 Hello, everyone, welcome to this webinar, Family Communication, specifically for Pre-K through second grade. We are talking about all the awesome things you can do with CESA to support family communication inside your classroom. So thank you so much for taking time out of your very busy lives to join us here today to learn a little bit more about CESA. I'm Angela, and if you've joined our, any other webinar you may have heard of me before, but I taught kindergarten for 15 years. I had five iPads in my classroom, and I now lead the community team here at CESA. So you can connect with me on Twitter if you like at Mrs. Gagki. I'm really excited to be here today talking all about great things you can do with CESA to support family communication. The plan for today is we are going to actually talk about how you connect families when you are starting with CESA. So we'll kind of just go through a couple logistics quickly if you haven't yet connected your families. We're also gonna talk about some time saving ideas for communication. We all love that, right? And we're gonna have a little, some examples where we talk about where you might share something to the journal versus the inbox, which would be messages and announcements. And then I'm hoping to have lots of time at the end for questions. So I told you a little bit about me, so I'd like to get to know you just a little bit. So I'm going to launch a poll and you can actually respond just by tapping on the screen right now. What's your role? So maybe you teach pre-K or kindergarten. For those of you in Australia joining us, I know there's a few of you that would be your potentially prep grade level. First grade, second grade, you would compare that to year two and three. But go ahead and choose to the best of your ability what maybe fits with you and what you most closely align with and then we'll kind of share those results so everyone can kind of get a peek at who is here live today. I have another question I want to ask you that just helps me get to know you a little bit more. What's your experience level with CESA? So I'm always curious, maybe you're brand new and this is something you are just trying for the very, very first time in your classroom. Maybe this is something you did a little bit last year or you're already using CESA all the time but thought I actually want to really focus on the communication aspect this year. That might be you as well. So go ahead and just tap the screen. Again, looks like we've got a great mix here today. So I'll share those results with you so you can kind of see who else is here with you live. And of course we welcome everyone that is joining us today via the recording as well because we always offer those. And one last question I'm always curious, knowing the context of what we're talking about here today, have you connected families to CESA yet? So maybe you are here thinking, oh, this is going to be what kind of pushes me to get them connected because I want to understand it or you've already connected your families and are here to learn more as well. So awesome. Looks like we've got a good mix there too. So yay. All right. So thanks for participating in those polls. We're going to get going into our content but I also want to let you know too, if because you registered for this webinar you will get the recording sent to you via email automatically. If you're watching the recording, you just know that if you register for our webinars you do get the slides sent to you as well. So all right. So let's go ahead and just jump right in. So what makes CESA different from other apps that you could potentially use for family communication? Really my three kind of big things are really the student engagement factor. Whoa, you're getting this in my whole desktop here. The student engagement that CESA provides for you and really ease of student use. So you can see here to the left just a little image that says your child just posted in CESA, which I think is a big difference from a lot of other tools that are out that are more teacher tools. You'll also notice tons of time saving communication for you the teacher and also these great visual updates, translation features and also rich attachments for families. And you'll get to know a little bit more about that as we get going in the webinar because we'll talk about adding notes or audio or video and things like that. So let's get going. So what I'm actually going to do here is I'm just gonna go through a couple slides to talk about how you connect families to CESA and then I'm gonna just do a live demo quick. So for about half of us here today that don't more than half, 58% of us that are here today live that haven't connected families, I wanna make sure you know how to actually do that. And if you have already connected families, this will just be kind of a quick review and I'll probably sprinkle in a couple little tidbits as well. So when you are in your CESA class on the bottom right, you'll notice this plus families button. So you can tap there. And once you do that, the very first time you're gonna be asked to turn on family access. So as you know, nothing is shared outside of, you really control who sees the content in CESA. So there's no big surprises here. So once you turn on that family access, remember that family members only see posts that their child is tagged in or posts that the teacher adds to everyone from the journal view. So keep that in mind as well. Even when you turn on this access, they're not magically just going to be connected with you turning on that access. There's a follow-up step here that you need