1C Best Practices

l) the importance of engaging parents, purposefully and meaningfully, in all aspects of teaching and learning.

In my classroom I have recently started up a classroom Seesaw account. I've been looking for a way to interact with my families on a new platform and highlight things we are working on. As of right now, I have nine out of my fourteen families connected to their child's Seesaw. In previous years I've used a Weebly website that I maintained, but the upkeep was a lot on my end.

So what is Seesaw?
It is a student driven online portfolio, that puts the ownership on the students. Teachers can empower students to reflect, share, and collaborate. Students "show what they know" using photos, videos, drawings, PDFs, and links. The best part is students can upload straight from their google drive. Everything needs to be approved by the teacher before it is posted for their parents to see. 

At the beginning of this month we wrapped up our third workshop unit and uploaded one of our stories to our learning journals. The students then recorded their voice over their pictures. All my students were SO excited to hear themselves recorded reading their work out loud. The possibility for having students work on their fluency with the recording options are endless.

Along with the digital portfolio you also have the option to use the activities portion of the app that is easily accessible even by my grade one kiddos. I uploaded a quick digraph activity for one of my words their way groups, with written instructions and audio instructions. Each student completed it and saved it to their portfolio for me to review. It was a quick way for one of my groups to be working independently on the I-pads and know that they are on task, and doing something meaningful. 

Finally, there is an announcement section that gives you the option to their send out a quick private message, or a general announcement to everyone that is connected to the app. It was a super quick way to remind parents about goal setting, and swimming lessons. I also like the option to turn off the messaging and commenting feature if needed. 

I wish I would have started using this earlier in the year, and its exciting to see all the possibilities for this across the board in any grade. I will  be starting it up first thing in the beginning of next year, and continuing to experiment with integrating it more into my classroom practices.

(I've included a wonderful video at the end if you'd like to see how an amazing duo of teachers uses it with grade 1)

Video