Five Ways to Get More out of Seesaw

published by Mike Neumire on 10/30/2023

Seesaw has something for everyone!

Seesaw is a dynamic learning journal space for students to document their classroom learning journey. It also serves as a mode of transparency and communication to parents and families. Seesaw continues to develop features that make this process as meaningful and effective for learners as possible. Here are five features that you can take advantage of to boost your Seesaw resume. 

1. Infinite Cloner

Any object in your Seesaw activities can now be designated as infinite cloners. This means that a student can click and drag away an unlimited number of copies of that object. This is awesome for early math skills and counting money / correct change. 

2.  Assessment

Seesaw activities have always been about free canvas space to draw, type, add objects to, and any other creative endeavor a student might benefit from. What activities lacked was any kind of immediate feedback in the form of conditional formatting. With assessments, teachers now have that superpower as well! In any activity, teachers can set up assessments, which are essentially just multiple choice questions with a correct answer. However, those multiple choice questions have some Seesaw flare- any object can be a multiple choice option, and teachers can set up answer zones for students to drag those objects to. For example, a teacher might set up an assessment where students have to drag all the mammals into a box (answer zone). 

3.  Frames

Frames are quick and easy shortcuts that you can set up in your Seesaw activities to get students to the tools they’re supposed to use. Teachers can drag frames out onto their activities and designate them to open any editor tool for students so that they don’t have to go searching. All the student has to do is click on the frame and that tool will automatically launch. This is an incredibly helpful shortcut that makes it that much easier for students to follow a set of activity directions, and even build in student choice. 

4. Blog

Every Seesaw class comes with the option to start a class blog. This blog is a space for the teacher to curate student work for an audience beyond your classroom. That audience might be other classrooms around the district, members of the community, or experts in the field that might be interested to see student work. Blogs can be shared directly with other Seesaw classrooms or can be shared by password-protected links. The teacher makes the final decision on what gets included in the blog and how it is shared. Giving students an audience beyond the classroom gives their work more authenticity. 

5. Assistant

Seesaw has jumped on the artificial intelligence train with Assistant, an AI tool that will help teachers build assessments by creating questions based on a teacher-searched topic. While building an activity, teachers can simply open the Assistant tool and search a topic and choose a question format. The Assistant tool will then generate a list of questions and answer choices that teachers can then add directly to their activity or edit to better fit their needs. This is a useful step forward because it takes some of the generative load off of the teacher’s plate, and lets them focus more on analysis and revision.