What
For many educators, today is the first day of our Term 1 holidays, but instead of having a 'lie in' and choose my own adventure, I am at EdTech's Google Summit at Aoere College with a fantastic group of learners and three #oresome learning coaches from LH6. We are here to support our learners (and Michael Davidson) with sharing the learning that we do at OrmPS, e.g. Choose Your Own Adventure, digital breakout, iExplore/Design Thinking and Lego Stories.
I am involved in the last session - Digital Breakouts. So at the beginning of the day, I was free to attend the Seesaw session; run by Sarah Morrison and Elena Rehana, both from Newmarket School. I have heard and read positive feedback from many educators about the ease and functionality of Seesaw. This has sparked a curiosity in me because I am finding Blogger (which is used at OrmPS to post narrative assessments and student learning), to be clunky and challenging for many learners - especially with Years 0-3. We are also finding it difficult to get parents onboard with reading their child's blog, then giving feedback.
Would Seesaw help to resolve these problems?
click link to access Sarah & Elena's presentation
So What
Sarah and Elena are able to 'walk the talk'. Sarah spearheaded the change within her school (she ran a pilot programme in her class a year ago) and Elena has only been using Seesaw for the past term - both are insanely passionate about Seesaw. They shared stories about the positive impact that it has made their student's learning, e.g. a shy learner was able to share their understanding by recording their voice, rather than writing; another was able to draw on a photo to illustrate groupings.
Apart from Seesaw being so easy for learners to use - especially the young ones, the other BIG plus was the positive feedback from the parent community. Parents have the Seesaw app on their phone and are notified when a post is added to their child's journal. With a quick tap, this post appears on their phone and a response can be added straight away.
I took a few learners to this session so that I could get their feedback on Seesaw, compared to Blogger. They were very keen to draw their portrait, add some text, then comment on each others post. This procedure was completed very quickly and Sarah demonstrated how she needed to approve the post, before it went 'live'.
Now What
There are plenty of 'ups' about Seesaw. The main one is how easy it is for learners to use and this would result in ALL our learners being able to upload to their journal in a multiple of ways. The second, and almost as important, is the possibility for an increase in parent feedback, compared to feedback (or even viewing) of our current learner blog posts.
As for the 'downs'... well at the moment one end of the seesaw is up in the air with little chance of returning to the ground.
