Instructional Strategies

In a survey conducted by Seesaw among 300 K-12 classroom teachers after at lease four months Seesaw experiencing (2014), the researchers found that 98% of the teachers found themselves were guiding students to use technology products more effectively and also, more than 90% of them report that Seesaw enables their students more concentrate on their learning and contribute more efforts in completing the assignments. You'll find some of the instructional strategies that can be used for your class in the following paragraphs.

1. Writing & Speaking Skills Enhancement

It's not difficult for teachers to understand that Seesaw is a great tool to keep records of the learning process and to some degree, to build an electronic portfolio for each student even they are only first-grade children. However, one important instructional strategy that cannot be ignored is using the tool to enhance students' learning and speaking ability. When uploading video clips or images, students should be required to add captions to each of the creation before they hit the send button. Frequently doing this as well as commenting on others' works, students are actually practicing their language written skills. Especially for younger kids, teachers may ask them to use several adjectives to describe their images. To practice language speaking skills, students can record their own voices for each journal and send them together with the images or videos when to upload.

2. Group Collaboration & Project Share

This instructional strategy is mainly for teachers who have younger children who upload items through the QR code instead of those students who registered with their Google accounts. Younger children first scan the QR code with the public iPad and choose to upload an image or a video. Then when they upload the item, they should click their names to tag themselves thus the item will be uploaded under their name. Teachers can design some activities that are supposed to be completed within groups. Students first collaborate in groups to discuss, prepare and perform the project. Then they can share their group works through uploading the item and tag each group members. Teachers then can lead the students to view and comment on each group's creation. Or, group members can do a group presentation standing in front of the big screen on which their work is showed.

3. Parents' Involvement

The function of inviting parents into the learning and sharing process is great to enhance parents' involvement in children's education and development. Frequent communications between parents and teachers will benefit students' development for the reason that parents will understand what their children are doing in the school and have the chance to communicate more with their kids. One thing to notice is that teachers should realize that Seesaw can be used as an announcement tool for parents. Every time when new items is available online, parents will get the notification through Email, App reminder, and SMS message, which enables teachers to assign the weekly announcement or weekly assignment note to the parents. Thus parents can know the exact information that their kids received from the teacher and help their children when they encounter problems.

4. Public Blog Presentation

The protection of students' privacy is discussed in the introduction. However at the same time, Seesaw do have a function that allows you to show some of the students' works to your peers or using them to give a conference presentation. Of course, you should get permitted by the students and their parents before you create this blog and posting any items on it. The blog has a link that can be customized by you and then is posted to the place you want. Also, students themselves have the option to post their published items to the public blog with your approvement. Teachers can show what their kids are doing during the school or conference meeting and discuss their experiences in Seesaw with other teachers to get inspired and learn from each other. The public blog provides a much wider audience for students achievements.