 Welcome everybody to the learning loop podcast, your best source for educational insights and trends. I'm Chris, your host. Today's special guest is Hannah. Hannah is a third grade teacher and is our literacy expert for our show today. Hannah is a long time CSI user and a true pro in using CSI to get the most out of her students. We are so thrilled and excited to have her here. Hannah, welcome to the show. Hey, thank you for having me. We are so excited. We'll jump in with kind of a basic question here. Could you start by just giving everyone an overview of how you incorporate CSI into literacy instruction in your classroom? Yeah, I have been using CSI for quite a while now. I kind of have lost track. It feels like something that's just always been a part of my classroom and we use it all the time. So when it comes, I mean we do use it in a lot of ways, but when it comes to literacy, I probably use it most in one of two ways. So I love that kids can read to me on CSI and then I can listen to their reading later. So it's, as a teacher, like your day is super busy and you can't always sit and listen to kids one on one all day. But if they read to you on CSI, then you've got, you know, whatever time you need later on to sit and listen to them. And you can provide feedback and share it with families and that just makes it really, really nice. So that's probably my favorite way to use it, even though it's sort of simple. But I also love using it for like practice opportunities. So because there's so many tools now in the, in like when students are in CSI, there's so many different ways to practice things and keep it exciting and engaging and fresh for them. So. Amazing. Super. It's, you're finding like the perfect balance of having this as your partner where students can practice and become experts at it themselves and then share that and showcase that and have it be something that you as a teacher can use when you need to and when it will help you in your classroom. Yeah, definitely. What specific literacy skills have you found to be best paired with CSI? I know you talked through recording things. I know you talked through being able to practice, but as you found anything that really has been like, this is just the perfect pairing. When we're learning about literacy, these specific skills work best with CSI. I do have a lot of fun with like different phonics based skills on CSI because you can use like the drag and drop features to sort by phonics skill. Students can use the highlighting tool to highlight different phonics patterns in a text. You can have students practice reading and sorting in all sorts of ways with what you're doing. So it does lend itself really nicely to studying different phonics patterns. So I do love it for that for sure. I also think that CSI can be fantastic for different fluency related activities. So especially tying into having students read to you on CSI, you can do repeated readings, you can have students listen to themselves and then try reading it again. You can focus on things like prosody and sounding like a reader when you read. So it's just a nice tool to have students to be like they can actually record themselves and see what they're doing. Yeah, I love that. I love how you're getting to the point too of almost passing that baton to students of like, I want you to use this as a tool to help yourself improve and help that self-improvement come from within versus you as a teacher having to always come in and reflect on it. Yeah and parents love hearing that stuff too. So I know in my classroom when kids have read something on CSI and I usually will comment on it and approve it then I also get comments from parents and so they get to sort of hear what we're working on and they get to hear their child and I think that's exciting for a lot of families to have that connection into the classroom. Absolutely and even beyond reading just the opportunity to be a part of that learning experience is something that you know most parents don't have the opportunity to do. So the fact that CSI can help build that bridge for parents that just helps everybody, students, teachers, families, the whole community just to circle around learning. We'll jump to the next question and this has to do with differentiation. So thinking in ways that you are either designing content or using CSI to support learning, how have you found CSI to really be a helpful partner for you to just make sure that your literacy instruction is more accessible for all of your learners in your classroom? Yeah I mean CSI definitely makes that really, really easy because like when you go into a sign in activity to students you can select groups of students and send them different things. So I think I have a couple groups in my room that are sort of intervention reading groups and we're really working hard on different phonics skills along our scope and sequence and so they need different types of practice or different decodable texts to read and I can send everybody a similar activity but they're getting it at different levels based on what they need and so everybody's doing the same thing but not really because it's differentiated and that's CSI just makes it really easy to do that because it's not quite as easy to like pass out different paper to every student in your class but when you've assigned it on CSI the students half the time don't even know what's going on so. Absolutely for sure and the ability now to schedule activities probably only helps that even more to be able to make sure that you're distributing things on time and to the different groups as they go. Yeah I do like that because you can have it all ready to go at whatever time you need it to go out. Awesome can you share with the audience or anybody listening here can you share an example of a creative literacy activity that you either put together or maybe your favorite one that you used that really just made the CSI tools shine and your literacy instruction really just came together perfectly. Yeah well I'll a lot of what I make is very like quickly thrown together and it's just you know something that I need in the moment so instead I'll pass that off to some of the awesome resources that already exist in the CSI library. I know I've used the phenomenal phonics resources quite a bit and they're organized by phonics pattern so you can go in and find exactly the phonics skill that you're looking for and it has a section where you can do the present to class and use it for direct instruction and then you can push out the different practice activities and I just think that's like just the kind of resource that everybody should know that that already exists