Seesaw

What is Seesaw

Seesaw is designed to help teachers to instruct and set tasks for their class, whether they are working at home or in the classroom and regardless of the topic. Children use Seesaw Learning Journal's drawing, recording, camera, and typing tools to form their thoughts into a demonstration of their understanding. As they do so they are creating a Seesaw learning journal.

What we love about Seesaw

Seesaw facilitates a variety of ways for kids to learn and demonstrate their understanding which then evolves into a detailed learning journal. At the same time, it provides teachers with effective monitoring tools and ideas around which to build new lessons for their classroom. Parents and guardians are involved in the process as they can see what their child (and only their child) has produced in the classroom or at home by using the Seesaw Family app. Seesaw is flexible, effective, and a powerful tool for schools, teachers and students.

What age is Seesaw appropriate for?

Seesaw's tools and structure do not limit it by age. As long as a child understands how to tap and swipe on a mobile device, they can begin to use the application. As their confidence, literacy, and knowledge grow, Seesaw Learning Journal will let them produce ever more sophisticated demonstrations of their new knowledge.

Is Seesaw easy to use?

Seesaw.com, their official website, contains a comprehensive help guide that provides useful instruction - both text and video-based. Teachers and parents can easily find the answers to any questions they might have there. With so many tools and possibilities, there is a lot to learn in Seesaw, especially for teachers, who will use the administration section and more complex tools for the creation of activities. However, Seesaw's methods are logical and clear, meaning that familiarity will quickly develop.

How will students benefit?

The drawing, typing, photo, recording and video tools let children be creative and experimental as they put their new learning into practice. Schoolwork becomes a more dynamic and responsive process with such easy-to-use tools. 

How will teachers benefit?

Seesaw for teachers is a fantastically useful tool for helping classroom practitioners to plan their lessons and monitor how children have responded. If they are ever stuck for inspiration, the in-app activity library is crammed full of ideas and resources produced by Seesaw's teacher community. Teachers can also make use of other creativity and education apps that they find useful as Seesaw is compatible with many of them.  It is easy and quick for teachers to learn how to access what their children have produced.

This gives them the powerful ability to react quickly to children's responses to a lesson. When teachers set work for their children they can easily get a child's-eye view of the task by posting material to a proxy student. This is a really good idea as in other apps there is such a difference between the teacher and student areas, that it can be difficult to know exactly what children will see. Looking at the proxy child account, teachers can easily see what their class will receive.  

Our teachers are confident that Seesaw can help improve creativity, reflectiveness, collaborative skills. Seesaw is a student-driven digital portfolio that empowers students to create, capture and share what they're learning at school. Seesaw simplifies classroom workflow by collecting and organizing all students' digital and physical work in one place.

Seesaw engages parents by giving them a real-time, personalized glimpse into their child's school day, via Seesaw Learning Journal app notifications, text or emails. When students share their work as text, drawings, images, videos, audio, and more! Teachers can totally use it as a formative assessment tool.

How will parents benefit?

Whether it is a society-wide issue or individual circumstances that see a child missing school, Seesaw is a very effective way of keeping education going for them. Teachers can just as easily set and monitor tasks to aid learning at home as they can at school. Parents can use this to help and support their children when they cannot be in the classroom.

How much does Seesaw cost?

The core features of the Seesaw for Teachers and Students part of Seesaw Learning Journal app are guaranteed by the developer to remain free. This lets teachers set and monitor children's work.

What is included with the free version vs. paid

If teachers and schools want to access the extended tools of Seesaw, they can upgrade their account. Seesaw Plus and Seesaw for School are the two options available. These add many new tools and expand the usefulness of the existing ones. The expansion provides extended assessment tools, more flexible administrative options, greater freedom for children to create larger pieces of work, and many more. There is a generous 60-day free trial available for Seesaw Plus.

What activities does the Seesaw include?

Teachers can easily create and share activities in Seesaw. They can also get inspiration from the platform's library of grade-level specific activities. Activities can be shared with the whole class or with specific students to differentiate instruction.

All student responses are organized on one page, so teachers can easily see how each student is progressing. Teachers can also copy activities between their classes or use them again next school year.

Create a Seesaw blog

• Create a public webpage for your class.
• Give students a global audience for their work.
• Post to the class blog in just one tap. No other apps, websites or embed codes needed! All posts are teacher-moderated.
• Connect to other class blogs directly within Seesaw so students can comment and collaborate with students from all over the world.

What Seesaw can improve on?

There are few faults to be found in the Seesaw app. While the comprehensive guide to using the app is useful, a few more in-app overlays might help explain processes a little more but for the most part, there is little need of them.

Overall rating of Seesaw

As you'll have seen in this Seesaw review, this is a very flexible app. It effortlessly brings together teachers, parents and students to help the educational process while reducing administration and freeing up teachers to concentrate more on their classroom lessons. Even in the free version, it is fully worthy of its 5 stars.

You can download Seesaw on your iOS or Android devices from the app stores. Download the Seesaw app from the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store.