Welcome to my YouTube channel for The New EdTech Classroom. I'm Sam Kary and
I'm a middle school teacher in San Francisco. In this tutorial, I'm gonna
show you how to set up digital portfolios for students using one of my
favorite programs, Seesaw. I feel so strongly that every
teacher should be using digital portfolios that I became an official
Seesaw ambassador to help teachers learn about the incredible ways the program
fosters student ownership over their learning. Whether you're looking for an
easy-to-use yet dynamic system for students to showcase their work,
need an engaging tool to build students' reflection skills, or simply want to keep
parents more in the loop about what their students are creating in class,
digital portfolios should be a part of any 21st century classroom. First I'm
going to show you how to get your account set up with the right settings
and organization, how to sync your account with Google Classroom, and then
invite parents. Then I'll show you some of the ways I use Seesaw to create
digital portfolios and foster better metacognition in my students. The first
thing you're going to do is create an account as a teacher. I have everything
linked to my Google account, so I'm going to click 'Sign-in with Google' or you can
create an account. You'll be prompted to either create a class or import a class
from Google Classroom. I would suggest importing your class directly from
Google Classroom if you already have that set up because then it's gonna sync
that with your Google Classroom and all your students will already be in Seesaw.
After you've set up your Google Classroom, you'll see all the students
that are enrolled in your Google Classroom on the right hand side of your
screen. If you want to get students enrolled in your Seesaw account, click
the '+ Students' button. There you'll see a class code that you can share with
your students. You only need to share that class code with them once. After
that, if they're using a Google Gmail account, they can sign right in with
their Gmail account. The next thing I'm going to show you is just some quick
ways to optimize the settings of your account to maximize the benefits of
Seesaw. You'll click that wrench up at the top right hand side of the screen.
There you'll see a place where you can continue to add students. You can also
add families by clicking the '+ Families' button. I'm going to
go over that in just a moment. If you want to add different teachers to your
account, you can click 'Manage Teachers.' From there, all you have to do is enter a
teacher's email address, invite that teacher, and they will be able to create
assignments, create their own folders, and have students upload into their
portfolio as well. That's really convenient if you teach students that
have multiple teachers and want them all to just go to one Seesaw account. Next
you'll see certain functions like student likes and comments, which you can
choose to leave on or off. There's also a button that allows students to see each
other's work. I turn this button off initially because I just want students
to create a portfolio. If we're gonna do an assignment where I actually want
students to share their work with others, let's say they're showing they're
thinking about a particular assignment, then I might turn that back on. I do
leave that 'New Items Require Approval' on. That way I have to make sure that it
meets a particular standard before they can actually submit it into their
portfolio. I like to leave on 'Enable Item Editing' so students can go back and edit
their work if necessary. When you 'Enable Family Access,' that's going to allow you
to invite families to view their student's portfolio, which is a really
powerful element of this program that I highly recommend you use. Now I'm not
going to go over all the different ways that you can invite families. You can
check that out, but I do want to show you how all you have to do is hit the '+
Families' button and that will take you to a portal where all you have to do is
enter their email or phone number and that will send the parent a notification
for how they can sign in and either access Seesaw from a mobile device or
from their computer. Then they'll have access to their student's portfolio and
they can see the work that students are creating all year round. It's really
great. The last thing I want to show you about settings is how you can manage
your folders. Managing folders is important if you have students in
different classes or if you just want to subdivide and organize
their accounts. I recommend that you set this up prior to getting kids in, so
that you have a clear organization system. If you go to manage folders,
you'll see that I've already created a folder called 'Student Led Conferences.' I
might want to create another folder like 'Reading Comprehension' to have students
add work to and there you see I have two different folders. When you're setting up
folders it's important that you go to the 'Show add to folder' step. Rather than
just teachers, you want that to be students and teachers. This way, when a
student adds a new piece of work to their portfolio, they will be required to
put it in a particular folder first. Okay now you've set up your basic Seesaw
platform. Let's look at different ways that students can upload work and start
reflecting on it. Here I am now in the student portal. There are three main ways
that I like to have students upload work. There are more options, but these are the
three that I use the most frequently. The first is by having students upload an
assignment directly from Google Classroom. The next is that they're going
to take a screenshot of their work using a Chrome extension that you're gonna
install to your browser. And the third is that they would take a photo of their
work and upload it to the program. So let's start first with looking at how
they could upload an assignment from Google Classroom. Anytime a student adds
an assignment, they're gonna click that green '+' button. Here, students will
want to go to 'Upload,' if they're trying to get an assignment that's already in
Google Classroom. They can go to their Google Drive, there they will see all the
different assignments that they've already created for you in your Google
Classroom. In this case my demo student doesn't have a lot of work, but if the
student did have a lot of work and it was hard to find in the assignments
below, you could click on the folder for Google Classroom and there the student
would find all of the assignments that they had uploaded through your Google
Classroom. So let's say that this student wants to upload a slide presentation.
