Are you considering SeeSaw for documentation in your classroom? I there are many great options about it as well as a few items to think about! I recently decided to use the program SeeSaw in my classroom to help with documentation of the learning.
I LOVED parent communication with it as you can send out notes and reminders through it. It is easy and efficient to use. My student’s parents absolutely loved looking up their student’s photos, work, and assessments which were shared with them. A few parents checked it regularly and raved about it. Other than that, to be honest, I didn’t get any other feedback from the families in my classroom. I loved working with this app!
Assessment
There is a lot of AMAZING collaboration which can happen with this program! So many people have already created many assessment tools to share with others. These can easily be found in collaborative grade Facebook groups or with friends who you know who have created them. It helps teachers keep assessment simple and not having to worry about reinventing great assessments which have already been created.
LIMITED OR SLOW INTERNET?
Consider using a computer to search for assessment or add an assessment to SeeSaw. At first, I was using my iPad but I eventually found that this was the most effective way to access all my stored information as my iPad ended up slowing down too much. With having two educators in the classroom I didn’t always know what had been uploaded and the computer provided the fastest “check” for me to see so I wasn’t making duplicates!
IPAD PROBLEMS
Our school had purchased a large allotment of iPads for teacher and student use which we have been very fortunate to be able to use. The unfortunate part of this is that in order to purchase many iPads, the purchasers sacrificed on storage space and our iPads came with the smallest amount of storage space available.
Once our Board installed apps were added to them we had next to no storage space left! I found that SeeSaw is a memory hog as it is always trying to access what has been downloaded. As a result, the app crashed all the time. Computers were my lifesaver when using it!
FINAL THOUGHTS
Ultimately, this upcoming year I will not be using SeeSaw because an administrative decision which is unfortunately totally out of my control. 🙁 We are a pilot school using Google for documentation and I’ve found it much more cumbersome and less user-friendly than SeeSaw ever was. To be honest, I miss SeeSaw greatly. If I could, and I had access to better storage on an iPad for convenience, I would LOVE to continue to use it! I highly suggest you try it out! What have your experiences been with SeeSaw? Please comment below to let me know!
