Seesaw - Balancing Collaboration, Community, and Communication Between School and Home
What is Seesaw?
Seesaw was uniquely developed by Adrian Graham and Carl Sjoogreen, who were former Google mangers and Facebook directors (Barhoumeh, 2017). Half of all U.S. schools have teachers that are incorporating this innovative, popular learning tool into their daily instructional program. SeeSaw is globally employed in schools across 150 countries (Constine, 2018).
Seesaw is an application that functions as a digital showcase for student work. Through this platform students can highlight their work by uploading pictures and videos of their learning experiences. SeeSaw is a student friendly program that allows students to independently document their learning by using photos, videos, drawings, text, PDFs, and links. It acts like an assessment tool as student learning is visible in their reflections to content standards (SeeSaw, 2019).
Universally, Seesaw is known as a parent engagement tool as students post about their academic ventures and share them with their parents/guardians. Teachers, students, and families can comment on the student posts to affirm, encourage and guide student learning. Seesaw is versatile as teachers can use it to communicate with parents regarding school activities, newsletters, upcoming events, and individual student needs (Constine, 2018).
What Are Some Unique Features of Seesaw?Through Seesaw, teachers can build capacity within students to create, reflect, share, and collaborate about educational topics through posting photos, videos, drawing, files, and note links. Students can record their thinking while drawing, sharing, talking, and videoing themselves, others and their academic artifacts. A warehouse of student work is organized and teachers can access one student’s work or view the entire class’ work in their feed. This online management system enables teacher to monitor student performance and collaborate with parents. This student digital portfolio is compatible with iPhones, Androids, Kindle Fire, Chromebooks, and computers using browsers such as Chrome or Firefox (Chrome, 2019).
SeeSaw offers a variety of special features such as;
How Does Seesaw Work?
Typically, a teacher prompts a question or gives an assignment through Seesaw. After students upload reflections based on their academic simulations, the videos and/or pictures feed directly to the teacher’s account. Once teachers listen and view the student work, he/she can decide to approve or disapprove of the submission. Teachers can provide feedback to the students through oral, written, or video remarks. Next the student work can be shared with a broader audience such as parents and other students. They can then select to provide comments to the student.
Teachers can set up an account by following these precise directions;
Create an account at Chrome, Edge or Firefox or download the Seesaw Class app. Select “I’m a teacher” to get started!
Student sign in mode: Change how students sign in.
Class Code Sign In: Designed for young learners (PreK-3) and shared devices. No usernames/passwords are required.
Email / Google Sign In: Designed for students who can remember email addresses and passwords.
Students can see each other’s work: Decide if students can see other students’ journals in your class. Please note, turning this feature OFF in a shared devices class will mean students will not see any content in the journal.
Student likes and comments: Decide if students can like or comment on posts. Many teachers decide to turn this ON after they have been using Seesaw for a few weeks.
Have more questions? If so submit a request here.
How Much Does Seesaw Cost?
Teachers and schools throughout the country utilize Seesaw as a free application. However, schools can pay $5 per students each year to sync SeeSaw with student databases, grading systems, and analyze common assessments through centralized administration. Regardless of what the schools do, parents have the option to purchase a annual “parent premium” to access their child’s digital portfolio spanning multiple school years (Chrome, 2019).
Seesaw Creative Uses and Ideas for School LeadersThis program offers a myriad of ways to enhance school leaders’ jobs. Here’s a few ways to begin using this program;
School Leader Introduction: Before students walk into class on the first day or school, a school leader (principal, teacher etc.) can send a video introduction of herself/himself. This can replace the traditional school letter or postcard that families are sent over the summer. This will be a personable way to connect with families and lessen school anxiety for new students.
Standards Overview for Units of Study for Parents: Teachers could create video overviews of upcoming curriculum topics for the quarter. A more comprehensive overview would include teachers modeling the correct way to demonstrate the six different ways to multiple numbers so that parents don’t assume that all that is needed is the rote memorization of math facts. Teachers must continually advocate for conceptual understanding in math as opposed to procedural outputs.
School Scavenger Hunt: Students could be placed in teams in which they have to draw, write, video and record their answers to clues as they go on a physical scavenger hunt off the school. This could be a wonderful activity to help students at the start of a school year become familiar with common areas throughout the school. This activity would also enable students to practice using each special feature in Seesaw.
Shelfies: Students can video themselves doing a book review on a book they recently got off the shelf in the library, classroom, or home.
