techieMusings

At the end of last school year, I got a class set of Wacom tablets (the small size of the Inuos). I wrote about it in this post.

I have revised my process a bit and wanted to share updates! Over the summer, Pear Deck rolled out a Drawing feature. I am now using Pear Deck for all of my warm-up needs. In this post, I am just going to be talking about how I am using the Drawing.

First off, here are the options available for students when responding to a “drawing” question type:

As a teacher, from the “projector view”, you can choose to show or hide student responses. So I start with the responses hidden, meaning all that is projected is the question. And then, when students have finished the problem, we review responses. To do so, I typically “lock student responses” so that they cannot continue drawing on their screen and won’t be distracted by that. Then, I “show student responses” on the projector. The responses are displayed, as in the image below:

Note that student names do not come up in this view, which is very nice when reviewing as a class. The view is very clear and you just scroll through responses as needed.

Then, there is the teacher dashboard, where you can get more individualized results, by student. Here is an example of what this view looks like:

I like to use this view as students are drawing their response so I can see what is happening, as it is happening. All of this is updated in real-time, so I can actually view the responses while they are drawing (versus not being able to view until they submit). On the left, I like using the grid view so that I can see a thumbnail image of everything that is happening in the class, at once. I can then click on an individual thumbnail to see a larger view of the drawing on the right side of the split-screen. It would be nice to have the ability to adjust where the screen splits, so that I might be able to see more students at once in the grid view as students are responding. That is locked and I cannot adjust, but I wonder if this is something the Pear Deck team might be able to look into…

The next thing that I have to think about is how students can save this information. I’d like for them to have these warm ups in their notes, to study from. I am thinking of doing the following… When reviewing the responses, instead of locking student responses, ask students to change their pen color and make any corrections to their warmup. After responses are revised, have students take a screenshot of their response.

What I still have to think through is *where* students will store these responses. I need for them to be able to save these things immediately (otherwise it will never get done) and somewhere that will be well organized so that they will easily be able to reference. I am thinking of having them set up notebooks in OneNote because I like the binder-style organization, plus students can share notebooks with me so I can easily follow their work. I just am not sure how it will work considering we are BYOD and there are not many students with PCs. I have been using OneNote on my Mac and have been very happy with it, but it does not have all the features of the PC version. I’ll tackle that one in the next couple of weeks!