Empowered Learner
1a
Students articulate and set personal learning goals, develop strategies leveraging technology to achieve them and reflect on the learning process itself to improve learning outcomes.
1b
Students build networks and customize their learning environments in ways that support the learning process.
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1c
Students use technology to seek feedback that informs and improves their practice and to demonstrate their learning in a variety of ways.
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1d
Students understand the fundamental concepts of technology operations, demonstrate the ability to choose, use and troubleshoot current technologies and are able to transfer their knowledge to explore emerging technologies.
Standard 1
Students leverage technology to take an active role in choosing, achieving, and demonstrating competency in their learning goals, informed by the learning sciences.
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Tool: Seesaw
Description
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Seesaw is an online platform that serves as a portfolio of student learning. Instructors can create activities and assignments as they see fit. Students can engage in learning on the site in a multitude of ways. The tools are easy to learn and access on the site. All of students' work can be seen by instructors and with other peers thus allowing for feedback. Additionally, Seesaw aims to bridge the connection between students' work and their families.
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Opportunities
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As the standard states, it's important that students are empowered to have accountability and be able to choose what they would like to share and how they would like to share it. Seesaw has many functions, so students can choose to submit their responses to activities in different ways. Examples include: taking and uploading photos, writing text on the keyboard or with the mousepad, recording audios or videos, and more.
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Because there are many functions, students can gain more practice with technology thus improving their abilities to troubleshoot and learn from making mistakes using technology.
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Many of the functions require students to engage with aspects that already exist on their computers (eg. keyboard, mousepad, camera, speakers, files, etc). Through engaging with activities on Seesaw, they further their knowledge of technology.
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Instructors can view their students' work and easily give feedback. Likewise, students can view and comment on each others' activities. This creates an engaging and communicative space online for students.
Limitations
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Although the platform does take on the form of a portfolio, students primarily see their incomplete or upcoming assignments. This makes it difficult for the site to serve as a portfolio that students can easily see and access.
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Unless prompted by instructors, students would not necessarily have opportunities to articulate or set personal learning goals. In the past, I have seen students go through the daily activities without any regard to their growth as learners.
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Generally, instructors create the activities/assignments, so students don't have too much power over what they would like to include in their portfolios.
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Not all students may have access to computers and reliable WiFi! :(
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This button above will take you to the Seesaw site where you can create your own account (as an instructor or student).
The button below will take you to an example of an activity that I have created. You will access it as a student and be able to try out the functions.
Have fun exploring!!
Examples:
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This is what the Seesaw homepage looks like (from the instructors' perspectives). On the right, there are buttons that lead to the activities, inbox, and progress. Instructors can add students and families to the virtual classroom at the bottom.
This is an example of an activity that a middle school math teacher might assign to their students. There are instructions that encourage students to submit their response using the various tools. As you can see, students can take a photo of something around their home and connect it to their learning.
This is a photo of what students see once they begin the activity. On the left are buttons to add text, photo, recordings, files, and more. On the bottom, students can use their mousepad or touchscreen to draw on the page with a pen, pencil, or highlighter.
Reflection
After working with Seesaw as a volunteer classroom aide in the past and while working on this artifact for our course, I am optimistic about using this site as a positive virtual environment to promote student learning. Clearly, Seesaw strives to build the bridges between students, teachers, and families. All students from grades K-12 are able to both engage with the content their instructors aim to teach while also building their technological skills. As I've mentioned above, the site builds in features that already exist on common computers, so students are able to engage in many ways with important functions on their devices.
Personally, I plan to use math portfolios in my future classroom. My hope is to include key features such as: a math autobiography, examples of strong work, examples of work that need revision, weekly journal reflections, math goals, and more. Up until creating this artifact, I never considered using a virtual platform as a space for the math portfolios. However, I believe I will try to use Seesaw because students can easily upload their things, I can respond quickly to their weekly journal reflections, and most importantly -- some assignments can be shared with the whole class, so students can view their classmates' work. However, I may still opt to use this platform as just an option for students because I understand not all students have access to computers or laptops with strong WiFi connection. I look forward to implementing this in my future secondary math classroom!