to do. And what it is is you can print paper invites to send home or you can send an email to families and we'll kind of go through both of those examples here in just a moment. So this is just my reminder to get into the live demo of what this looks like. Because I think sometimes when you're seeing slides and you're thinking about how does this actually look, it might look a little bit different. So here I am, I'm in a kindergarten class. Now I apologize a little bit. You might be thinking, Angela, you've got like five tabs open and you've got this other screen going on. That's because over here, I'm actually signed into CESA on the family app. So that's actually on an iPad. So I wanna have that available to show you later. But in this screen right here, I'm signed into CESA on my computer as a teacher. So I wanna be able to show you both of those views as kind of to show you a couple of things. So as a teacher again, I'm gonna go to the bottom right. I'm gonna tap this plus families button. So when I tap that, now this class I've already invited families to. So the first time you do that, that's also going to let you know to enable family access, which we talked about. Now I prefer for the pre-K through second grade level to send home these paper invites. For me, that was just the easiest way to do it. You can also send this sample email home. So I'm gonna click on this button just to show you what that looks like. Basically you need to copy this entire message and you can just hit this copy email and you can paste that into whatever your email program is. Some people think, oh my gosh, I've got to put all my family's email addresses into CESA, not at all. So this is already modified for you to, it has your name in here, it has your specific link to your CESA class. You can also choose the language here as well. So that's an option right there, which is to do the email. Again, print, paper, invites. And again, these can be printed in all these languages here. But when I tap this print paper invite button, CESA does all the work for you. So we're creating the invites for you. You don't have to do, it's great. It's just a little magic little elves are working behind the scenes here. So the thing I wanna point out is each invite has the student's name at the top. So make sure when you get ready to send these home, you're actually sending home avis with avi and Karina gets Karina's and whatnot. So these are all of them for your entire class. Each of these QR codes is different. So it's unique to that specific child. So make sure it gets home with the correct child. And then these are all the instructions for families. Basically, it's just gonna say if they wanna get CESA on a smartphone, get the family app. If you wanna connect via a web browser, this is the link that they go to. So one of the things I wanna show you the difference when you send this home. And for those of you that have already connected families, you may have experienced that. So if your families, once they get this, if they connect to CESA by just getting the family app and scanning this QR code, there is not an approval process that you have to go through. Because basically you have hand delivered this note to them and it's only accessible to them because they have the code for their child. If your families do this option from the computer and they go to the web browser, I'm just gonna click on this link so you can see actually what it looks like. They will have to select their child's name from the list. So basically, once they select their child, it's going to come to you for approval. So you confirm, oh yeah, that is the family of that child so that they're making that connection to that specific child, okay? So that's as easy, easy peasy, right? To get your families connected. One other thing I wanna show you, so what I typically do is I actually give these to families before school starts and they're connected to CISA pre-day one at school. Now you might be thinking, well, if school's already started and I haven't a family's connected yet, that's totally fine. You can, I feel like another great time is if you do a curriculum night or a parent info night or for sure kind of that first conference that you have with families if they're not connected yet, that's even another good face-to-face time. I wanna take a moment here too while I'm in the class and I wanna go to this wrench in the upper right because I'm gonna show you a little tip. So you might be saying, this is awesome, I've already connected my families but you might have some families that aren't yet connected yet even though you've invited them and I wanna show you where to look for that. So I tap the wrench and I'm in the families section right here in my class settings. Now what I can do is I can go in here to manage families. So if I go there, what I love about this, it's going to tell me the families that I already have connected with the students and then these are all my families that are not yet connected yet. So I know I wanna make sure I get connected family members for these students. So that means I might print off the invite again, I might try a different approach and say, oh, I'm gonna send the email link this time or I might just, when I see them face-to-face make sure I can walk them through the steps of getting connected. So that's a handy tool for you. You'll notice too when you get the list of the paper invites, it will also say who's already connected on there as well. So you can kind of have that as a resource too. Okay, so that's logistically how you connect families to Seesaw. So I'm gonna go through a couple more slides because I wanna show you a couple of things. So just as a reminder, families use the free Seesaw family app or they go to app.seesaw.me. It is a different app that you use in your classroom. We talked about this. So this is just more for reference when you get the slides, that it can be translated into all those different languages. Here's where they're gonna get the app from. This is a, when you get the slides, you can look through this family app tour, little tutorial video, which is kind of handy for you to really kind of get a deep dive into the family app. But I'm gonna show you inside in just a second here as well. And then we already talked about this as a reminder to make sure you send it home with the correct student. Again, I'm kind of showing these slides really quickly, not intending to go through each of these because we just demoed it, but it's a good reference for you when you get the slides to look at. The other thing that I want to remind you about is that up to 10 family members can connect to each student. So keep that in mind as well. Before we go into some time saving communication ideas, I'm gonna peek inside our class really quick as a family member. So this is on the left here, I'm in the family app and I'm actually showing this on my iPad here. And when the families get into the family app, they will simply, when they open the family app, it will say, I'm a family member, create my account. So the first thing they'll actually do is scan that QR code for their student that was provided by you, the teacher on that printed letter. Then they'll create their account, you don't create any family accounts, they do that themselves. And then when they get inside the family app, they'll have this home tab, which actually shows all of the work for all of their students, kind of just in one spot. Kind of the latest post from their students. You'll notice in the upper left, this parent has two children connected. Now, of course, these are, just for professional development purposes, these are not actual parents. But in the center is the journals tab. So if you have family members that you see saw last year, they don't have to create a new account. Do you see this big blue bar at the bottom that says add child journal? They just tap there to add the journal for this year if you're using free CSA. If you're using CSA for schools, actually because of the student ID numbers connecting their child's work from year to year, the journals will just appear for them. They don't have to even get invited. And then we have this inbox tab as well, which is where messages and announcements come from the teacher and they can privately message you to the teacher. So I'm gonna talk and show you a little bit of that, but I realized we've already had so much time that's gone by. I need to get into some tips here. So time saving communication ideas. I love CSA because I have to tell me, I have to tell you that my three favorite time saving tips, and I could have a list of about 10 that I knew we didn't have time, is number one, using quick notes for reminders for families. Number two, really quick audio newsletters that will save you guaranteed an hour a week, at least in my experience. And then three, you can use links for different sign up options as well. So we're gonna kind of demo a couple of those today. So let me show you. So if I go back into our CSA class, what I wanna do is again, I want to kind of just post a quick note to families. So I'm gonna go to the green add button here as a teacher and I'm gonna go to send announcement. So when I go to send announcement, I am going to choose who I'm gonna send this to. And I can do it all students, all families or families and students. This is for families. And I'm just gonna start typing my announcement here. Now in order to save time, I actually typed my announcement. This is a for real legit announcement that I sent to my kindergarten families when I was in the classroom. Basically kind of just a couple things that were coming up. So on Monday, have your child bring something, just kind of a quick note, nothing fancy. Maybe it's, maybe you're in Minnesota like me and it's a Sunday night and it's, we've got our first 10 inches of snow that reminder went out on Sunday night to bring snow pants. So what I would do is I would tap send now and then you're gonna notice here in the parent app. Did you see just what happened here? I just went back to the parents family app. So I have this red notification. So in my inbox, I have a red notification that showed up in the family app. So then we know it's from Mrs. Gagki. I'm just gonna tap on this. And when I tap on that, there is my announcement from Mrs. Gagki. Now at the bottom here, I can send a message back to the teacher because they have sent an announcement. So basically, if you the teacher send one announcement ever in the entire year, that turns on the ability for families to message you back privately for the rest of the school year. And I can show you how to turn that off if you are thinking, I don't want that to happen, but it's another great tool to kind of stay engaged. So I could type something back, thanks. She will not be at school, not be at school on Tuesday. Okay, so I'm just gonna send that back to the teacher. And then in the teacher view, I'm back here, I'm going to see, I just refreshed, but I will see that notification waiting for me. So that notification is right here in my inbox. So I can see that I have one new message if I tap here from Roberto, I can click there and then there's my message, okay. So I also have in this same inbox and notifications tab. So that's just kind of keeping a stream of all the stuff happening in your class, but that's kind of where you'll notice that as well. So that was quickly how you would use the note. And one of my favorites, I'm gonna go back to send announcement right now because I talked about audio newsletters. Oh my goodness, I used audio visual newsletters and I have to tell you it was amazing. So I would spend for the week of September 10th, okay. I would spend an hour each week typing of an amazing, wonderful newsletter and have photos and all of this stuff like pre-SESA. But once SESA came along, it was just amazing because what I did and I'm gonna show you here is I would go into ad attachment. And again, going into kind of these rich attachments that are available as options for you, the teacher, you have lots of options here. Now, I would typically do this on my iPad because it was, I would just take a photo, but I would also do a couple other things as well, which we'll talk about in a different webinar not to overwhelm you. But I'm gonna choose a photo that I actually have from my computer and this is what I'm gonna use for my newsletter this time. So sometimes I would just take a picture of something meaningful in my classroom that week and I would have my, what I had planned out to talk about to families, okay. So I would spend about five minutes kind of just sketching out a list of topics that I wanted to discuss in my newsletter with families. And then I would record it and it would give the same information and context that I would provide in a full one page newsletter that I maybe typically would do or post to the website or post to my blog, but this took me five minutes instead of an hour. So I've got my picture sometimes, like I said, I would do this as just kind of a talking point. Other times I would create, I would use shadow puppet edu and kind of do a slideshow of pictures with my voice narrating. So I'm gonna go ahead and tap this record button right now so you can kind of get the full effect here. Hello kindergarten families, this is Mrs. Gadki. We had an amazing first week in kindergarten. One of the things I wanted to start talking about is when we were sitting in our large group, we wanted to really talk about how we treated each other in our classroom. And we hung up this crinkled heart and what this stands for for us. So I'm not obviously gonna go through my whole newsletter, but I would talk about different aspects, and again, the total length might be two minutes, two and a half minutes, but I would talk about several different things. What do we do in math? What do we do in reading? What are important events to remember? So that's one way I would do a newsletter. So again, that's just going to be added as an announcement that goes to all of my families. So I'm going to, again, can send this to all of my families. And if I look back into the family version, which I was just kind of showing you there for a second on my iPad, if I go back there, I'm gonna see in the inbox, I have this notification coming up. So there's kind of what my newsletter appears like there and I can press play and it shows up full screen. You can't hear the IO because it's kind of connected weird to my computer right now. But that's just kind of another way to again, share information with families. You can also still type a newsletter if you want, and you can add that as an attachment or a PDF. So I actually have a calendar. So sometimes you might wanna share a calendar with families and you're thinking, how would I do that with CESA? I get asked this a lot on our various channels where teachers communicate. So I thought I'd give that example. So when I go to the green add button, I can go to send announcement. And again, I'm gonna focus on families. So see our calendar for the month. Okay. And again, you can add as much as you want. But if I go to add attachment here, I can add this file and I already have it saved, a PDF that I created our September calendar. So we have book orders to, we're going on a field trip. There's library books to show that library is happening. I could add a caption. I can do all sorts of things. I'm gonna then send that to my family. So then they have that as well as a reference. They can print that PDF out if they choose. But again, that can all be sent through CESA. So the other thing I wanna show you too is if I go to the green add button and send an announcement, again, we're going to all families. The attachment link, okay? So I'm not actually going to walk through all the steps, but we get this asked a lot, like what if I want parents to sign up for something? What if I'm having conferences or I need volunteers? I use Google Forms a lot. So I would create a Google Form and just share the link here, making sure that the permissions were set so that anyone with the link could view it. So they would just get the link through CESA, open it up and be all set to go. Maybe it was a quick check-in survey, things like that. But anything basically your students can create in CESA, you can create for families via announcements and messages. So kind of keep that in mind. The other thing I wanna show really quickly here while I'm doing this live demo is I can initiate private messages with families as well. So again, in order to do that on the right here, you notice I'm in the inbox tab and I can initiate a private message with Roberto for example, okay? So I can type the message here, I can tap here to add an attachment. Maybe I had a conversation at conferences and they were thinking, oh, could you get me the site word list that Karina is working on this week? So maybe I would send that. I could send that via a private message. So keep that in mind as well. A couple of things I wanna show you. A little bit about the translation feature. So I love this about CESA. So CESA can translate notes, comments, messages and announcements into over 55 languages automatically. So basically what that means is that when you type in CESA, so maybe you're typing to a family member, or they're messaging you back. So in this example, this parent Beth Hawkins, her first language is Spanish. So she is sending me a message back. She's just typing in Spanish. And on my end, when I get that because my device is set to English in CESA, I will see the C translation button appear. So when I touch that under this, you'll see it just translates it to English. The same thing happens with families. So if you are typing a note to update them, if you are sending them a message, if you're leaving comments, if you're typing an announcement, they will get the option to C translation if their device is set to a language other than the language you typed in. So that happens for over 55 languages. So kind of just keep that in mind. There's nothing you have to do on your end. It just happens automatically if their device is set to a different language. I wanna talk briefly about journal versus inbox because as we kind of talk about family communication, obviously just using the journal in CESA is huge family communication from students posting to CESA. So I wanted to kind of give you a little bit of how I differentiate it. So my question that I often ask myself is should this be in the student's portfolio, okay? If I am posting something to CESA, should I put it in the journal? That would be if I wanted to be maintained in the student's portfolio or is this really like a teacher message? And if it's really a teacher message or announcement, that's really going to belong in the inbox which is where we were just talking about sending announcements and sending messages. So the journal is really for all of those, all the work that students are doing. So students are usually capturing it. Maybe they're responding to an activity. Maybe you, the teacher are posting, a photo of one child doing something that in my mind could go inside their portfolio or their journal because I think that shows their growth, especially when we're talking about students at the pre-K through second grade level. But then most other things when I am directing it as the teacher, it's going to happen in that inbox tab. So this is really for teacher-to-family communication or family-to-teacher communication. So those things like newsletters or reminders or sign-up forms or class photos, those are all gonna be going through the inbox. I'm not gonna be posting to student journals there. The other thing to just note too is lots of questions come up like who can see it? Who can see what stuff is happening here in CESA? Just as a reminder, if your settings in CESA are set to students can see each other's work. So this is just like a little screenshot from your class settings. If that setting is turned on, families only see work their child is tagged in. So that really goes into effect for any way your class is set up. Families only see work their child is tagged in. All approved comments from families are visible in the journal to all students. So again, if a student has posted work into their portfolio, into their journal, it's their science experiment and their family comments on that, you approve the comment. All the students in your class can see those comments on that post made by the family member. If you have students can see each other's work turned on. Families can also see all comments made on any work that their child is tagged in. So for example, if three students are working together and those three student names are tagged, all three families will be able to see that post and any comments made on that post because their child is tagged in it. So I just wanna let you know that too. And then on the right here in the inbox section, announcements, if we're talking announcements, all connected family members can see announcements, but they can only see announcements that were sent after they connected, not prior announcements. So what that means is if you, as the teacher, went in and sent an announcement to every family saying, oh my gosh, welcome to CISA, but you hadn't yet invited families, when they connect, they're not going to see that. So they're only going to see announcements after they've connected. The other thing is private messages in that inbox are only visible to the teacher who sent the message and the one family member and vice versa. They are not visible to any other teacher on the account. So I know we are right at our 30 minutes here, but I wanted to take some time for questions and you might be thinking, Angela, I gotta go. I've spent 30 minutes with you and I highly respect your time. So if you wanna scoot out of here, by all means do that. We'd love for you to fill out the survey that pops up at the end because we wanna know how we can get better and serve your needs. But if you have questions or things that you thought, oh, I thought she was gonna talk about this today and she didn't, type them in the question box right now. Or maybe you're thinking, could you explain this a little bit more? What questions do you have? I'll stick around here for a little bit and go through some questions. Just note that you are going to get their security if you registered and we appreciate you coming to learn more about CSAH.