 Hello, everyone. Welcome to Cross Classroom Collaboration with CSaw. I'm excited to be here this evening and share this with you. And I wanted to make sure that you knew that if you have signed up for this live webinar, that all of the slides will be emailed to you and a recording will be emailed to you at the end of our webinar. After a few hours and everything gets processed, it will be sent your way. But we're very excited to have you here. And what we're going to be doing tonight is sharing a little bit about Cross Classroom Collaboration with CSaw leading the way. My name is Cara Brem. I am a classroom teacher in middle school math. And this is the second year that I've been teaching middle school math. Before that, I was a fourth, fifth grade teacher and way back when also a third grade teacher. So I lived in the elementary world for 19 years and then got a little wild hair and just decided to try out middle school. So seventh grade math, here I am coming to you from Cary, North Carolina. And just a little bit about me. I am a CSaw ambassador. This is the fourth consecutive school year that I've used CSaw in my classroom, both in the elementary classroom and now again in the middle school classroom. And I'm also a national board certified teacher in literacy. I know a math teacher who is also a reading teacher, crazy. And I'm a level one and level two Google certified educator. If you'd like to connect with me, you can find me at Mrs. Brem Tweets on Twitter and at Mrs. Brem Math on Instagram. So I'm excited to take you on a little journey with me today and tell my story about this cross classroom collaboration that I had. And just to give you a little bit of insight and background. I worked for a school for nine years, the elementary school UC pictured there. And then like I said, I got a little wild hair and decided to leap the whole way across the parking lot, across that bus parking lot to the middle school. And, you know, we're two school buildings that are so close together and actually share the same campus. And for years as an elementary school teacher, it was always, oh, the middle school building, the middle school building. And then I moved to that middle school building and I was like, oh, well, we never even hear about the elementary school building. And so the idea came across to bridge that gap between the two schools because it seemed like we were thousands of miles away, even though we were yet so very, very close. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take you on this journey with me that of crossing over that bridge and that gap and sharing, sharing our classrooms from different, different grades here. So here we go. Our journey this evening is going to map out how you could do the same thing. Maybe that might be connecting with someone, you know, right next door or close by or the whole way across the globe. And seesaw has allowed me to make that happen with other teachers in that building right across the bus parking lot. It would also be a really great journey for you to take with another classroom from anywhere around the world. So this is our map for our journey this evening and I'm going to lead you through. Let's talk about connecting. So you would most likely need to find another class to connect with if you were going to have this cross classroom collaboration happen with your students. And there's so many different ways that you could find a buddy class to connect with. Whether that's an older or a younger class in your own building could be a classroom down the hallway. It could be within your own school district within your own state or even beyond those borders. And using seesaw connected classrooms seesaw connected blogs, that might be a way that you might choose to connect. Also, you could find social media through your social media PLN connections, whether that's through Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, any groups that you might have on there. And there's a big seesaw teachers group in Facebook and even broken up by grade levels that you could find someone to connect with on there. You might even have some personal teacher friends who might want to make that connection within the same school, a different school. If you have a friend of a friend or your cousin's a teacher in another location, and you could build those connections with the buddy class there. So my buddy class, again, I'm a seventh grade math teacher, and my buddy class, it was a third grade classroom. And in that third grade classroom, the third grade teacher I've worked with previously at the school right across the parking lot. And also the technology teacher librarian, the, and many other teachers over there I spent years working with. So they're personal teacher friends that I had, and it is the same campus that we're on but we are in different buildings. So our buddy classes came together and really worked hard on this story that I'm going to share with you. The curriculum was a common thread that when we were trying to come up with an idea of how are we going to bring together these two classrooms that seem so far away. And we were discussing as a teacher team, what are we going to do like we want to pull these kids together and kind of bridge that gap. And we weave together a common curriculum thread and so a whole bunch of different ideas were going through our heads. You know, and how you choose that might depend on are you choosing the same grade level to connect with and choosing one subject or one standard that's covered to really focus your collaboration. Are you choosing like we did different grades and ages. So what was a common standard that both of our grade levels shared and being a math teacher, we're kind of stuck with math at that point, but, but we were looking at all the of the math curriculum and thinking what, what do we share. And geometry was something that is woven throughout so many grade levels for so many years and different parts of geometry and here in North Carolina. The common thread that we chose was two dimensional shapes and investigating describing reasoning about triangles quadrilaterals decomposing them and breaking them into smaller parts and pieces. And so that also fit well with our seventh grade curriculum of drawing constructing and describing geometrical figures and the relationships between them. So that third grade spiraled around again and we hit on some of those similar ideas in our seventh grade curriculum certainly at a deeper level. But as teachers we were trying to determine well now what are we going to do with that so if geometry