Our school has used Seesaw for the last several years, but initially we purchased the licenses as a way to create digital portfolios for our students’ work over time and for parents to be able to see what students were doing in the classroom in real time. I really didn’t use Seesaw myself except as a way to monitor and appreciate authentic student work that I could then share as a resource for professional learning or for sharing with families.
Seesaw has a new feature called School Announcements, where administrators can create a message embedded with all kinds of things - videos, images, google slides, voice captions, etc. I was hopeful that I could use this feature to create a virtual “meeting” or presentation similar to what I would do in person. My first attempt was a video message for the students for the first day of school introducing our theme for the year.
I was able to send a recording of myself to all the teachers through Seesaw with instructions play it for the parents.
My next attempt was for Back to School Night and this time I was a bit more creative and after some more experimenting I realized that I could embed a slide presentation and then overlay it with either video or voice caption.
However, I ran into a couple of setbacks. I made the mistake of sending it to just one teacher first to get some feedback and realized that I could not go back in and resend the same post. I thought there had to be some mistake but finally had to contact Seesaw but to no avail. I had to recreate almost all the work I had done in order to send it out to the whole school. This time I sent it to the parents as well as the teachers.
My latest attempt was to mimic a school meeting so I created slides for each component of what I would normally do at an assembly and sent it out to teachers with instructions to follow along and pause the video at certain places for class discussion. I also used another feature which was to embed images and use the drawing tool to emphasize a picture.
The whole school watched and participated in the meeting at the same time. I got immediate feedback from the teachers that it was successful so I felt good about using this tool to accomplish my goal. My next steps will be to give some feedback to Seesaw about being able to resend posts. I would also like to see if there is a way to make it more interactive where students, teachers or parents could comment on my post.