »

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2 responses to “Pear Deck’s app helps teachers engage in real time with every student”

  1. […] Iowa City-based Pear Deck, an education technology startup making presentation software for Google Drive, left its limited beta release and is now available globally. Earlier this month, Pear Deck was named New Startup of the Year at the Silicon Prairie Awards and became one of three finalists in the Iowa Business Plan Competition (final placements will be announced during an Award Luncheon September 18). Congrats! Read more via ICAD Group, Silicon Prairie News. […]

  2. […] Deck officially launched earlier this month after operating in beta since March. Pear Deck is a Google Drive app for schools utilizing a […]