Education
Pear Deck
Pear Deck is an interactive presentation tool for teachers that turns Google Slides and PowerPoint decks into live student response sessions.
What is Pear Deck?
Pear Deck transforms Google Slides and PowerPoint presentations into interactive classroom experiences, allowing teachers to embed formative questions — draggable responses, short text, drawings, number lines, multiple choice — directly within existing slide decks. Founded in Iowa City in 2014, it found particularly strong adoption in districts that had standardised on Google Workspace for Education, since the Google Slides add-on integration meant teachers didn't need to learn a new presentation tool. GoGuardian acquired Pear Deck in 2023, adding it to a suite of classroom management and student safety products.
The platform operates through the Pear Deck add-on inside Google Slides, which communicates with Pear Deck's cloud backend to manage student sessions, collect responses, and push instructor-controlled slide advances to student devices. Students join sessions through a web browser using a join code or Google account, seeing the slide content and interactive prompts on their device. The Teacher Dashboard shows real-time response heat maps and individual student answers as they arrive, enabling formative assessment during instruction. Sessions can be exported to Google Slides with student responses embedded as a record of class activity.
When Pear Deck has issues during a live class, the teacher-student interaction layer breaks down. The Google Slides add-on fails to launch the Pear Deck sidebar or returns an authentication error when the teacher tries to start a session. Students entering join codes encounter connection errors or sit on a loading screen that never resolves. In-progress sessions drop student connections, showing the "waiting for teacher" screen as the session loses its state. Student responses submitted during an active slide fail to appear on the teacher dashboard, meaning the formative data is invisible even though students believe they submitted it.
Outage.gg tracks Pear Deck platform status using real-time community reports from teachers. If sessions are not starting, students cannot join, or responses are not appearing, the live status page shows current impact.
Common Pear Deck Problems
Issues users most frequently report when Pear Deck is having problems.
Login failures
Players are unable to sign in, receiving authentication errors or being stuck on loading screens.
Matchmaking problems
Unable to find or join matches, long queue times, or errors when trying to connect to game servers.
Disconnections mid-session
Getting unexpectedly kicked from active sessions, losing in-game progress or items.
In-game store & purchases
Cannot load the in-game store, complete purchases, or received items are not appearing in inventory.
Frequently Asked Questions
Common questions about Pear Deck outages and server status.
You can check the live Pear Deck server status at outage.gg/services/pear-deck. The page shows real-time community-submitted outage reports, an hourly trend chart, and the current health status.
Pear Deck can stop working for a number of reasons including scheduled maintenance windows, unexpected server failures, network infrastructure problems, or DDoS attacks. Check the live status page on Outage.gg for the latest community reports to see if others are experiencing the same issue.
Go to outage.gg/services/pear-deck and click the "Report an Issue" button. Your report is counted immediately and helps confirm whether a problem is widespread. Reports from multiple users trigger a status change visible to everyone watching the page.
Click the "Notify Me" bell button on the Pear Deck status page at outage.gg/services/pear-deck. Create a free account and we will send you an email the moment Pear Deck comes back online — no app download required.
Many services maintain official status pages with planned maintenance notices. Outage.gg aggregates real-time community-reported outages which often surface faster than official channels.
Related Services
Other services you might be tracking alongside Pear Deck.
