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

Seesaw: The app that changed everything

Maybe that's an overly-dramatic title for this post: the app that changed everything! Seesaw came along and did completely change how I think about using iPads in Junior Primary, though.

Seesaw has been on my radar as a portfolio-type app for years, so their icon was familiar. The first time I opened it I saw a login screen and immediately ruled it out as not useful for my situation. Here is my situation:

• A class-sized set of iPads
• Shared in a mobile lab
• No guarentee you would get the same iPad each time
• Users are 9 years old or younger

I saw the login screen on Seesaw and thought that it would be too complex for my little users. There are already enough logins that they/I have to remember: Windows login, Reading Eggs, Mathletics, Cami Maths, our typing program - I thought adding another login would be a waste of my time.

My colleague, @mrkirkbhs, pointed me back to Seesaw earlier this year as he had heard good things about it being used for younger grades. I have been given more earmarked time for iPad use this year and, in an effort to make that time more meaningful, I went back and had another look at Seesaw. Just past the dreaded login screen is the fantastic trick that makes Seesaw fit my situation:

Seesaw offers a class-level login based on QR code! This makes it ideal for shared iPads with young students!

This is amazing for two reasons:

QR code: No alpha-numeric login for my students to remember or type in on the tricky iPad keyboard. They just tap "I'm a student" then hold the iPad up like they are taking a photo of the code and voila! They are logged in to the main hub of Seesaw, ready to create content.

Class-level login: This is fantastic for my young students. From the main menu they create content then, when they are finished with it, they 'tag' their work by selecting their name from a list (or multiple names if it is group-work). Again, this removes any problems with spelling login names incorrectly and puts the student's work at the heart of Seesaw.

What have my students been able to do with Seesaw?

Seesaw has opened the door for my young students. Whereas before, the iPads were really only being used for drill work and games, Seesaw allows a child to record their learning. This is huge. Imagine Seesaw being a digital journal, where the student can add drawings, text, voicenotes and video - even on top of imported images. This allows the student to annotate and explain, and share their learning with their classmates.

Seesaw has a family app where families of the students can be invited to participate in the shared learning: next term I will be introducing that to my classes. I will also be making more of an effort to show the brilliant features of Seesaw to my Junior Primary colleagues, so that they can also gain the benefit of having a digital journal ready and waiting in their classroom space.

EdTechTeam Cape Town Summit: iPad Masterclass

What a whirlwind of a day! I am just back from a brilliant masterclass lead by Lindsay Wesner, focusing on an excellent model of student-centered learning. My brain feels exhausted from all of the learning that I did today but I wanted to write up a quick post so that I can collect all of the great ideas I had, heard and shared.

Excited at check-in!

I Wonder Why?

The first area of focus was creating an inquiry hook, a really great question to engage students and get them to wonder why. I've heard of similar frameworks with regards to Genius Hour but I appreciated the added structure that Lindsay added. It is very difficult to come up with a good question! As I work in Junior Primary, I came up with: What makes our world so special? I planned to narrow down the scope of the answers using additional questions in order to structure the inquiry for my younger students, as my aim was to help them learn about the world, continents in particular.

Scaffolded Research

Once we had our question, we had to create a method of scaffolding research for our students. Very often if you send them out to Google unsupervised then they fall into a rabbithole of online content. Similarly to how I use Symbaloo for managing young students on the internet, you can build an interactive slideshow using something like Keynote, Google Slides or MS Powerpoint. Your slideshow can be shared with the student and can be turned into a great place for the student to research while still following your method. Here is the quick sample that I mocked up today in Google Slides. I themed our research step as a top secret spy mission, because why not?


This is an excellent way of using the concept similar to a HyperDoc to enable students to do research in a safe, focused framework.

Demonstrating Our Learning

Later in the day we were asked to be both the teacher and the student. As a teacher, we had to create instructions for our students to do a task that demonstrates the learning they have done in the research phase. As students, we had to actually complete the task. I found this stage the most challenging as I don't often have to complete the the work that I assign! It really helped me reflect and re-evaluate on my teaching practice with regards to the tasks that I set and my expectations. Working as the students can let you find loopholes and snags that you don't antipicate in your assignments. I struggled to choose an app to show my learning, but once I overcame that I had a lot of fun attempting my first ever Tellagami:

There was so much packed into today, I have only chosen a few topics to write about. I really appreciated hearing from real experiences and opinions from authentic teachers. Thanks to Lindsay for steering us and Leigh Morris for faciliating like a boss, as well as Alan and Paul from Digicape. My fellow educators were absolutely fantastic and I look forward to connecting with more people at the next two days of the EdTechTeam Summit!

