Seesaw

What is Seesaw?

Positioning: A learning experience platform focused on K-12 education, offering a digital portfolio, formative assessment, and robust family communication tools.

Functional Panorama: Covers Student Portfolios (allowing students to capture and showcase learning through various media), Activities (enabling teachers to assign and differentiate lessons), Inbox (facilitating secure communication between teachers and families), Skills (for tracking student progress against learning objectives), and a Community Lesson Library (providing access to pre-made educational content). It also includes features for progress monitoring and preparation for parent-teacher conferences.

Seesaw’s Use Cases

• For K-12 Teachers: To assign differentiated lessons, create interactive activities, provide multi-modal feedback, and track individual student progress.
• For Students (K-12): To creatively demonstrate their learning through photos, videos, drawings, text, and voice recordings, building a comprehensive digital portfolio.
• For Families: To receive real-time updates on their child’s learning journey, view student work, and communicate directly with teachers.
• For School Leaders: To gain insights into student performance, manage school-wide announcements, and facilitate consistent communication across classrooms.
• For Curriculum Specialists: To access and contribute to a vast library of educational activities, aligning content with learning standards.

Seesaw’s Key Features

Core Features: Supports multi-modal student content creation (photos, videos, drawings, text, links, voice recordings) for digital portfolios. Offers an extensive Activities library for assigning lessons. Includes a secure Inbox for private and class-wide communication with families. Provides Skills tracking to monitor mastery of learning standards.

Recent Updates:

• Google Classroom Roster Sync improvements (May 2024). This streamlines class setup and student management for schools integrating both platforms.
• Enhanced Activity Creation with AI-powered suggestions (March 2024). This assists teachers in building engaging assignments more efficiently.
• Expanded Lesson Library resources (April 2024). Continually updated, high-quality content across various subjects and grade levels.
• Improvements to the Parent Sign-In process (February 2024). Enhances accessibility and ease of use for family engagement.

User-Feedback Features:

• Users frequently request improved integration with a broader range of learning management systems for a more unified educational technology ecosystem.
• Teachers often highlight the benefit of the voice recording feature for early learners, allowing them to explain their work or thinking without requiring typing skills.

How to Use Seesaw?

Official Workflow:

1. Teachers sign up for an account, create a class, and invite students using QR codes, email, or Google Classroom sync.
2. Teachers then create or select an “Activity” from the library and assign it to individual students or the entire class.
3. Students complete the assigned activity using Seesaw’s diverse creative tools (drawing, recording, typing, photo/video upload) and submit it to their digital portfolio.
4. Teachers review student work, provide feedback using text, voice, or drawing tools, and approve it for sharing with families.

Pro Tips:

1. Encourage students to use the voice recording feature on their creations to articulate their thought process and reflections.
2. Utilize the “Skills” feature to tag student work to specific learning standards, enabling easy progress monitoring and detailed reporting.
3. Proactively guide families through the Seesaw Family app’s functionalities to maximize home-school communication and engagement.
4. Explore the “Community Library” by typing specific keywords related to subjects, grade levels, or skills to find ready-to-assign activities and inspiration.

Seesaw’s Pricing & Access

Official Policy:

• Seesaw Free: Provides basic digital portfolio functionality, activity creation, and family communication for individual teachers with limited storage and features.
• Seesaw for Schools: A comprehensive subscription service for schools and districts, offering advanced features such as school-wide activity libraries, in-depth progress tracking, administrative dashboards, enhanced communication tools, and premium support. Pricing is customized based on the size of the school or district.

Web Dynamics:

• Seesaw frequently offers webinars and personalized demonstrations for schools considering the “Seesaw for Schools” tier, occasionally including introductory discounts for new school-wide adoptions.
• Compared to broader Learning Management Systems, Seesaw’s free tier offers a strong entry point focused on portfolios and communication, while its paid tier provides a specialized, deep-dive solution for K-5 formative assessment and strong family engagement, distinct from full course management platforms.

Tier Differences:

• The Free tier allows fundamental activity creation and sharing with limited access to analytics and integrations.
• The “Seesaw for Schools” tier unlocks school-wide analytics and reporting, shared activity libraries across the institution, private teacher notes on student work, advanced administrative controls, and comprehensive rostering integrations (Google Classroom Sync for the entire school or district).

Seesaw’s Comprehensive Advantages

Competitor Contrasts:

• Seesaw’s rich multi-modal creative tools (drawing, voice recording, video) make it exceptionally accessible and engaging for younger, elementary-aged students, setting it apart from more text-centric platforms like Google Classroom or Canvas.
• Its integrated and intuitive family communication features are notably more robust than those found in many general-purpose Learning Management Systems, fostering significantly higher parent engagement.

Market Recognition:

• Seesaw is widely recognized as a premier digital portfolio and learning platform, particularly for elementary education, with millions of students and teachers utilizing it globally across more than 150 countries.
• Independent educational technology reviews consistently commend its user-friendliness for both educators and young learners, as well as its effectiveness in promoting student agency and facilitating formative assessment.
• User satisfaction for its family communication module is frequently rated highly, with families expressing appreciation for the direct and transparent window into their child’s learning process.