and you don't have to reinvent the wheel and I know there are other similar like collections for phonemic awareness and learning letter names and letter sounds that already exist within the CSI library. I don't know if I could create something quite as like beautiful and exciting but I do love those. Which is just fine that's okay as long as you're finding power in the combination I think that's really the important part is you know whether you create them or not you're recognizing that CSI is there to help you out and really to boost your students literacy instruction. We're going to jump to just a tiny little bit down here and just thinking about how to blend together digital resources like CSI and literacy instruction and you know when you think of things like curriculum pressures you think of things that might be coming through districts but also the ability that that you've seen and the power you see within digital instruction how do you really find that balance in your classroom of reading reaching all those curricular demands but also ensuring that you're providing students with 21st century learning. I understand that definitely as being a challenge because most districts have an approved curriculum that's been kind of given to you and you're expected to teach it with fidelity and so it might not naturally lend itself to to doing anything digitally but I think I know I've already mentioned different practice opportunities they're very easy to provide in CSI but you also kids can take pictures of the things they're doing they can if you have a student who is maybe struggling with writing sometimes they can take a picture and record themselves explaining something and I think that also provides like students the opportunity to practice using technology tools that they might not otherwise have access to so I think as teachers we can be creative in ways to like use the technology tools in CSA to help students access the hard copies of curriculum that they might find themselves using even if we're not creating elaborate activities for students to to complete there's a lot of really helpful tools within CSA that just help with differentiation with you know helping students access assignments if they struggle with reading or writing then those kind of things yeah absolutely I think that's one thing that you really spoke to that I think a lot of teachers are working to understand is that to use CSI you don't have to make activities or even use activities you could just press that green add button take a picture take a quick drawing record your voice add to your journal through that way too and you can still have an extremely powerful robust portfolio built for all these students as you go yeah absolutely and the kids sorry the kids love doing that stuff too because they they love taking pictures and and doing like a voiceover or taking a video of themselves because they feel like little youtubers in action so they sure do oh that's amazing I love that you you've reached that point in your you know your educational career and your your your sage-ness will say it that way your teaching expertise that you recognize really how to use tools in the proper way that's going to make sure that you're reaching those curricular demands and you're ensuring that your students are having everything that they need to be able to showcase what they know thank you yeah we'll jump to one portfolio question here and then we have just two more quick questions after that thinking of seesaw as a digital portfolio do you have any examples of moments where you really saw student growth like literally come to life right in front of you using the seesaw digital portfolio yeah I mean again my examples I always feel like they're really simple but when you look at because I do have students read quite a bit on seesaw and you can just watch their reading just progress and grow over the course of the year and to listen to what they were reading at the beginning of the year versus the middle versus the end and it's just so tangible for them to see that progress and for me to see it and for families to see it I just think that's related to literacy for sure that's just such a powerful like awareness for students to have that I worked hard and I got better absolutely and you can see it you can feel it throughout the entire year right here in seesaw we're gonna jump to the loopy question and this is just a question that we ask that just kind of a silly question we ask all of our guests here what is your favorite way to unwind from a really busy crazy school day oh um usually it is reading or just watching mindless tv one or the other just something that that I get to do alone right absolutely recharge your batteries move into the next phase of your evening all ready to go that's those are good advice and those are things too that that you know I like to always have my own personal time sometimes after school and so I think that's that's important to hang on to so hopefully you're getting that after every busy day hopefully everybody around you just making sure you have that space we're on to our final question and as we close up our episode we always try to make sure that we provide any advice for anybody who's listening maybe there's somebody who's brand new to seesaw maybe there's somebody who is brand new to literacy and wants to really help boost their skills so if we have someone like that listening Hannah what advice would you give them to really either improve their literacy skills or their seesaw skills or both of those things together to get to a point that you are here today yeah um I know I've told other teachers this before too but you um can only do so much at once so pick one thing at a time to try to implement in your classroom and I think that works for literacy um I know learning about the science of reading can be really a daunting task as people learn more and more and and want to revamp everything they're doing um or if it's you know learning how to use seesaw and realizing just all the resources that are available for you you can't do it all at once so pick one thing and get really good at that and then pick something else and get really good at that and and take it one bite at a time sure it's it's the old saying go slow to go fast that's very very powerful advice we are at time Hannah I just want to say thank you for being here thank you for sharing your expertise thank you for being just a seesaw leader and a literacy leader out there we are so thankful that you are here that you took time away from your busy day to just share your expertise with us yeah well thank you so much for having me of course thank you bye bye