Chatterpix, Word Cloud, PicCollage, and ThingLink were some of the other apps beyond Shadow Puppet that I have used for app smashing with Seesaw. There are so many other great options out there, though, that may be perfect for use in your classroom! A full list of Seesaw compatible apps is available here.
Benefits of Seesaw
Using Seesaw in my college classroom with my preservice teachers was a powerful experience for me and for my students. It enabled me to help my students see how they can integrate technology in their future classrooms as a tool to make their instruction more powerful. In addition, my students found Seesaw to be a powerful learning tool as well. One of my students summed up his experience with Seesaw saying,
“Seesaw has been helpful to me as I consider my role both as an educator and from the perspective of my students. As an educator, I love the ease of access when using the program, which features a wide variety of functions. Furthermore, I love how it provides my students the chance to engage with posts from other students. This gives the app a tremendous amount of benefits in promoting social skills, stimulating academic discussions, and displaying (and validating) students' individuality. When it comes to viewing it as a student, this app has been valuable in serving as a running record of the entire class's learning. I love being able to scroll through our different lessons and activities to review. I also love how I am able to read, reflect, and interact with posts from others. This makes my learning incredibly more meaningful in the end.”
Creating a more meaningful learning experience through the documentation of learning over time and the ability to communicate and collaborate are two of the best benefits my students and I discovered in our Seesaw integration.
Showing Growth Over Time
With student work collected and organized in one app, it is easy for students to look back over their own work to review and reflect on their own growth. Having an organized collection of student work can enable teachers to use Seesaw during student-teacher conferences and also during parent-teacher conferences.
At the conclusion of the school year, parents or students who use email address sign in are able to download and save all of the work added to Seesaw. The download is organized by the month that the work was added. Schools that use the paid Seesaw for Schools version are able to transfer student portfolios from year to year to build one continuous portfolio.
Promoting Communication and Collaboration
When student work is added to students’ personal journals on Seesaw, it is also added to the class feed. This feed has a similar view to social media apps such as Facebook. Teachers are given the option to decide if students can see the work of all of the other students in the class or not. If students can see others’ work, they can like and add comments to their classmates’ work. Teachers are given control to moderate all content added to Seesaw, approving all items added and all comments added before they are visible to the class. The commenting feature enabled my students to collaborate by sharing their own ideas and receiving feedback from their peers. My students used these features to replace activities we had previously done with our discussion board feature on our learning management system.
The communication and collaboration benefits are not limited to within the classroom. Teachers are given the option to have parent accounts linked into their Seesaw classroom. When parents are linked into Seesaw, they receive notifications when their child adds something to his or her Seesaw journal. Parents can then view, comment, and like their child’s work. Up to ten familiy members can connect to each student account, so parents can even invite grandparents, other family members, or friends to access their child’s portfolio as well. For privacy, parent/family accounts can only view their student’s work and cannot see the class feed.
Brand new to Seesaw 5.0, as of July 2017, is the Inbox feature. The Inbox feature provides teachers with a way to message either students or families, as a group or to privately message a family member. This provides a way for teachers to send digital newsletters or reminders without these items becoming a permanent part of the students’ journals. Families can also send messages privately back to the teacher, but they can only reply; they cannot start new messages in Seesaw.