Absent Archives: Teachers can send a video announcement to students that are absent or suspended so that they know what they missed in class, what needs to be done for homework, and any other pertinent information.
Frontloading Content: To energize the students about an upcoming topic, teacher can expose students to a video that highlights a Science connection. Students can post their background knowledge about the topic and predictions about the content that they will be studying the next day. Providing this video at home will allow students to explore the topic at their own pace, frequency and duration as needed..
Parent/Teacher Conferences: Seesaw could be used to show students’ growth through the continuum of learning in a parent teacher conference. Teachers could easily remind parents of beginning of the year writing samples or oral book retellings to highlight middle of the year performance on the same tasks.
Snow Connection Challenges: A teacher could provide a Snow Connection Challenge during inclement weather. During a snow day, students could document their connection of science and math learned in school to the elements around them. Students could participate in online discourse about the students’ activity and the content connection. For instance, a student could video about the physics of sledding by showing two people sledding down a hill. The question could be deposed as to why one person finished sooner than the other person as it relates to gravity, acceleration, and Newton’s law of physics. Other students could comment and answer one another’s posts.
Global Awareness: After reading the Flat Stanley book, teacher could do a global challenge of getting students to take/send Stanley to the farthest place in the world over their summer vacation. Family members who receive Stanley could take videos of Stanley documenting the city, state, and longitude and latitude measurements of this locations. Students could predict in their online journals how many miles Stanley traveled to this location. The students could be placed in pairs to calculate the miles to assess how far they were from their estimates. This project would be an excellent way to get to know students’ families and assess their navigational and mathematical skills through the integration of Mapquest or Google Maps.
Other ways that school leaders can apply Seesaw in the school setting can be found here.
What Are Others Saying About Seesaw?School leaders value Seesaw because it connects student learning from school to home. It provides a launching pad for parent to student discourse outside of the classroom environment. The privacy setting are in line with Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act since the videos/pictures housed in student, parent, and teacher accounts vs. the world wide web. It is a complementary program for BYOD and one to one device schools/districts.
Teachers adore Seesaw because it motivates the students to produce quality work since other students and their parents will be viewing and commenting on it. Reluctant learners are highly engaged by technology so teachers love how all learners are actively involved in learning due to Seesaw’s format. Many teachers are grateful for the way Seesaw increases the level of communication with parents about student learning. Seesaw is a time saver for teachers as they can’t always conference with students one on one in a lesson but this program gives them a snapshot of students’ understanding of materials taught. Teachers say that Seesaw is efficient, engaging, and effective (K. Reekes, personal communication, February 1, 2019).
Parents enjoy Seesaw as they have talking points for their children when they come home from school. Seesaw provides the common ground between home and school. Many parents enjoy the dialogue about student learning and regard Seesaw as the forum to connect. Busy working parents love the brag board of student work displayed on Seesaw. In a digital age, Seesaw has become the electronic refrigerator to display student work (R. Lu, personal communication, January 28, 2019).
Personal Reflection and Analysis of Seesaw
Seesaw promotes equity in the classroom as all learners can access directions in the form that is most appropriate for them as determined by the teacher. Advanced learners can access directions in writing while ESL students can retrieve oral recording of directions from the teacher. Teachers can also provide scaffolds for special education students by providing sentence frames for them to begin their online journaling. I find ease and comfort in the simplicity of being able to develop QR Codes for younger learners that may not have strong literacy skills yet. Differentiation is a tremendous asset for this program.
In an evolving world, social media is a massive sore spot with some families and the school. If schools are not careful, social media such as Twitter and Facebook can violate a families privacy when students are included when they shouldn’t be. When schools are careful not to post anything related to parents that haven’t given their permission for students to be photographed, these students feel isolated and left out. However Seesaw helps students may not have permission to post pictures and videos electronically have a platform to share their work in a similar yet private way as their peers. For parents that are separated or divorced, they can have equal access to their child’s electronic portfolio if all parties make a parent account.
Seesaw can build community in a classroom since students are permitted to comment and post on other students’ work (when approved by the teacher). These comments can fuel academic curiosities and pride about content related topics.
This program can save teachers so much time. For grading purposes, teachers could access the student work anywhere they had internet access. Grading and completing student rubrics is so easy as teachers can view each child’s work on an assignment separately or in a window displaying all the student work. Even though schools may not have a paid subscription to Seesaw, at any time a teacher can contact the Seesaw help desk at seesaw.me to provide assistance for any of the program’s features.
One of the disadvantages of Seesaw is that unless parents have a computer or smartphone at home, the school to home connection is lost. This resource seems to make the affluent families richer in opportunities and the low income families poorer if they do not access to technology at home. Therefore, seesaw could negatively be attributed to widening the opportunity gap for children in poverty.
Another feature that could be troublesome in some situations is when parents have purchased a parent premium account and schools are not paid subscribers of Seesaw. This means that parents can pay to access their child’s electronic portfolio that may span multiple years. School staff would not be able to see the continuum of student learning. Without a paid subscription, a school would only have access to the current year’s posts of children. This means that parents would have more data than teachers and this data could become ammunition. Parents could accuse schools of not making academic progress with their child and the digital portfolio could be their archived data that could be used as educational malpractice against the school.
Teachers that do not have a paid subscription to Seesaw can not upload standards of learning with the student videos. This means that parents would see activities but it may not be publically connected to the learning outcomes that the teacher originally designed the activity for.
References
Barhoumeh, G. (2017, June 8). Adrian Graham and Carl Sjogreen. The Founders of Seesaw. University of British Columbia. Retrieved from https://virtual.educ.ubc.ca
Chrome. (2019, February 3). Seesaw - The Learning Journal. Google. Retrieved from https://chrome.google.com
Constine, J. (2018, February 7). Instagram for Classwork – Seesaw in ½ of U.S. Schools. Tech
Crunch. Retrieved from https://techcrunch.com
Gupta, P. (2016, May 19). Why Use Seesaw to Demonstrate Student Work. EdTechReview
Retrieved from http://edtechreview.in
SeeSaw. (February, 2019). SeeSaw for Schools helps Somerset Stephanie Increase Parent
Involvement and Motivate Students to Produce Higher Quality Work. Retrieved from https://web.seesaw.me
Seesaw is an application that functions as a digital showcase for student work. Through this platform students can highlight their work by uploading pictures and videos of their learning experiences. SeeSaw is a student friendly program that allows students to independently document their learning by using photos, videos, drawings, text, PDFs, and links. It acts like an assessment tool as student learning is visible in their reflections to content standards (SeeSaw, 2019).
Universally, Seesaw is known as a parent engagement tool as students post about their academic ventures and share them with their parents/guardians. Teachers, students, and families can comment on the student posts to affirm, encourage and guide student learning. Seesaw is versatile as teachers can use it to communicate with parents regarding school activities, newsletters, upcoming events, and individual student needs (Constine, 2018).
What Are Some Unique Features of Seesaw?Through Seesaw, teachers can build capacity within students to create, reflect, share, and collaborate about educational topics through posting photos, videos, drawing, files, and note links. Students can record their thinking while drawing, sharing, talking, and videoing themselves, others and their academic artifacts. A warehouse of student work is organized and teachers can access one student’s work or view the entire class’ work in their feed. This online management system enables teacher to monitor student performance and collaborate with parents. This student digital portfolio is compatible with iPhones, Androids, Kindle Fire, Chromebooks, and computers using browsers such as Chrome or Firefox (Chrome, 2019).
SeeSaw offers a variety of special features such as;
- student folders categorized by essential learning targets or subject matter
- student directed learning which creates ownership, independence, and agency
- easy QR code sign ins
- simple, green directional buttons for student independence
- intuitive navigation creation tools to provide access to all students
- teacher approval before publishing which makes it safe for all students
- child friendly (auto-focused) integrated camera
- compatibility with SMS, Email, and app notifications for parents
- adds succinctly from other apps such as Shadow Puppet, PicCollage, Book Creator, Explain Everything, iMovie, Skitch, Keynote, Pages, Numbers, Docs, Pages, Drive and more (Gupta, 2016)
How Does Seesaw Work?
Typically, a teacher prompts a question or gives an assignment through Seesaw. After students upload reflections based on their academic simulations, the videos and/or pictures feed directly to the teacher’s account. Once teachers listen and view the student work, he/she can decide to approve or disapprove of the submission. Teachers can provide feedback to the students through oral, written, or video remarks. Next the student work can be shared with a broader audience such as parents and other students. They can then select to provide comments to the student.
Teachers can set up an account by following these precise directions;
Create an account at Chrome, Edge or Firefox or download the Seesaw Class app. Select “I’m a teacher” to get started!
- Create your class, name it and assign a grade level. There will be a suggested sign in mode for your students based on their grade level. Play with some features in your class by using Sample Student! You can assign Sample student an activity, add posts as Sample Student, and more!
- Help students sign in to Seesaw. You can add up to 150 students in each Seesaw class.
- Class Code Sign In: Finish adding your students’ names by tapping + Students. Then, Print your Class QR Code poster for students to use to sign in. To find this Tap “+ Students” (bottom right, under the class list) > tap. Print student sign in poster. Students will choose “I’m a student” from the Seesaw Class App, then the blue "scan code" button and then scan your class QR code. Email / Google Sign In:Tap “+ Students” (bottom right, under the class list). Share your Join Code with your students. They will type it in, create student accounts, and connect to your class from their devices using the Seesaw Class App.
- Introduce Seesaw to your students!
- Here are Getting Started Guides by grade level.
- Send home a Meet the Teacher note.
Student sign in mode: Change how students sign in.
Class Code Sign In: Designed for young learners (PreK-3) and shared devices. No usernames/passwords are required.
Email / Google Sign In: Designed for students who can remember email addresses and passwords.
Students can see each other’s work: Decide if students can see other students’ journals in your class. Please note, turning this feature OFF in a shared devices class will mean students will not see any content in the journal.
Student likes and comments: Decide if students can like or comment on posts. Many teachers decide to turn this ON after they have been using Seesaw for a few weeks.
Have more questions? If so submit a request here.
How Much Does Seesaw Cost?
Teachers and schools throughout the country utilize Seesaw as a free application. However, schools can pay $5 per students each year to sync SeeSaw with student databases, grading systems, and analyze common assessments through centralized administration. Regardless of what the schools do, parents have the option to purchase a annual “parent premium” to access their child’s digital portfolio spanning multiple school years (Chrome, 2019).
Seesaw Creative Uses and Ideas for School LeadersThis program offers a myriad of ways to enhance school leaders’ jobs. Here’s a few ways to begin using this program;
School Leader Introduction: Before students walk into class on the first day or school, a school leader (principal, teacher etc.) can send a video introduction of herself/himself. This can replace the traditional school letter or postcard that families are sent over the summer. This will be a personable way to connect with families and lessen school anxiety for new students.
Standards Overview for Units of Study for Parents: Teachers could create video overviews of upcoming curriculum topics for the quarter. A more comprehensive overview would include teachers modeling the correct way to demonstrate the six different ways to multiple numbers so that parents don’t assume that all that is needed is the rote memorization of math facts. Teachers must continually advocate for conceptual understanding in math as opposed to procedural outputs.
School Scavenger Hunt: Students could be placed in teams in which they have to draw, write, video and record their answers to clues as they go on a physical scavenger hunt off the school. This could be a wonderful activity to help students at the start of a school year become familiar with common areas throughout the school. This activity would also enable students to practice using each special feature in Seesaw.
Shelfies: Students can video themselves doing a book review on a book they recently got off the shelf in the library, classroom, or home.
Absent Archives: Teachers can send a video announcement to students that are absent or suspended so that they know what they missed in class, what needs to be done for homework, and any other pertinent information.
Frontloading Content: To energize the students about an upcoming topic, teacher can expose students to a video that highlights a Science connection. Students can post their background knowledge about the topic and predictions about the content that they will be studying the next day. Providing this video at home will allow students to explore the topic at their own pace, frequency and duration as needed..
Parent/Teacher Conferences: Seesaw could be used to show students’ growth through the continuum of learning in a parent teacher conference. Teachers could easily remind parents of beginning of the year writing samples or oral book retellings to highlight middle of the year performance on the same tasks.
Snow Connection Challenges: A teacher could provide a Snow Connection Challenge during inclement weather. During a snow day, students could document their connection of science and math learned in school to the elements around them. Students could participate in online discourse about the students’ activity and the content connection. For instance, a student could video about the physics of sledding by showing two people sledding down a hill. The question could be deposed as to why one person finished sooner than the other person as it relates to gravity, acceleration, and Newton’s law of physics. Other students could comment and answer one another’s posts.
Global Awareness: After reading the Flat Stanley book, teacher could do a global challenge of getting students to take/send Stanley to the farthest place in the world over their summer vacation. Family members who receive Stanley could take videos of Stanley documenting the city, state, and longitude and latitude measurements of this locations. Students could predict in their online journals how many miles Stanley traveled to this location. The students could be placed in pairs to calculate the miles to assess how far they were from their estimates. This project would be an excellent way to get to know students’ families and assess their navigational and mathematical skills through the integration of Mapquest or Google Maps.
Other ways that school leaders can apply Seesaw in the school setting can be found here.
