Digital Portfolios are such a great way to communicate and complete assessments in the classroom. Working with the platform Seesaw today was awesome, I definitely plan to use this and cannot wait to see the benefits of this in the classroom.

Seesaw Pros and Cons

Seesaw pros:

  • Instant communication with families.
  • Families can see their childs progress and see where they can further support them at home.
  • The data is stored in Canada with the premium Seesaw (FOIPA).
  • Great platform to gather students work to review for assesments.
  • It is a way to build relationships with families and have them involved in their childs education.
  • All posts and comments must be approved by the teacher before they can be added. This can ensure the safety of students privacy and respectful use.

Seesaw cons:

  • Time consuming to add all students work to the platform. It will be important to make a goal of how much you will want to post to set realistic expectations for parents.
  • Some families may not have the means or accessibility to technology to utilize the app.
  • Overall, I do not see many cons with this platform, the pros absolutely outweigh the cons!

Seesaw in the Classroom

Seesaw can be incorporated into the classroom in so many ways! Some ideas I have are:

  1. To assess reading. For my free inquiry I have been looking into the positive impacts of animals of well-being and so I would also love to do this with the Paws to Read program (Through Therapeutic Paws of Canada). This would showcase to parents through images and videos their childs success and engagement of reading to a dog.
  2. Share classroom projects with family. This can be a great way to allow parents to engage in meaningful reflection with their child. Most students when parents ask what they learned today say “nothing”. Now nothing is not an answer when the parent can talk to them about what they did that day.
  3. Assessment. There are many great check-ins and lesson plans that could either be done as homework or in the classroom. The teacher would just need to be mindful that of each childs unique situation and that they may not have the technology or parental support at home to do this.
  4. Cross-Curricular opportunities: This platform is not designated to supporting one subject in school so it is a great way to get inspiration of different cross-curricular lessons.

My Experience with Seesaw

Here is an image of my groups practice with stop-motion videos. I know that if I was a parent and I was able to see little snippets of my childs learning and what they were doing I would be very excited to be apart of it. I really love that Seesaw is a very easy to use, straightforward platform. I also love the idea of having students post their work so they are also learning how to use the technology!

Here is an example of one of the activities that I did as a “student” on my Seesaw account today. I know how much my nieces LOVE using emoji’s so including this in a math lesson would definitely be a hit! Making math fun would definitely increase student participation and I think it is extremely helpful that these templates are already created to help with lesson prepping. I would absolutely use this lesson in the future and it looks like Seesaw has over 600 other lessons available. I tried signing in as a teacher but did not have success in having access to look through these other lessons.

Putting Seesaw to Use

  1. I would like to use Seesaw primarily as a communication tool between the student/teacher/family
  2. I would make a goal to first do one post per week. As I felt more proficient I would try to do two posts per week making it so that at least one of these two posts the students are uploading the image or video ect.. themselves.
  3. I can see myself using this platform as a way to save students work digitally to avoid taking students work home to mark. This would definitely save a lot of tea stands on students work!
  4. Lastly, I see this as a great way to assess students homework. I would use it to assign activities to work on from home.
  5. Fingers crossed we do not have to go through anymore lockdowns but if it was necessary I could see utilizing Seesaw as a way to communicate to students and assign acitivities if school ever had to go back online.
  6. I would love to introduce this or continue using it if it is already in place during my practicum this spring!

Chelsea