Be intentional with the Personal Deck

The Personal Deck is the most important feature that Podsie has to offer. In order to get the most of Podsie, teachers have to be intentional about ensuring that their students are keeping up with their personal decks.

The principles behing how the Personal Deck are drawn from learning science research. Specifically, the Personal Deck leverages the power of "spacing" and "retrieval", which are two best practices that have been proven to meaningfully improve long-term retention of content. Here are a couple of research articles that we drew heavily from when designing the Personal Deck feature:

• Improving Students’ Long-Term Knowledge Retention Through Personalized Review
• Spaced Repetition Promotes Efficient and Effective Learning: Policy Implications for Instruction

In other words, research has concretely shown that "spacing" and "retrieval" will effectively help students remember what they've learned. The Personal Deck allows you and your students to implement "spacing" and "retrieval" on a day-to-day basis, but students have to regularly practice their Personal Deck in order for it to work.

It depends. In general, we recommend that teachers provide at least 10-15 minutes three times a week for students to practice their personal decks.

Another good gauge is how many Personal Deck questions are currently due for your students. If you see that the average number of due questions is starting to get into the 20s range, then it's probably a good idea to carve out some time for your students to review their Personal Decks.

One popular way of using the Personal Deck is to use it in place of a traditional "Bellringer" or "Do Now".

With this method, teachers will typically assign a Standardized Assignment on Podsie as an Exit Ticket at the end of class. Then, the next day when students come in, the questions from that previous Standardized Assignment will have been inserted into the Personal Deck, along with all of the other questions from previous Exit Tickets. The great thing here is that the Personal Deck will only show questions that a student needs to review based on their prior performance, so then each student will get a differentiated review session to start off the class.

If your students' personal deck counts get high, you have a couple of tools at your disposal.

Adjust personal deck settings

To navigate to the settings page, open the menu in the top right corner:

Once you're on the settings page, you can adjust different settings that will affect how often your students see questions on their personal decks. You can also freeze the Personal Deck during holidays to ensure that the counts pile up over the break:

Assign a Personal Deck Assignment

The key to getting Personal Deck counts back to a reasonable count is for students to consistently review their Personal Decks. It's better for students to spend 10 minutes each day reviewing 20 questions than to spend an hour just once a week trying to cram and get through 100 questions.

You can assign a Personal Deck Assignment to help motivate your students to be consistent with their Personal Deck review: