Pear Deck Learning

Pear Deck Learning is a K-12 instructional platform for teachers, schools and districts, built from four products that share one account: Pear Start for AI lesson planning, Pear Deck for interactive presentations, Pear Practice for gamified practice and Pear Assessment for formative, summative and state test preparation. The home page calls it "The only platform that supports every instructional step in any topic" and adds: "From lesson planning to state testing, we're here to help teachers." Around the four products sit professional services for schools, a tutoring service called Pear Deck Tutor, and links to the GoGuardian classroom management and safety products.

Every product has a free teacher tier, so a single teacher can start without a purchase order, while schools and districts buy premium access on a quote.

Pear Start: lesson packages from a prompt

Pear Start is the planning layer. The home page's "Lessons in < a minute" feature generates "customizable lessons, practice sets, and tests on any topic, differentiated for multiple student groups, in under a minute." A footnote explains the claim: in early internal testing it took 38.02 seconds on average to produce a lesson plan plus at least two differentiated versions of the matching Pear Deck, Pear Practice and Pear Assessment materials.

The pricing page lists Pear Start as free for educators, with "40+ AI tools" for common teacher tasks and "no usage limits." Teachers can build from standards, files or websites, upload images, PDFs, documents, URLs or Google Drive files, pick standards "across all grades and states," and turn a printed worksheet into a gamified practice set. A content converter moves existing slide decks, worksheets, Google Forms or lessons into interactive Pear Deck Learning materials, and output exports to Google Forms, Docs or the platform itself. An automatic PII check warns a teacher before uploading content that may contain student personal information.

Schools and districts that have bought Pear Deck, Pear Practice or Pear Assessment get the premium side of Pear Start included: tool customization to match district policies, a district library, usage reports, access management, the option to hide tools, and single sign-on through Classlink, Clever, Microsoft and Google. On AI data handling the home page states: "We require LLM partners to delete all data from users' AI requests within 24 hours."

Pear Deck: interactive presentations

Pear Deck turns a slide lesson into a live, two-way session. Teachers build a lesson from scratch or add interactive questions, polls and quizzes to existing presentations, run it at their own pace or switch on Student-Paced Mode, project answers anonymously, and lock responses or set timers to keep the class in step. Students can join anonymously or log in with Google or Microsoft.

Teacher Free costs $0 and includes "unlimited presentations, interactive questions, Sessions, and participants," the Content Orchard of templates and ready-to-teach lessons, Immersive Reader for accessibility, and Flashcard Factory, a vocabulary game available on Google only. Teacher Premium is listed at "$149* /year" with the asterisk reading "with educator discount." It adds the Teacher Dashboard with responses by student name, Draggable and Drawing prompts, Reflect & Review for sharing slides and feedback after a session, Quick Prompts, Teacher Feedback, audio on slides (Google only) and a Shared Teacher Dashboard for co-teachers.

The Schools & Districts plan is priced as "Custom." It adds premium features for every teacher and student, a District Library, "Certified math and ELA content for grades 3-12," Efficacy Reports, custom professional development, dedicated onboarding support and LMS integrations with Canvas and Schoology, which the page says are included with a District subscription while a fee applies for a School subscription. The home page reports "1,000+ ready-to-teach, high-quality Certified Math and ELA lessons" in the Content Orchard and Instant Pear Decks, an AI generator in beta, which goes "from standards to lessons in 30 seconds." It also cites 14.2M students engaging in Pear Deck lessons in the 2022-2023 school year.

Pear Practice: games and spaced practice

Pear Practice is the student practice tool, framed on the home page as "The classroom engagement tool that gets students excited to learn." Students create avatars, earn XP, keep weekly streaks and play multiplayer modes such as the Big Board and Quick Play, alone or in teams. Teachers assign live, async, group or individual practice, build sets from scratch or import questions via .CSV, vary time limits, and give each student Personalized Daily Remixes built on spaced retrieval.

The free tier includes basic question types (multiple choice, multi-select, math types, drawing), sample certified sets, live responses and classroom reports, with support by live chat and email. The premium Schools & Districts plan, sold on a quote, adds certified K-12 Math and ELA content, diagram and classification questions, audio and video in items, AI question generation, Instant Set generation from PDFs, pictures or worksheets, AI answer feedback in beta, standards-based and district reporting, and an account manager. The company reports "a 15 percentage point improvement" from an analysis of over 1,500 students between February 2023 and September 2023, and that 40% of students on Pear Practice practice independently.

Pear Assessment: classroom tests to state test prep

Pear Assessment covers formative and summative assessments, from a teacher's quiz to a district common assessment. The assessments page lists "50+ tech-enhanced question types" with multimedia, hints and tags for standards, DOK and difficulty. The pricing page lists "80,000+ standards-aligned Edulastic Certified questions" and a public library of "over 350K items and 60K assessments."

State test preparation is a large part of the pitch. Teachers can mimic the state testing interface and use state-released practice tests from "PARCC, Smarter Balanced, AIR, PSSA, MAAP, NC EOG, STAAR Test, ISTEP, and so many more," with sample Grade 7 tests for Texas STAAR, New York Regents, California CAASPP, Georgia Milestones and Kentucky KSA. Video Quiz, a newer format, turns YouTube videos into formative assessments, with questions "created by you or by A.I." and placed on the video timeline.

Teacher Free ($0) covers building assessments, sharing and automatic grading, with basic security through private links. Teacher Premium costs $125 a year and comes with a "Start a Trial" button; it adds advanced security (shuffled order and choices, lockdown browser settings), more accessibility tools including Text-to-Speech and a magnifier, Desmos calculators, rubric scoring, the state test interface and standards-based reports. The Custom district plan adds common assessments, unlimited teacher users, drill-down reporting, grade passback to Google Classroom, Schoology and Canvas, rostering from SIS and LMS platforms, phone support with an account manager, and add-ons such as Data Studio for MTSS and early-warning tracking or migration of existing assessments. The home page cites "Tier 3 ESSA" evidence for math and ELA growth in grades 4-8 and 13.2 million assessments assigned.

Tutoring and services

Pear Deck Tutor is the tutoring arm, and the all-products page mentions "on-demand tutoring" among the outcomes the platform supports. Neal Kellogg of Oklahoma City Public Schools is quoted saying the district scaled online tutoring from its virtual school across the district, so that "every student has unlimited access to high-quality tutors." Tutors can apply through a "Become a Tutor" page. Schools can also buy what the site calls "premium professional services" to get more out of the products.

Who it suits

Pear Deck Learning suits K-12 teachers who want lesson planning, live interaction, practice and testing in one login, and districts that want to replace several tools with one vendor; one customer story is titled "How Woodford County Streamlined Their Edtech to a Single Unified Platform." The integrations page names Google Classroom and Microsoft Teams and says the platform works whether a school is "Google or Microsoft-based," though Google schools get a few extras, since Flashcard Factory, audio on slides and grade export to a spreadsheet are Google-only. Schools preparing for state exams will value the test interface simulation and the released item banks.

It is less suited to anyone outside K-12, such as a corporate trainer or a creator selling courses. The other caveat is that the full product, including certified content, LMS integrations and district reporting, sits behind custom school and district quotes.