Everyone Posts v Private Sharing

Beware the 'Everyone' option, this is a level sharing that you should rarely need to use, if ever.

It is the Seesaw equivalent of 'reply all' with email, once pushed to all family members, any interaction with the post, eg a like or a comment, then generates notifications for all family members and all students, so one interaction can easily generate 50-60 notifications, now multiply that by the amount of students in the class and you can imagine the overwhelming notification overload in generates in everyone's Seesaw inboxes!

Remember these are learning journals, which focus on the learning of each individual child, or within small groups, but there's no way a post that features all 22 students in a class can really be showing the learning of each individual in that class. More generic whole class posts should be shared using an Announcement.

The other problem with these kinds of posts is that they end up being included in every child's individual learning journal, if the post is not about that child's individual learning then it shouldn't be in their learning journal.

It can feel when you make a post in Seesaw that you have to pick something, but, an option that is easily missed is the option not to choose anyone to share it with at all, that way the post will end up in the class feed, accessible by all students, but not a part of any of their Learning Journals, yet.

This is the best option if the post is:

  • a resource you want students to access, eg a Google Doc template, a link to a web resource etc.
  • one that is generic, but has relevance to the whole class, this way they can Copy & Edit, and personalise it, or set it up as an activity they can all respond to.
When a post is shared with 'Everyone', this can easily mean in excess of 50 people (2 parents per child, not including extended family). Each time any of those people interacts with the post—this could be in the form of a 'like' or a comment—it sends a notification to ALL of the children in the class. These are generally meaningless to most of the children, eg 'Daniel Smith liked your post'. This generates a great deal of 'spammy' notifications; every time a parents interacts with the post​, easily 40 notifications, for each interaction, eg a like or comment, which then means children miss the notifications that really matter.