I know that a lot of elementary school teachers are going to be using Seesaw as
your primary learning management system, so I made this video to show you the
most important features you need to know about using Seesaw at the elementary
level. In this video I'm going to show you how you can invite students into
Seesaw even if they don't have email addresses.
I'll also show you how you can link families to your Seesaw account,
as well as go over some of the most important settings you should be aware
of, how to access pre-made lessons in Seesaw,
how to create your own lessons, as well as how to make announcements
that go out to students and families. And then I'm also going to show you what
the student end of Seesaw looks like so that you have a better understanding
of the student experience after you've pushed out an assignment.
And if you're interested, I've also included a link to a tutorial
that I've made specifically for students, teaching them how to use Seesaw.
The link to that video is in the pinned comment and the description below
and that's going to take you over to my YouTube channel that I set up
specifically for students, that's COPPA compliant so you can use it
safely in your class. So I know that sounds like a lot. I do
have a lot to cover in this video, but it's all going to be really
important information if you're using Seesaw,
so I'm looking forward to showing it to you. My name is Sam Kary and this is my
YouTube channel for The New EdTech Classroom.
As always, if you find the tips that I share in this video helpful, you can show
your appreciation by hitting the like button,
leaving a comment, and also sharing it with other teachers,
as well as subscribing to my channel and hitting the notification bell
to make sure you don't miss any of my weekly updates. So let's start totally
from the beginning here. From Google, I'm going to search for
Seesaw and then I'm going to click on the first link that pops up.
Here you'll see that you're able to sign up for a Seesaw account for free.
After you click to sign up, you'll choose that you are a teacher and then you'll
need to create your account. After you've created an account, it's
going to prompt you to create a class. Here it will give you an option
to import a class from Google Classroom. I'm actually not going to show this in
this particular video because if people are using Seesaw as their primary
learning management system, they may not be using Google Classroom
at all. However if you're interested in looking at how this would work,
I do show that in my other Seesaw video and it's also pretty straightforward,
you just have to click on the link here and follow the instructions to import
students from your Google Classroom into Seesaw. So here I'm going to go
ahead and give my class a name and then I'm going to choose a grade
level. After you set up that class you'll be taken to your teacher dashboard
and once you're in you can start to add students. So I'm going to click on 'Add
Students' and then the first prompt that will pop
up is going to ask if I want students to sign in with email addresses
or not. It's a common problem that younger students do not have email
addresses and then are not able to sign into
accounts, so Seesaw has worked around that problem
and I'm going to show you how it works. You'll go ahead and select 'No,' that
students do not have emails, then you'll choose whether or not your
students are on shared devices or 1:1
and I'm going to choose 1:1 here. Now I can add my roster of students into
Seesaw. You can either type names in manually or
you can paste a list of all your students names
so that they all get imported at the same time. So I'm going to add a couple
of names here and then click the green check to
proceed. Seesaw makes it very easy for students to log
in. They can either log in using the desktop version
of Seesaw or the app version on their smartphone or tablet.
Then they will click on 'Student' and either enter the class code that you
give them here or they can scan a QR code if they're
using a smartphone or a tablet. After students have entered the class
code or scanned the QR code, they'll see a list of names of all the
students who are enrolled in the class and they just have to select their own
name. Now that we saw how that process looks on the teacher end
let's just look really quickly at how a student would actually get in.
So the student can also search for Seesaw, click
on the link to Seesaw, they'll go to the top right hand corner to log
in, and there they'll select that they are a student.
After they select 'Students,' they'll have some different options for how they can
log in. So if students did have an email, they
could of course use that here, and they can also use a clever single
sign in as well. And then of course like I just showed, if
students don't have emails, you can just share that class code with
them, they can enter it, and they'll be able to get in. And then
after they've entered that code, they'll be prompted to select their name
from your roster of students. They'll verify that it is in fact them
and then they'll be logged in. Now back on the teacher end, let's take a
look at some of the settings so that we can get those set up, as well
set up our basic organization system. On the top right
hand corner, you can click on the wrench to be able to access the settings for
Seesaw. There you'll see you can still continue
to add students to your roster and there's also a way you can add
families as well and we're going to look at that in a moment. So you can of course
customize things like the name and appearance for your class, but
probably the first, most important thing you'll need to do
is go to 'Manage Teachers' and then add emails for co-teachers
if other adults are also going to need to be able to access the teacher end
of your Seesaw account. Below, if you click on student likes and comments,
you'll see that the default setting is that students cannot like each other's
work, but that they can comment on it. You can
probably just leave these settings the way they are,
with student likes off, but allowing students to make comments,
just make sure if you allow them to make comments that you also have it set up
so that you have to moderate the comments before they get posted to
Seesaw. You also have an option here of whether
or not you want to allow students to see each other's work
or whether or not you just want the work to be seen between the teacher
and the student. If you're going to use Seesaw more like a learning management
system where everything is going to get posted to
Seesaw, then I'd recommend that you turn this notification off.
You'll notice as well that the 'New items require approval'
is also turned on by default. So I just want to show you really quickly what
this is going to look like. As students are turning in their work, on
the teacher end, you're going to see that work come
through and you'll have to approve that work
before it shows up in a student's journal. If the work doesn't meet
expectations, you can leave a comment on the work to let them know how they need
to fix it and then you can send it back to them
requesting that they make those revisions
before they resubmit it. I tend not to use the 'Delete' function
unless it's just totally inappropriate or wildly off base from what they're
supposed to do and then if you are ready to approve the
assignment, you're just going to click on the green 'Approve' check. I do think
this is an important piece of Seesaw, the checking of work and verifying that
it meets expectations before you allow it to come in,
just keep in mind though if you're using it for all of your assignments
and students are turning in lots of assignments, you're going to constantly
need to be checking that work and approving it
in order for that work to actually show up as submitted.
The next important setting is to enable family access.
When you enable family access, that's going to allow you to invite families in
to be able to see their student's work. You can also choose the way that
families can interact with their student's work. So for example
you can choose whether or not you want families to be able to like work, which
again I would also just leave off, and you can choose whether or not
you want to allow them to comment and whether you need to be able to
approve those comments, and I would keep both of those
on. The next important setting is to manage folders.
Here what probably makes the most logical sense is to set up folders based
on subjects. That being said, if you're just a single
subject teacher, you could also just subdivide your subject
into different categories. Seesaw does have a paid version
and 'Skills' is one of those premium features. If you're using Seesaw as
essentially a self-contained learning management system,
where you also want to be able to essentially grade students within Seesaw
as well, then this would definitely be an
important feature to have and it's possible that you do, if your school has
chosen to use it as their primary LMS. If you don't have premium access, you can
also just play around with it during the initial trial period
to see what it's all about. So the basic idea is that you can manually create
skills that are corresponding to standards
and then what will happen is when you create an assignment, you can associate
assignments with particular skills. And then as students turn in those
assignments, you'll also be able to assess them based
on the skills that you set up. So let's scroll up to the top here and
look at how you can invite families. If you already have a spreadsheet with
all your families' emails, you could just upload them yourself
and then that will send your families an invite so that they can sign up.
You can also just enter a phone number and that will ping them with a text
and prompt them to download the app version of Seesaw
and that's another way that they can get in as well. And then if you just need to
email out a general link to parents, you can generate a link and you can do
that here too. And if you'd like more information about what happens on the
family end, you can click on this link below to see
all of the different things that parents will see
when they log into their accounts. The basic idea is that they can opt in to
getting notifications whenever their students put work into
their journals. And then they can comment on the work
that their students did, so it's a great way to open a window into exactly what's
happening in your classroom. Now that we have our
settings ready to go, let's look at the teacher dashboard.
If you click on 'Journal,' you'll see that you have access to either a class
journal or to individual student folders. So you
can see on this other Seesaw account that I have that actually has student
work in it, that after students have uploaded
work, it's all going to show up together in the class journal in a running stream.
And then if you selected an individual student's folder,
you could just see the work that that particular student put into their folder.
Now let's take a look at this activities tab.
One of the great things about Seesaw is the fact that they have so many
pre-built lessons already made for you to take and use. To
access those we're going to click on 'Browse Activity Library.'
In the Activity Library, you'll see that there's a community tab
and your own personal library tab. The community tab will be where you'll go to
find all the lessons that have already been pre-built.
Here you can choose to filter lessons based on grade or subject area
and you can also enter search terms for different types of activities that
you're looking for. And you'll see without even searching
that there are already some suggested activities that you might want to look
at. The lessons at the top are all going to
be activities that Seesaw has created, whereas a lot of the other lesson plans
that are in Seesaw might just be lesson plans that other teachers have uploaded.
You can tell that it's an official Seesaw lesson because it has this
official Seesaw icon. So let's go ahead and just choose this "Curious Moment"
lesson here to see what it looks like. You'll see in all the Seesaw built
lessons that in addition to text, they also use icons that correspond to
different actions that students could take
when they are creating the assignment. So you can see here for the third step
that it's asking students to either take a picture or a video.
And then in the next direction it's prompting students to add a text box
or add their own audio. And in addition to these directions,
students could also play the audio below in order to just listen to the
instructions read out loud to them. If you decide that you want to assign it,
go up to the green 'Assign' button. There you'll be given the ability to
assign the assignment to only a select group of students or to all your
students and then you can also push that assignment out into a
particular folder. And then lastly if you have 'Skills' set up,
you can also associate a skill with that assignment.
When we created the folder system, that was a folder system
for our students, but you should also start to create your
own folder system within Seesaw for the different lessons.
So one way to do that is by going up here to the heart icon.
If you like a lesson, that is going to prompt you to add it to a collection.
So you can start to find different assignments that you like and then add
them to different buckets of collections. That will also allow you to access those
same lessons year after year if you decide that you want to use them
again in the future. Now that we've created that assignment,
you'll see that it shows up in the activities tab under 'Assigned to Class.'
So the pre-made assignments are great, but of course you're also just going to
want to create your own lessons from scratch as well.
So to do that, go up to the green 'Add' button, select 'Assign
Activity,' and this time rather than the community tab,
go over to the 'My Library' tab and click 'Create New Activity.' There you can give
the assignment a name as well as some instructions
and you can also record yourself reading the instructions out loud
so that students can just listen to it. And then you also have access to all
these different ways of uploading different types of media
as a way to either provide an example or to give instruction.
Some of these are pretty self-explanatory, like the ability to
upload a file into Seesaw or to take a video from your webcam.
You can add a link to another website or you can also take a photo from your
webcam as well. And if you open up this drawing
tool, this is actually the interface that will still be available even if you've
uploaded other things like an image. This will
allow you to add things like text boxes and audio and different types of pencils
and pens and different colors and all sorts of things like that.
I am going to show you exactly what this looks like when we get into the student
end. But what I do want to show you here is
how you can set up a template that students could draw on top of. So
let's say for example that you have a bunch of old worksheets that have been
scanned and now they're static documents and
don't seem all that functional in a digital
environment. What you can do is upload them
into Seesaw, like this math worksheet here,
and then when you assign it to students, they will be able to just
draw directly on top of that template. All right so now that I've uploaded this
math worksheet in that my students are going to write directly on top of,
I'm going to hit 'Assign,' and then when we get back into the teacher dashboard,
we'll see that both of those assignments are now showing up.
So now that we've learned how to create assignments and put them into folders
and then assign them to our students, I'm going to show you how to create an
announcement that you can send out to students or students and families.
So we're going to go back to the green 'Add' button and there we're going to
select 'Send Announcement.' You'll see in the drop
down that you can select to make this announcement to just
students, to family members, or to students and family members.
And you can also add attachments to this announcement as well. All right now that
we've seen the basics of the teacher end, let's jump in and take a quick look at
what a student account would look like. You'll remember in the beginning that we
already had our students sign in to our account,
so now when that student is logged into Seesaw, after we've created those
assignments, they're going to see that they have some
new activities to complete. When they click on an assignment, they'll
see those same instructions and be able to listen to the audio
version. Then when they're ready to respond, they'll click 'Add Response.'
And here, as I mentioned, they'll be given the same options for how they could
respond to that prompt as you were given when you were creating
media as well. If a student ever needs to go back and see what the instructions
are, they can just click on the link on the
top and that will pull up those instructions again.
As part of those instructions, the teacher was asking students to either
take a photo or a video. So to add a photo, all
students will do is click on the photo icon, that will pull up
their webcam, and then they can take a picture of whatever they need to
for this assignment. Then students will still be able to annotate on top of
their images. So they can add things like text boxes
that explain what it is that they're showing,
they can also click on the microphone, and that will allow them to record their
voice, and then add an audio file. And they can
also click on the shapes tool to add different shapes, like arrows pointing to
specific places on their work for example.
And the shapes, like everything else, are fully customizable so students can drag
them around and change the color and do things like
that. At the bottom if students click on the quotation marks,
they can also add text captions or voice captions to their work as well.
And then all these different drawing tools at the bottom allow students to
choose a digital stylus and then write or draw directly on top
of the image as well. Once students are ready to submit their
work, they'll click on that green check on the top right hand side of the screen,
and then it will be sent back to you for approval.
So you can see here that the student is still waiting for that approval
and then the color changed to orange here to indicate that their teacher
actually returned that work to them and is asking them to redo it. And then here
you can see that the student has been notified
that their work has now been approved. Now let's look quickly at that math
worksheet assignment. So if a student clicks on it, they'll be
taken to that math worksheet where they can draw directly on top of
it to add their answers to the problems. Let's look quickly just at a couple of
other ways that students could also add work.
So here if they clicked on 'Video,' that would allow them to take a video through
their webcam and they could be explaining something
or showing something about their work. And then after they've created that
video, they'll still have all the annotation tools available to them as
well. And they can also upload files, so they
could choose to bring files in from their computer or from their
Google Drive folder. And if they click on 'Note,' that will just
allow them to type on digital paper. And then lastly in order to see that
message that you sent out to students, they can go to their inbox and then
select 'Messages.' And under 'Messages' they'll see the
announcement that you had posted. So those are the basics of how to use
Seesaw for elementary school students. It's a really powerful and dynamic
program and I think both you and your students are really going to like it.
Just a reminder that I do also have a link in the video description to the
student tutorial and that will take you over to another
YouTube channel that's just for education technology tutorials for
students. If you have any questions or comments
about using Seesaw at the elementary level,
please put them in the comments below. Thank you so much for watching my video
to the end. If you found the tips that I shared
helpful, please share it with other teachers that you know,
hit the like button, and subscribe to my channel and hit the notification bell
to make sure you don't miss any of my weekly updates. You can also check out
some of the other tutorials I have on my channel by clicking on one of those two
videos above and if you're interested in downloading
any of the resources that i've created and show on my videos,
please visit my website at
www.newedtechclassroom.com. Lastly if you want to check me out on
social media, my Twitter handle, Facebook page, and Pinterest account are
all in the description below. Thanks so much and have a great week!