is a common thread, and one of the teachers said well castles, right they can build castles. So we took that idea and we ran with it and the students worked collaboratively and built these amazing geometric castles. So, in order to do that, we needed to figure out how are we going to communicate and work together in order to build these castles. And a digital platform drove our communication 100% with seesaw at the helm, and we decided that we both my classroom in seventh grade and the third grade classroom had used seesaw the students were familiar with it we used it in our rooms regularly. And so we decided to create a seesaw classroom just for the students participating in this. And from there, we had co teachers who were involved. But there are many different communication ideas that you could add on to that, like any if your school has Google apps for education through the docs the sheets the slides all of that you could use that for communication. We also chose to use Google Meet and formerly Google Hangout, and that was for the teachers because the students did not have access to that but we connected whole group at a common time. You might also find that with your buddy class you have other technology that you that might be in common that you could share and communicate that way. If you're close like we were close, you can even have a low tech idea of just taking a field trip to visit your buddy class as well to work on a project and really communicate face to face. So our communication was at was, we'll start with the Google Meet. After we had our seesaw classes connected and students were sharing these interactive posts and comments. We thought well they need to see each other right and we posted videos and said hello and introduced ourselves, but wouldn't it be still good to see each other in real time. So we decided on Tuesdays and at Tuesdays at 915 worked well for everyone and we met using having being logged in into seesaw and additionally having Google Meet as part of the login process. So up on the screens in the classroom were my students and the third grade students and the teacher computers were broadcasting that at the same exact time. Students had their own computer they were logged in and they were using seesaw to interact as well but if something needed to be shared orally and it was just faster, then they would walk up and have a conversation and call someone up and talk to them about it. We were also as teachers able to talk to all the students at the same time and share information. So one day we decided we're going to take a field trip. Let's walk across campus and we were lucky enough because we were on the same campus we could do that. So we actually had some face to face time where it was the first time that students met and they really got a chance face to face to meet. We had been meeting for many weeks digitally over the computer and chatting with in comments and video posts in seesaw but this was certainly part of the memory. So we took a walking field trip permission forms and everything. Very supportive administration allowed us to do that and working with some amazing teachers also helped all this fall into place. The collaboration piece was huge because we were working together towards these shared goals of weaving our curriculum and building and designing and and tinkering around. And there were different kinds of collaboration that took place with our project. And with that came different tools. So we had simple collaboration like info sharing and notifications and tracking where everyone was. And then we had more rich collaboration where we were sharing more for group knowledge or having different versions of our project and sharing our status but not just tracking the status truly sharing. And here's where I want to go. What can I do. I need help. We also had joint viewing and editing through not only links shared in seesaw but also through a free program called Tinkercad. So if you haven't used Tinkercad it is a computer aided design software that is free and I'll get more into that in a little bit. But this simple collaboration students were posting in seesaw. They were communicating through comments. They were sharing their info and links from Tinkercad into seesaw. So they were having dialogue back and forth. This happened while we were either meeting live or at another time when the students had an opportunity to go in and work and look. So it was pretty amazing just even the simple collaboration that was taking place. And then we had more rich collaboration. And again this was created in Tinkercad and Tinkercad is design software. So it's computer aided design where students were taking and building these castles and using the shapes that were in Tinkercad. Building these castles and they're able to rotate and turn and design and change and it was just incredible. But one of the things that Tinkercad also allowed was a collaboration piece where if you clicked on that step one when you're logged in and created something you clicked on that first step. There's a little person at the top with a plus sign. You're going to add a collaborator and that generates a link. Students copied the link and then we pasted the link in seesaw. That link in seesaw allowed not only for that conversation back and forth but also access. So the third grade students were the ones who created the links and started off the project. And the seventh grade students were the ones that were able to work on different versions of the project and helped with the design features and guide the third graders along with their geometry and with their knowledge and with the building process as well. And together they worked on collaboratively through the links real time in there at the same time. So they were sharing their group knowledge, they were sharing their status and they were just really building, truly building and editing and viewing it together. They were also able to create through a lot of critical thinking. It was amazing what had to happen in order for these students to not only work together but to build and to make it actually happen at work. So the idea here was they were learning from each other. They were using seesaws built in creative tools in order to create. They were using Tinkercad but there's so many other creation tools that are out there that you could have students use. That would require any subject, any grade level, you know, whether that's coding with scratch or made with code, whether that's story creation tools like sock puppets, puppet pals, book creator. Anything that you can