I have been using Seesaw for a few years now so I thought I would share a quick post about it, what it is and a few ideas for how it could be used in class. For the uninitiated, Seesaw is an online portfolio system that can be used to collect and comment on work. More importantly, your children and their parents, guardians or carers can comment on the work too!
To get started, teachers will need to upload pupils’ names separate or for speed they can enter a full class list. Seesaw then does the rest, honestly this is enough to give each child a login and account for Seesaw. Not only that, but Seesaw does all the hard work to give the child’s parents a log in too, and it’s free!
Put simply, Seesaw shines when it helps to collect evidence of learning that is otherwise difficult to display properly in a book. Seesaw provides the perfect way to keep a constant record of a child’s progress. It links brilliantly with other apps, so it is a fantastic way to collect and share work with pupils on their iPads. As Seesaw links well with other apps information can be uploaded in a variety of ways:
- Photo – I have done this with artwork, homework projects, work from class or even science experiments as well as work from Computing.
- Video – I have used this for science experiment videos, PE work in dance and gymnastics, Computing for explanation videos but any videos from the camera roll can be uploaded.
- Drawings – I have done this with explanations to gauge children’s understanding, similar to how I use explain everything
- Note – Not the most amazing feature in comparison to the rest but still valuable for research purposes.
- Link and File – These are great for sharing work from the teacher and doing some project-based learning.
It is worth noting that all of the above features can also be improved further with a brilliant feature with is adding a sound file, or annotation. This can be the child explaining what they have done or the teacher giving feedback to a piece of work. In addition, there is the facility for parents to add feedback too.
Seesaw Blog
I have been using blogs for a few years now, blogging is so valuable as a way to cover online safety lessons but also to inspire pupils work by sharing it with a real worldwide audience, the real authority on value of this are fantastic people like David Mitchell, Cherise Duxbury and Liam Murphy. However, some teachers struggle to set up blogs such as Primary Blogger or see that the effort they put in would be better improving the content. Seesaw has provided an answer to this!
With Seesaw it couldn’t be any easier to post content to a blog, once children have added a piece of work teachers can review it and keep it in that class’ portfolio or press a world icon and it launches onto a class blog.
To reiterate, work will not publish to the blog without the teacher’s approval, this is the same with comments. This creates a nice safe environment for classwork to be published.
More information about the blogging feature can be found here -http://web.seesaw.me/blogs/
Quick Ideas for the Classroom:
- Project Based Learning – Make a presentation with the App, use texts, audio, video and illustrations.
- Assessment- Formative assessment opportunities are created as both teachers and students can share and respond to the same screencast when the file is shared as a Seesaw project.
- Flipped Learning – Seesaw is also a great medium for utilizing the flipped classroom model as screencasts provide student-centred learning opportunities that can be viewed and responded to at home and in school.
I hope you have enjoyed reading this and if you’re not already I hope it has persuade you to look into the incredibly valuable resource that Seesaw is. I find my class really enjoy using Seesaw, its user interface is simple and it is very difficult to make a mistake on it. The use of the Blog feature has just made Seesaw next level! My students love how I just tap the globe and how they can just add comments to each other’s work. That’s not to say there isn’t a place for Blogs, we teach Blogging as a unit in a few years at KS2 but if the point of the exercise is to share the work- why not keep it simple? As I often say, EdTech should save you Money, Time or both and Seesaw definitely does that!
How do you use Seesaw? If you would like to post a link to your Class Seesaw blog I would be happy to comment on the exciting work you get up to.
Thanks,
Adam
Diary of a Geeky Teacher 