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!
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!