2nd Graders Demonstrate Their Understanding Of Shapes Using Multiple Steps In Seesaw!

Our 2nd Graders have been studying 2 dimensional shapes. Second grade teacher, Mrs. Quaal, asked for my help to create an activity that would allow students to take a photo of shapes in their classroom, draw the shape on top of the image, and record themselves identifying each shape and its defining elements. Essentially they created a series of screencasts, one for each shape.  We used one of Seesaw's newer features, Add Page in order to create this series. 

To accomplish it, students followed the steps from an activity that I created so we could easily remember each step. 

Though it was helpful to see the documentation from the steps, we streamlined it on Mrs. Quaal's whiteboard to help students remember where they were in the steps.

Because Mrs. Quaal's students were accustom to using Seesaw, they managed this multistep activity quite well.  

Check out this example of a single screencast from a series that the student created. 

I learned a great deal from this lesson. I loved watching how engaged and independent the students were in demonstrating their learning. I also realized a few minutes into the lesson that I needed to be clearer about how students should delete an image so they wouldn't delete all of the pages of their project.  Once I realized that this was an issue, I quickly circled back around and added this step for students: 

Caution - If you don't like your image, do no click the trash can in the upper left or it will delete all pages of your project! Use the  attached to the image to delete the image with the trash can. 

Now that we have worked out the kinks, this activity is a great template for students to screencast their future learning with Seesaw.

Seesaw - The OHE Digital App Of The Year!

It's November! Already two and a half months of the year have flown by us!  At OHE, we have many new initiatives that our teachers are trying to wrap around and embed into their classrooms. As the school's Digital Learning Specialist, my main task is to support those new initiatives for teachers and students.

Given the sheer expanse of the overall objectives of digital learning in today's classrooms, I would never say that any one app should become the single focus for educators. After all, any app is only as good as its use with our students, and variety is the spice of life! However, our experiences with Seesaw this year has proven it to be very close to perfection as we continue to push toward the larger aims of digital learning. It has been fun watching our OHE teachers embed this tool with ease into their classrooms!

This year, Lakeville Area Schools adopted Seesaw as our LMS for K-4. We moved from the free version to the paid version, so now it is supported by our district's student information system. I have been so impressed with how many of our teachers embraced Seesaw right from the start.  This is a tribute to the user friendly interface from Seesaw, and our fabulous teachers!  Greatest of all, Seesaw supports student voice, choice, collaboration, communication and creativity. Love it!

I began the year with a two hour staff inservice. For those of you who know how an elementary school year startup feels, you know that teachers hit overload in the first hour or two of back to school meetings. So much info! With this in mind, I tried to make it as simple and easy for them as possible. I was lucky to have a Seesaw webinar arranged by our district's Digital Coordinator, Brianna Buck, and a customizable Google slide presentation that she had curated/edited from Seesaw. I was grateful for this jump start. It made the early days of Seesaw go much more smoothly.

Once the year started, I began to make the rounds to teachers, checking in, co-teaching Seesaw lessons with them and answering their questions. Then at the beginning of November, I was given another opportunity to inservice staff.  By then, our teachers had begun using Seesaw and were more comfortable with the app's ins and outs. During this inservice, we were able to begin fine tuning how we used Seesaw. Below is a Smore newsletter I used for this inservice.

Most recently, I began sending our staff a Smore email each week with some of the OHE highlights. This has proven to be very popular. I believe our teachers find inspiration and encouragement from seeing what others in our school are trying!

Book Fair Fun 2019!! Celebrating New Books And Generating Excitement About Reading!

Our fall Scholastic Book Fair & Grand Event had a fabulous selection of books this year, and our grandparent event saw our largest attendance yet! The Grand Event was held before school starts with a very early start time, but our dedicated grandparents seemed unphased! I am so grateful for all of our parent volunteers, and specifically our co chairs, Jeannie Storlie and Katie Blanchett. They spent many hours before and after the fair making sure everything went smoothly!

I created a book preview video for our OHE morning announcements during the fair.

I also created a celebration video for our Grand Event!

Finally, I shared A Big Book Fair Thank You with our OHE community to express my gratitude for the new books we purchased for our Oak Hills Library!  All in all it was a huge success!