think of that students can make and do and create really works well to get those juices flowing and that critical thinking really pumping. So our students use their math abilities in order to create these castles through Tinkercad. And, you know, we saw the communication that was taking place in the collaboration but the critical thinking piece was key. Because there was so much failure that happened. I know it sounds weird to talk about failure but there was so much failure that happened and had to happen in order for this to be successful. The picture on the bottom left over here that looks like just a triangle by itself right down here. So this picture is a picture of what happened when we first printed our castle. So the idea was created in Tinkercad. And the amazing elementary teacher, she said, well, let's, we have this 3D printer. Let's try to print it out and see what happens. So when she printed it out the first time, it was a complete and utter failure. And the group who she printed, we got to use that as a teachable learning moment and say, OK, well, this was a failure. It didn't print. Something's wrong. We have to figure out what is wrong and how can we fix it. So they had to go back and redesign and rethink and try. And once they figured out what was wrong, then they were able to share what they learned with others. And the problem was that they were designing and there was, you can see in this awesome completed castle here that the base wasn't connected to the shapes. So within Tinkercad, if they didn't connect it properly and have that base connected, then they would have failure. Another thing that they did using the seesaw creative tools was they were able to capture screenshot pictures and then go into seesaw and find surface area of their castle, which is a seventh grade geometry skill. Although third grade does learn about area, seventh graders got to take it to the next step and share how they would find the surface area of the quadrilaterals. So that was neat for them to go in and manipulate and use seesaw tools in order to share that experience with the third graders as well. So so much critical thinking had to take place here. And then we were so excited. We're like, okay, this is amazing. We have to celebrate this. We have to showcase how much effort and how much excellence was put into this design project and this collaboration and this cooperation. So we were thinking, well, how could we celebrate this? One way was we could publish a seesaw classroom blog to the web. And not only were we able to share it with families and share it on social media with our PLN, but the students were able to share it in another way. You know, we did take a field trip, but if you're not close, you could take a virtual field trip and celebrate your accomplishments together with your buddy class. Maybe you have, you know, you're doing a book project and you decide to have a camp out and, you know, you're all camping out but in separate classrooms at the same time and make some s'mores over a pretend fire. That would be that would be pretty fun, right? So it's it's like a virtual field trip there, but you're celebrating together. Maybe you want to present to a group and take your students and meet up at a conference. If you're in the same in the same state and you go to a state conference and share your amazing work, share in person, virtually to other students or teachers. You could even create podcasts with all of your teamwork, your process, your product. So all of that would be pretty amazing. And I'm sure you can think of some awesome ways that you could showcase your products that you would create with a buddy class. We created a seesaw blog. And since we had that same seesaw class, we were able to the students were able to have their choice and share their voice with all the parts and pieces of the process along the way. So they were able to click on the blog icon and share it to the blog. And as teachers, we were able to approve that that information went on the blog. And we have parent permission permission to share faces on the blog and all of that. So it was pretty amazing. And our students were so proud of all of their work and all of their accomplishments. Another thing we were able to do was to present. And this was a memory that's definitely going to last a lifetime. Our students were able to present at the student showcase at the North Carolina Technology in Education Society event this past March. And it was an incredible experience. You can see that bottom left picture. That was the student showcase with all kinds of students there from all over the state of North Carolina sharing. And our seventh graders and our third graders were there together with their castles with their computers and sharing their story. So their voices were heard. They were telling about the choices they made. They were telling about their passion and all of their failures because we even brought those as well. And it was an incredible experience. Now, this journey was so fabulous. This journey was, you know, bringing everyone together, bridging the gap between the classrooms. And even though we were fortunate enough to be so close together to meet in person. It was more of that engaging experience that we had with each other through the project and through seesaw leading the way that really made this journey so amazing and incredible. Also, there were some incredible teachers that really put all this together and I was on the middle school end of things, but there were multiple elementary school teachers that helped out and I could have not have done this without them. And that was pretty awesome as well to be on that level and work so closely with these wonderful teachers. It was priceless. So all of these ideas, you know, they certainly just don't always pop in your head. Connecting with the seesaw community is so amazing. There are incredible ideas out there every single day that you can find on Twitter and Instagram and within all of the seesaw teachers groups that are available by grade level or the whole seesaw teachers group. So I certainly encourage you to connect with that seesaw community to grab ideas, ask, reach out, try to find your buddy classes and make a project happen no matter what the subject. Math happens to be our subject, but no matter what your subject is and share it out so others can learn and grow as well. So I'm excited that you came out this evening and to listen to the story and share the journey with me. I certainly appreciate all of your time. And again, a recording will be emailed to everyone.