How I Use It?
I use this in place of a traditional students work book. It is a place to collate all their work from class as a digital portfolio. Their research, evidence of learning, thinking, reflections, assessments, plans, everything goes up on here. I organise the different posts according to units using the labels feature.
I encourage students to include photos and videos from their real world work of what they have been doing and creating.
In the Cabin I use it as a journaling tool about how life is going. Sometimes I give a focus for a reflection such as managing self, applying learning to the holidays, my happiness, my health and mental attitude, the cabin group development etc. This is only available to be seen by the student, the Cabin Coach and the students parents. It is one way that a student can ask for help if needed on tricky situations such as bullying, depression, peer pressure, etc without directly talking to an adult. It also gives them an outlet for expressing themselves and telling someone about how their life is going.
Why I use it?
It is a great way to collate digital and real world work in one place. It allows for easy sharing of work and recognition, meaning others students can see each others work and like and comment on it, as well as tagging other students to work which is important for group tasks.
It is private and the teacher has easy and full control over the permissions of the class. It is easy to set up access for parents and caregivers at home to be a part of the learning process and engage with their childrens' learning through comments and even through making their own posts.
See the parent comment at the bottom
It is compatible with heaps of different apps and formats. There has always been a way to get work onto SeeSaw no matter what they did the work on, so far.
What Would I Change?
I would have an option to make the individual feeds public as well as the class one so that their work can be shared with the world. I would have rubric assessments built in that I can edit and control and attach to each piece of work and give feedback to students (they have just implemented a variation on this feature that I am keen to try out). This feature would be accessible by all the students in the class for self and peer assessment. Having a local back available for when the internet goes down would be great, at the moment we rely on the internet connection and on the website working to access all their work.