What Are Others Saying About Seesaw?School leaders value Seesaw because it connects student learning from school to home. It provides a launching pad for parent to student discourse outside of the classroom environment. The privacy setting are in line with Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act since the videos/pictures housed in student, parent, and teacher accounts vs. the world wide web. It is a complementary program for BYOD and one to one device schools/districts.
Teachers adore Seesaw because it motivates the students to produce quality work since other students and their parents will be viewing and commenting on it. Reluctant learners are highly engaged by technology so teachers love how all learners are actively involved in learning due to Seesaw’s format. Many teachers are grateful for the way Seesaw increases the level of communication with parents about student learning. Seesaw is a time saver for teachers as they can’t always conference with students one on one in a lesson but this program gives them a snapshot of students’ understanding of materials taught. Teachers say that Seesaw is efficient, engaging, and effective (K. Reekes, personal communication, February 1, 2019).
Parents enjoy Seesaw as they have talking points for their children when they come home from school. Seesaw provides the common ground between home and school. Many parents enjoy the dialogue about student learning and regard Seesaw as the forum to connect. Busy working parents love the brag board of student work displayed on Seesaw. In a digital age, Seesaw has become the electronic refrigerator to display student work (R. Lu, personal communication, January 28, 2019).
Personal Reflection and Analysis of Seesaw
Seesaw promotes equity in the classroom as all learners can access directions in the form that is most appropriate for them as determined by the teacher. Advanced learners can access directions in writing while ESL students can retrieve oral recording of directions from the teacher. Teachers can also provide scaffolds for special education students by providing sentence frames for them to begin their online journaling. I find ease and comfort in the simplicity of being able to develop QR Codes for younger learners that may not have strong literacy skills yet. Differentiation is a tremendous asset for this program.
In an evolving world, social media is a massive sore spot with some families and the school. If schools are not careful, social media such as Twitter and Facebook can violate a families privacy when students are included when they shouldn’t be. When schools are careful not to post anything related to parents that haven’t given their permission for students to be photographed, these students feel isolated and left out. However Seesaw helps students may not have permission to post pictures and videos electronically have a platform to share their work in a similar yet private way as their peers. For parents that are separated or divorced, they can have equal access to their child’s electronic portfolio if all parties make a parent account.
Seesaw can build community in a classroom since students are permitted to comment and post on other students’ work (when approved by the teacher). These comments can fuel academic curiosities and pride about content related topics.
This program can save teachers so much time. For grading purposes, teachers could access the student work anywhere they had internet access. Grading and completing student rubrics is so easy as teachers can view each child’s work on an assignment separately or in a window displaying all the student work. Even though schools may not have a paid subscription to Seesaw, at any time a teacher can contact the Seesaw help desk at seesaw.me to provide assistance for any of the program’s features.
One of the disadvantages of Seesaw is that unless parents have a computer or smartphone at home, the school to home connection is lost. This resource seems to make the affluent families richer in opportunities and the low income families poorer if they do not access to technology at home. Therefore, seesaw could negatively be attributed to widening the opportunity gap for children in poverty.
Another feature that could be troublesome in some situations is when parents have purchased a parent premium account and schools are not paid subscribers of Seesaw. This means that parents can pay to access their child’s electronic portfolio that may span multiple years. School staff would not be able to see the continuum of student learning. Without a paid subscription, a school would only have access to the current year’s posts of children. This means that parents would have more data than teachers and this data could become ammunition. Parents could accuse schools of not making academic progress with their child and the digital portfolio could be their archived data that could be used as educational malpractice against the school.
Teachers that do not have a paid subscription to Seesaw can not upload standards of learning with the student videos. This means that parents would see activities but it may not be publically connected to the learning outcomes that the teacher originally designed the activity for.
References
Barhoumeh, G. (2017, June 8). Adrian Graham and Carl Sjogreen. The Founders of Seesaw. University of British Columbia. Retrieved from https://virtual.educ.ubc.ca
Chrome. (2019, February 3). Seesaw - The Learning Journal. Google. Retrieved from https://chrome.google.com
Constine, J. (2018, February 7). Instagram for Classwork – Seesaw in ½ of U.S. Schools. Tech
Crunch. Retrieved from https://techcrunch.com
Gupta, P. (2016, May 19). Why Use Seesaw to Demonstrate Student Work. EdTechReview
Retrieved from http://edtechreview.in
SeeSaw. (February, 2019). SeeSaw for Schools helps Somerset Stephanie Increase Parent
Involvement and Motivate Students to Produce Higher Quality Work. Retrieved from https://web.seesaw.me
