 Welcome everyone! This session is about rethinking newsletters with CESAW. We are honored that you are here learning a little bit more and getting inspired to try something new in your own classroom. I'm Angela and I taught kindergarten for 15 years. I lead the community team now at CESAW because I really am passionate about supporting all of you that are getting started and in our teacher community. You can find me on Twitter so say hi. I'm Mrs. Gagkey. I would love to see... I'm especially interested to see what you do maybe with newsletters after you tune in here. So keep me posted on your progress and if you're watching via recording welcome as well. I am going to be giving you a code that you can write down during this session to get a certificate for viewing if you are watching the recording. So wow! Right? So this is my story of what newsletters look like and I love that the date is still on this. So this is September 16th 2013 right? So that was the year before I started getting involved with CESAW and I was really... it's really important to me as a teacher to make sure my families are involved and I think one way to really involve them is tell them about what is happening in your classroom and I would spend at least an hour a week typing up a really detailed newsletter of what happened, you know, what we were exploring, what the students were involved in and all of that. So you might be doing a similar thing right now. And what I found were a couple things. Number one, I felt like oh my gosh this is a lot of work. I'm really really working hard to communicate with my families and I'm not sure who's reading it and I'm not sure if they even want to read this entire document right? So I started creating and sending newsletters via CESAW because my families were connected. They were already seeing posts from their students and they really enjoyed that because they were hearing from their student. But I love from the teacher side that I could also see who has seen my news. So on the bottom under each post you can see who has viewed it, who has seen it, which is huge. You can't do that with an email right? So that was one just little mini bonus for me. But more importantly, I was saving an hour every single week by creating and sending and, you know, sharing my newsletters in CESAW. So I want to just give some options. There's actually so many options from the very first time that I've actually shared this idea a few years ago. CESAW has so many more creative tools, but we're going to start with kind of three basic ways that you could rethink your newsletter. So number one, really, really quick and easy way is just take a picture. Tap the mic and start talking. Add your audio. So I did that frequently. So sometimes I might just take one picture of something that was going on our classroom and I would talk and I would just talk for maybe a minute, maybe 90 seconds and I would explain and share about our week, post it to CESAW and we were good to go really quick and easy. Second option, maybe you want to use the note feature. So instead of typing it up in a different Word document or Google Doc, maybe you're just going to use the note feature in CESAW with a couple bullet points of important info and be good with that. Third option, maybe you want to create a multi-page post and share photos and voice and kind of go through all sorts of things that are happening in your classroom all within CESAW. Now I will show you before multi-page was an option in CESAW. I actually use the app ShadowPuppet, which you'll see actually an example of that as well. So how did I do this? So every Friday, when my kids went to specialist, so if they were in music or gym or art or whatever, I would come back to the room and I would take two minutes and I literally, and this is, you know, this is a real picture of my notebook and I would sit down, I'd have my plan book next to me and I would take about two minutes and just sketch a list of topics that I wanted to discuss. What were we doing in various subjects? What reminders did I have? What skills did I really want to highlight? So I just use this as my talking points because again, most of the time I did audio visual newsletters. So I completely let go of a really, you know, really dense typed full page. I just went with audio visual newsletters in most instances. So this allowed me to quickly prep again, took two minutes, sketch some things out, and that's how I planned. Then what I did is I chose one way that I was going to share it. So I guess one of the things I didn't show you, but it's kind of related to the first example is, like I said, you could take a photo of something in your classroom, maybe it's an anchor chart that you're working on or something, and just use that to start your conversation and go through your newsletter and talk. Or you could do this. This is kind of a fun website. It's called Word Clouds. And you could just use this as kind of a graphic that you can easily create. So I'm actually going to go there right now and show you this. So it's just wordclouds.com. I can go into this word wizard, and I can just type text. So I could say, writing, math, if I want math to be big, maybe I say patterns, what else we do? We explore ants and habitats. Okay, I'm going to say, I don't know what else we did. We did reload. Maybe I'm going to share the title of the book. I don't know whatever your list is, right? I'm just typing them in quick. I'm going to hit apply. And then it is creating this word cloud for me. I can change the colors. I can change to a different theme. I can change the shape of it. I don't know. I can do all sorts of things. Then I can go over here to file. And I can save it as a PNG or a JPEG. And I'm just going to call this newsletter. Okay, so there we go. I'm saving it. It's downloading for me. So if I was in my CSA class, and I was getting ready to get my newsletter ready, and I wanted to use that, I could just go to, I would probably choose to send an announcement because I'm sending me a newsletter. It's communication from me to my families. So I would say send to all family members and say, here's the news for the week. And I could add an attachment right here. In my attachment, I'm going to go ahead and upload this image that I just created. Again, yours would probably be a little bit, you know, fancier or cuter than this one. And then I can just go ahead and tap the mic and I can start recording. So I could say, hey, third grade families, we had a fantastic week this week. In math, we were really focusing on patterns and creating patterns with, you know, three different colors. So basic ABC patterns. We also started exploring ants and their habitat. So make sure to ask your student this guiding question. Okay, so you can go on right, I'm going to click done. And then I'm going to check done. I could rerecord if I want, right? I could do that. But I'm just going to tap the green check. And it's added as an attachment, I can send that now. And again, this would show up for my families right here, they would see that in their announcements and messages. So again, that's just one option. Again, you don't have to go to the other website and do that. But again, you saw how fast that was for me. You could also just start with a photo and add your voice. What I also want to talk about option two, I