The app I want to focus on this week is Seesaw. It has so much potential for helping students
create, collaborate and share using the iPad.
I plan to start small, so I have time to learn more about it
and so students are successful early on.
The Seesaw support area has clear, manageable ideas for
introductory lessons.
Three Tips for Introducing Seesaw to Students
They even have a presentation you can use to introduce this
app to students.
This week, I plan to introduce this to my Level 1 ELL
students as part of our unit on learning about emotions. TPAK will inform this lesson planning as it
evolves because I intend to allow open-ended interactions. This unit on
emotions will transition into including our feelings and “showing/not telling”
them in our personal narrative writing.
I’m sure we’ll find many alternative ways to use this app in
our classroom. Some of the benefits of using this app include that it:
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Allows another way to represent subject matter
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Provides multiple opportunities for language
rehearsal
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Provides opportunities for students to interact
with their peers
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Can be used as a formative assessment
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Allows students, teachers and parents to monitor
student progress
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Provides a platform for communicating with
parents via emails and/or parent-teacher conferences.
Some future ideas for using this include:
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Having it as a station when students complete
work
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Having 2nd graders share their animal
research report (I need to get better at finding/adding photos so students can
do this efficiently.)
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Sharing with parents or with the ELL students’ classmates
in their general education classrooms.
If any of you have used this in your classroom, I 'd be very interested to know how it went.
Hi Terri,
ReplyDeleteThanks for letting Carin and I go with you for your project. Carin told me about it and we are looking forward to what we could do. Glad that you've posted here about many ways of using Seesaw, which Carin and I have already downloaded but needs time to be familiar with it. You are amazing to create the projects for ELL students. They are lucky!
I come from China and my son came to U.S. when he was 4 years old. He's definitely an ELL then. Well, my daughter will be 5 in March. She's particular. We speak Chinese at home so the children actually could do both, though more fluent in English now. It is a tragedy to see that they gradually lose their mother tongue. However, it would be an enlightening experience to work with your as i am so interested in ELL.
Well thought out uses for this new app, Terri! Thank you for researching it a bit and sharing your findings along with applications for the classroom. Our collaboration as teachers really helps all of us continue to grow.
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