5 Awesome Starting Activities on Seesaw

Hello, internet!

I wanted to post an update about using the Seesaw app with our Junior Primary shared iPad lab. Seesaw has been a fantastic tool in our classrooms here at Bridge House School. It's a brilliantly simple app and it often takes very little time for a teacher to understand how it works. The first snag can come, though, when you want to begin using it with your students but aren't sure where to start. This term I've been guiding my Junior Primary colleagues through Seesaw and many now feel ready to start using it on their own with their students (yay!). The important thing to remember is that Seesaw is a tool to record and reflect on learning. Add Seesaw to enhance learning and it will be hard to go wrong.

To help with getting started, here is a list of the top 5 activities that I have done with students ages 6 - 9 (Grades 1 - 3) on Seesaw using our iPads. It's in countdown format, but all have been equally fun and valuable.

5 Awesome Starting Activities on Seesaw

Digital Leaders: The Green Screen

First steps onto the green screen.

This year I opened applications for our first ever group of Digital Leaders. Working within the framework of our Junior Primary club time, I had thought that I might have a small handful of interested students. I was happily surprised to end up with 16 Grade 2s and 3s that are bursting to learn more about technology and share it with their friends and teachers.

Our first outing was to our Learning Commons, where Mr Kirk has painted an entire wall green to facilitate and encourage green screen experimentation. Our Junior Primary iPads have the Do Ink Green Screen app installed. We talked about green screens and why they could be useful. I helped my students find the app and open up the great in-app tutorial video. I especially appreciated that the tutorial was led by a child as it helped my students feel that they could master this tool. I gave them no other instructions except to "figure out how to get this working".

The next 30 minutes were exciting and very noisy indeed. My students embraced the challenge I had given them and did, in fact, manage to get the layers working correctly to produce the green screen effect. They used images on the camera roll as background layers. Here are some of the results of our experiment:

I asked our Digital Leaders if they thought we could use the green screen in our IT lessons and it was a resounding yes. Here are some of the ideas they came up with:

• Making action movies with special effects
• Doing weather reports or news reports
• Telling a story in a different place
• A teleportation story
• Gr 2: Underwater facts but actually be underwater