Seesaw: The Learning Journal

Long awaited, and here at last! For the past couple of weeks I've been playing around with my classes and using the Seesaw app and website for all of my classes. At first my students were a little hesitant about having to find some free space on their phones to download the app, but eventually they came around to the idea.

Creating an account is super simple and making and joining classes is very easy, and when you finally get everything set up, there's an instructional video showing you how to use the program and features. I normally explain how to use the program in my blog posts, but I think you'll get more out of Seesaw if you play around with it on your own. There's so many different things you can do with it and I haven't been able to explore them all yet, so what I'm going to do for this post is explain the lessons I've used Seesaw for and then talk about how the students reacted to it.

One thing I will say is that you NEED to have students use their school provided email address, that way the students appear in the class as Bobby Robertson, and not as gthug69...
How I had them sign in

1. https://web.seesaw.me/  or download the app
2. Log in
3. I'm a student
4. Email/Google account
5. Student Sign in with google or G+ 
6. Allow access
7. Enter Join Code

The Assignment

After I created an account, built my classes and watched the tutorial video I created my first note.

Side note: I had my class settings to where all posts have to be approved by me, and where students couldn't see each other's work. That meant that if I wanted to upload something, I had to share it with all the students, which was easy enough. One problem that I ran into was that I made this note before I had any students in my class, so as students joined my classes I had to re-share the note with students as they joined the class. On all the future little projects we did it wasn't an issue.

Of course there was a little trial and error. Some students didn't have their phones, and the desktop computers we have in the room are slower than Christmas. One solution was to have them share phones but still have their own video uploaded. That worked well for the most part, but some students didn't listen and didn't sign in to Seesaw with their own account so I had to search through other students' folders to find their work. So if you have access to iPads or laptops then BRING THEM!!!

Once all the students got signed in and they got access to the assignment, they started creating their videos. Some of them were really good, but some were a little lack luster. The students need a chance to play around with the program to figure out how it works and how to properly make a video. I had some that were submitted upside down, there were some where students didn't allow access to the microphone and there was no sound, some tried to video and write at the same time and I got really bad close ups of the paper. It just takes trial and error.

After they did their first videos, I graded them and went back and left comments on all the videos and let them know where they went wrong or what they did right. The main feedback I got from the students is that they didn't like having to talk on camera, so the next assignment we did was long division where they didn't have to talk, they just had to upload a video showing all their work. They enjoyed this a lot more.

Next I had them play around with uploaded a photo of their work. Easy enough, no having to make a video, no speaking involved. They loved it, and it didn't take them long at all to realize they could type and draw on their photos also.

What I like about Seesaw:

• You can control who joins your class, and there is a way for parents to look at their student's work
• You can control what the students can see, and share examples with your classes
• You have the ability to approve or deny comments or submissions of assignments
• Students can submit an assignment in a variety of formats
• All work submitted is stored in an individual folder by student name so you can look back on it later
• You can comment on submissions to let students know how they did