Tuesday Tech Tip: Pear Deck

Pear Deck is a fantastic interactive tool for teaching and learning.  Check out the guide below for all the details:

Tuesday Tech Tip: Interactive Solutions on the Web with Classflow & SmartExchange

More and more classrooms are receiving devices so that each student has access to technology, that is personalized and collaborative.  Whether these are iPads, Tablets, Chromebooks, or other laptops, students are now able to interact with specific content easier than ever.  ClassFlow is an interactive lesson delivery system for classrooms that are experimenting with one-to-one or bring-your-own-device (BYOD) structures.  ClassFlow allows teachers to push out any content lesson, slides, assessment items, etc… to students’ devices.  Students are then able to interact with that content and send it back to the teacher for immediate feedback.  Getting started with ClassFlow is a very simple process.  

Here is a overview of ClassFlow:

Step 1: Log into ClassFlow using your Google credentials.

Step 2: Prepare a ClassFlow Lesson

• The great thing about ClassFlow is that you can upload existing SMART Notebook, Promethean ActivInspire, Microsoft Office lessons, or from your Google Drive and Dropbox.  This includes text, images, and video.

Step 3: Connecting the Class

• Students can connect to your ClassFlow lesson using a class code from ClassFlow Student.  Once in, they can interact with the content you have created.  

Step 4: Analyzing Student Understanding

• If you sent your students quizzes, polls, or other assessments, you can look at this data during the lesson for immediate feedback, or afterwards to help you inform your next lesson.

Step 5: Differentiation

• Throughout the lesson, teachers can create student groups send different material to different students, depending on their skill level.  This way, you can adjust the difficulty level of your content for each student in your class.

ClassFlow as an excellent collection of YouTube videos in their ClassFlow Channel. There, you can watch tons of video tutorials; everything from teacher set-up to how to deliver questions to students' tablets in ActivInspire (for Promethean users only).

New tools are great however, we acknowledge that you may be using some things that you created previously. If you have been a SMART Notebook user, you likely know that SMART has made changes to software structures.  You undoubtedly have some awesome lessons created with Notebook software.  If paying for the software is out of the question, consider using Smart Notebook Express .  

This is a light version of Notebook where you can view, save, and interact with SMART Notebook files for free! You can also create here as well. Simply go to express.smarttech.com to get started.

Need some lesson inspiration?  SMART has a place for you too.  

Here you can search for lessons, images, and more by subject, grade, and file type.  You will have to create a username and password to browse.

This youtube tutorial offers some useful tips for using both Notebook Express and SMART Exchange.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeWyi03OVmw

Should you want to consider purchasing the latest version of SMART Notebook, you can visit

http://education.smarttech.com/en/products/notebook to learn more.