Seesaw / EE Reflections and Discussion

I have had a good discussion with Jessie today around Seesaw and EE and have also sought the thoughts of the blogger / teacher behind Mrs Priestly ICT in regard to both platforms.

Our discussion brought out the following points:

Jessie has found it difficult to use Explain Everything over the past year and it seems to be quite tricky for the kids to use independently with lots of steps for them to go through to download tasks, save then upload them etc, takes many steps which ends up being a time consuming job for the teacher.

I haven't used it yet as it has only just been put onto our ipads the week of lockdown.

With the new Explain Everything upgrade it also seems that many of the previously made activities may no longer be supported by the new platform.

We are not writing it off yet but we have decided that we want to shelve it for now.

We have discussed what we would want to purpose of EE (or any other tool) to be within the classroom and we both agree that we want the focus of our classrooms to be Play Based, hand on creativity as opposed to computer generated creativity which means we don't really see the point in spending lots of time teaching students how to duplicate circles etc when they could be making physical hands on sets and taking a photo and adding a voice recording of their explanation of of their learning just as easily.

We want the digital tool to support the kids in sharing their learning and understandings in an easy and collaborative way.

Seesaw seems to be a platform that can do many of the same things as EE (EE has many more bells and whistles but we don't think our age groups would really make that much use of them) Students can easily access their activities, they are all saved in their own folder and it can be shared with whanau at the push of a button.

As Seesaw is a free platform there are also LOTS of wonderful easily accessible and ready made free or low cost resources that we can tap into without spending hours re-creating these.

The down side to Seesaw is that 'what happens on Seesaw stays on Seesaw', so that we cannot share Seesaw posts to Blogger, however we will still be committed to making one class blog post per week and getting the Blogger process and language into the kids for as they move through the school.

Another of our stumbling blocks is that we have never been able to see Explain Everything in action in a classroom.  Although we have been excited and motivated after the PD session that was now long ago and even trying to navigate it ourselves at home during the past wee while at home, we have both found it very frustrating and non-user friendly.

Moving forward what we would like to do is:

1. Shelve EE for the time being.  Find out from Donna if anyone in the north is using this well within their schools that we could visit to see how it actually works within the classroom (also an interesting point that most local schools are in fact using Seesaw and are very happy with this).  

2. From when we go back to school and probably for the rest of this year (unless we can find someone to visit) we will implement Seesaw into our classrooms and set this up with our parents.  We will give this a good go and see if it meets our needs and find out what our parent community think of it.

At the end of the day we are trying to really reflect on the PURPOSE of why we want to introduce such a platform and we also want this to be easy and user friendly for both the students and ourselves to navigate and use.  At the moment we think that SEESAW can better meet these needs.  If we put EE into many tasks across that day our students may become proficient in using it independently but we don't actually want to do this, we are happy with many aspects of our programme and don't want to throw them out to put EE in.just so that kids will be able to use the platform.