said, you could just type a note. So what I love is if you're just using a note and sending that as your newsletter, amazing, because guess what? When you do that in Seasaw, any text that you type in a note, in a comment, in a, you know, message will be can be translated automatically for families. So here I am, I'm sending this, I'm just typing it in English. When the family gets it on their side in the family app, if it if the device is set to any, you know, over 55 languages we translate to, they would see a C translation option. So in this scenario, this family had their device set to Somali. So they, it would show up in their language by just tapping C translation, which is huge. Okay, so that is an amazing feature that really comes in handy and quite honestly can redefine and really rethink your newsletters and how you might approach them. Okay, example, I guess this is technically example three, my font is getting a little wonky here, but this is an example of a newsletter that I created in Shadow Puppet, which is a separate app. But let's just pretend you don't even need that anymore, because you can do it all in Seasaw with the new multi page feature. So I'm going to give you an example, I'm going to play this so you can kind of hear whoopsy whoopsy this example of what this sounds like. Let's take a listen. Good afternoon, can you hear in families? It's March 18, 2016. And this week, we wrapped up a nonfiction writing unit, we read the story vegetables, and then our writing this week, continue to look at how we can write nonfiction texts. So we wrote actually about grapes and raised just the sight word makes. So again, you can see me kind of filtering through just various pictures that I've taken throughout the week, and talking through them and kind of giving some highlights to families. I apparently went on for three minutes in this one, but that's okay. Usually yours will be much shorter. But as I mentioned, all of this can take place right in Seasaw now, you don't even need another app because you can choose post student. Again, I would send an announcement because I'm talking directly to families, right? So instead of posting to the journal, I would send an announcement, I could say news for the week. And then the key right here is adding this attachment. So I could upload photos. Let's see, I've got all sorts of things on my computer today. Let's just, I don't know, let's add some, let's add some that we're going to talk about here. Sure, this, this, this probably doesn't look like your classroom, but you're going to get an idea here. Alright, so say you've had three photos from the week, and I'm going to top the green check, I'm going to add those. And then with our new multi page feature, I can go right here on each page and start talking and explaining I could record and talk at the same time as well. Hey, it was a fantastic week in fourth grade this week, we really focused on creating community, please ask your child about x, y, and z. I'm going to pause for that moment. I'm going to click done on this page and I'm going to go to the next page. And again, what I was doing before in shadow puppet, I can do now in Seasaw with multi page. So again, this can be one newsletter that you send to families, right inside Seasaw, which is awesome. And again, I really want to share the length of time this will save you. I mean, some of you might be think that's so complicated, keep it really simple. So what I loved about just doing an audio visual newsletter actually, was that the amount of time it took for me to type that up and explain and do all of that I can do that in about 90 seconds when I'm just talking through it. And I would also say better yet, how can your students take over the news or have ownership in that process as well. So of course, even them just posting to Seasaw they're sharing their news that way. But you might consider doing something, record a video newscast in Seasaw. I had students, my even my young kindergartners, we actually started doing that in the spring where we would have two students, they would maybe have write a list about what happened during the week and they would kind of keep track. And I would have another little friend just doing video and they would record that newscast. And again, really short that they were taking ownership of that. Now, if you really want to get advanced to try some, some different things, I've also seen teachers do some app smashing with green screen, where you can create different backgrounds and do a newsletter that way as well. So that can be also really fun to explore too. I want to pause for a moment and give a code for those of you that want a certificate if you're watching the recording, that code is 773. And I'm going to give you some more in just a little bit. So stay tuned. The other thing that I want to make sure I pause and go over questions or have time for questions as well. So let's hop into a couple questions. Leslie is just clarifying, does translate only exists in a note? No. So if a Seasaw will translate text that is in a note, if it's in a comment, if it is in a message or a caption. So those things are translated automatically. You as a teacher don't need to do anything. It really depends on the device's language that the family is set to. Can you print out the newsletter when you are in notes? So Lee, great question. If you send it as an announcement, I don't know that you can do that. If you post it to the journal, you absolutely could. So we could do that by just tapping the three dots. Can you add more than one attachment? You cannot add more than one attachment. But as I just showed with multi page, if you have that premium feature or want to try it out, you can add up to 10 pages in one post. So that should cover most of what your needs are. I'm going to give the next three digits of the code for the certificate. That's five to six. If you need that for the recording, if you're watching the recording, Catherine, there are over 55 languages that CESA will translate content to. Is there a way to make newsletters or other announcements available to parents who sign up for CESA family after the announcement has been posted? Amazing question. I love that you're asking this, Christy. Great, great question. What you need to know is that in order for families to see an announcement, they have to be connected before the announcement is sent. So what I recommend at the beginning of the school year is if you don't have families connected yet, post to the student journal. So if I go to our class, I just want to just show this difference. If I go to our class, I'm going to delete this for now. And I'm signed in as a teacher. If my family members aren't connected yet, I want to tap the green add button and choose post student work. Then what I would do after my amazing newsletter is done, let's pretend that's it. I'm going to tap the green check and I'm just going to tag all students so that when the family gets connected, they are going to see that post already they're waiting for them. But when you have your family members connected, you absolutely want to go about that through the announcement feature, if that makes sense. So great tips there. Go ahead and keep typing in your questions. The other thing. Yeah, I mean, well, let's just keep cruising through the questions here.