Presentation: Digital Passport

Friday was our Prep staff meeting and I was given a 25 minute slot to present the Digital Passport program. It was my first ever public presentation so I was quite nervous! All things considered, it went well. Our school is rolling out a 1:1 iPad scheme from Grade 4 up in 2016 and we needed to have a behaviour expectation guideline for the students to follow. We picked Digital Passport at the recommendation of Shaun Kirk, our Learning Commons director. It is a browser-based scheme with detailed lesson plans covering 5 modules: communication, privacy, cyber-bullying, searching and creative credit.

My very basic presentation slides are embedded below. Embedding this presentation was also a good learning opportunity for me, I haven't embedded anything into a blog like this before. We are living in the future, I tell you.


As we want our homeroom teachers to take charge of this program and run it with their classes, my presentation was aimed to ease any discomfort. One of the teachers told me afterwards that she appreciated the presentation because it made Digital Passport seem like something that she would be able to do. I'm glad that staff felt they can handle the Digital Passport scheme - it is straightforward and an excellent baseline to encourage discussion of the various topics.

A candid shot of me presenting taken by one of the audience members. Maybe you can't see how scared I was from here.

iPad Projects on Book Creator

In Junior Primary we have access to a shared mobile lab of iPads. One of the apps we use is Book Creator, which is a great tool for putting together a simple presentation. I popped into the Grade 2 classes and was very pleased to catch the tail-end of a series of presentations on sea creatures. Our students presented with great enthusiasm, I was very proud of them! They had created their presentations from scratch, with no parental or teacher takeover - it was all their own. I was also most proud of the audience of their peers, who listened well and clapped at the end of every one.

 The combination of Airplay and our Windows desktops can sometimes cause great frustration at not being able to sync correctly, but the results can be so worth it. 

ESET Security Day 2015

Yesterday, some colleagues and I attended the first every ESET Security Day in Cape Town.

I give them points for almost getting the surname correct.

It was my first ever work conference and a great opportunity to start to develop the tech side of my job with a bang. The most interesting speaker, for me, was Daan Potgieter's explanation of  the 1 to 1 tablet program his school have rolled out. There was all sorts of discussion about the pitfalls concerning such an initiative. It was great to experience that because my school is beginning an iPad rollout next year. It will start from Grade 4 upwards, not directly effecting us down in Junior Primary, but we are going to be expected to 'upskill' our students in order to start with the iPads when they get to Senior Primary. In a nutshell, Hoërskool Waterkloof chose Android tablets because they were more reasonably priced and they could have third-party security solutions (like ESET, who sponsored the event). I was most impressed to hear that their school manages more than double the devices that we do with the same amount of tech support staff! Kudos to those hard-working techs.

One point that he highlighted was the importance of standardisation of the devices. Mr Potgieter gave the explanation of even the size of tablet could hugely impact on your teaching - students with different sized screens would display a reader or textbook differently, so they would all have different page numbers. Assigning reading would therefore have to be carefully done, such as selecting a chapter or topic rather than the common method of page numbers.

Another point which has been niggling me: iOS doesn't allow third-party security/control applications. This doesn't surprise me, from my limited experience with an iPad this suits the impression I had so far. Apple has it's own products which cover things like antivirus, remote management, multi-device management and so on. The problem is that not all of these vital features have rolled out here in South Africa yet. This makes even managing a mobile iPad lab a chore because there is no other option available but to do updates and adjustments manually, on each individual iPad. I will be chatting to our Apple Distinguished Educator at school, he is very passionate about our iPad rollout and is well aware of the blocks that are in place - hopefully these are temporary blocks.

On a side note, the food at the conference was excellent and the venue was great. All of the organisers were friendly and the atmosphere was a positive one. I'm looking forward to my next conference!