They would click 'Select' and there they will see their assignment directly from
Google Classroom. They can either add a voice recording to explain that piece of
work or a caption and I'm going to show you those tools in a moment.
Once a student is ready to submit their work they hit the green
check button on the top right hand side of the screen, they'll select which
folder they want that assignment to go into, click the green check button, and
there it will be waiting for teacher approval. So on your teacher account,
you're going to see that a student submitted work, you'll have to approve
that before it comes in. We'll look at what that looks like in just a moment.
The next thing that I want to show you is how you can have a student upload a
piece of work using the photo function. So here they would again click 'Add,' they
would click 'Photo.' Students can hold up an assignment that they want to include,
select the picture icon, and then their picture will show up with a lot of
different annotation tools that they can use to talk about their work. When the
student is ready to submit their work to the teacher, they click the green check.
Again, select what folder it goes into and it will wait for a teacher approval.
The next really cool thing that I want to show you is how you can use the
Seesaw Chrome extension to actually take a screenshot directly from a program
that students are using in class. Direct students to go to the Google web store.
There they will select 'Seesaw.' It's the top app 'Reflect in Seesaw Extension.'
Click 'Add to Chrome' and there students will see that they have the Seesaw
extension on the top right hand corner of their screen. You can then direct them
to go to a website where they might have an assignment that they want to capture
and put into Seesaw. So for example, right now I'm going to go to Storyboard That.
Here a student might want to include a screen capture of their work and rather
than screenshot, it put it in a folder, and then upload it, you can use the app
to just directly screenshot it and have it go right into Seesaw. The way you're
going to do that is by clicking on the Seesaw extension, 'Capture selected area',
or visible area will capture the entire screen. If you capture the selected area,
you can choose where you want the screenshot to be.
That will open up Seesaw and you'll see that it's now in the Seesaw portal. So
here I want to show you some of the different annotation tools that I direct
students to to be able to start to reflect on their work. The first is to
add a text box. When you click the text box, it'll pop up a box and I like to
first direct students to title their assignment, so that we know what we're
looking at. You'll see that these are dynamic, you can drag them around, you can
change the size, change the color, change the backfill, any way that you want. If a
student wants to add a voice recording, they could add of voice recording
explaining why they chose the assignment. They could take a picture and use that
to explain why they chose the assignment. I like to direct students to using
different shapes so that they can point to particular parts of their assignment.
So here I'm going to select the arrow shape, I'll drag the arrow next to the
dialogue, I'm gonna turn that arrow around, drag it, make it smaller,
and then I'm going to add another text box to explain why I am pointing to that
particular part of the assignment. So I'll click the text box, I'll move
that text box over, and here I would direct students to explain what their
work shows. One of our learning targets was to have students be able to write
dialogue from nonfiction text so that's what the student wrote. Next I want to
have the student reflect on how they visualize what they had read by creating
another annotation. So they'll select another arrow. Here, I'm going to have the
text box up in the top corner, so I'm going to actually move that arrow around
a little bit, draw it out, add a text box,
write the target. There are other tools that students can use to annotate their
work, for example, the pens at the bottom with different colors that they can use
to write directly on their work and comment on that particular section. The
next thing I direct all my students to do is go down to the quotation marks.
Here, they either add a voice caption, further explaining why they chose that
assignment, or they do a written caption. I always provide my students with
sentence frames here that include a part about what the work shows, in terms of
reaching a learning target, as well as why they are proud of their work. Now
let's look at what it looks like in my teacher portal now that the student has
uploaded some work. I see that I have different assignments to review. I'm
going to click the 'Review' button. I can review their work. If I approve it and
think that it does belong in their portfolio, I can click that green check.
If I think, "Mmm you actually need to go back and fix that. it doesn't work," I can
trash can it, delete it, and they will have to upload that assignment again. The next
thing that I want to show you is how a student's portfolio would look after
you've approved all their different assignments into their portfolio. You'll
see that they have a stream of different assignments that they have annotated and
reflected upon that can then be shared with families and that they will have
for the rest of the year and, if you have a pro account, can go with them over
multiple years that they are with a school. The last thing that I want to
show you is just how it looks on the teacher end and how easy it is to pull
up different students' portfolios. If you want to look at all the work that your
class has put together, you can click on the 'Class Journal' and if you just want
to see work that certain students have uploaded, you can click their names and
it will show you their portfolio. I also find this to be incredibly convenient
when I'm actually running conferences and I want to pull up different students
for my conference. I love how Seesaw allows students to
reflect on their work in dynamic ways that is meaningful to them, how it keeps
their work all in one place, and how it allows me to share that work with
families, so that they get to see their students work all year round instead of
just at the end when we have our student led conferences. Thank you so much for
watching my video. If you'd like to see more of my education technology
tutorials, hit that red 'Subscribe' button. Below you can also find a link to my
website, as well as my Twitter handle and my podcast, where I have conversations
with other educators about how they use technology in class and industry
professionals about the latest and greatest in education technology. Thanks
again and have a great week!