 Hey hey from CESA and welcome to Messages for Teachers. This training is designed to teach CESA for schools teachers how to use messages in CESA. CESA brings educators, students, and families together to create a powerful learning loop between the classroom and the home. Messages allows for ongoing, flexible communication that builds a positive environment to support student learning designed with student safety and privacy first. By the end of this training you will learn how to use messages in your classroom and about the student messaging experience. The examples of using messages in this training are if administrator settings are defaulted and have not been changed. Please check with your administrator to see if they have adjusted the messages settings to learn what you, your students, and your family's messaging experience will be like. Let's get started! First, let's learn how to use messages in your classroom. We'll start with how to send a message. Tap the messages icon to access messages. You are now in messages. On the left hand side, you will see all of your conversations. If you tap on one, it will show up on the right hand side and you can scroll through all the messages in that conversation thread. You can also reply here. To send a new message, just tap this paper and pencil icon and choose the message type. Here a new announcement or a new conversation. An announcement is a one-way message. Member names are hidden and members cannot reply in a conversation thread. A conversation is either a one-on-one message or a group message which shows member names and allows all members to reply in the same message thread. Depending on the messaging settings set by your administrator, teachers can send messages to administrators, other teachers, students and connected family members at their school or to any combination of these. Teachers can also message their entire class or classes at once. Be sure to check with your administrator to see which settings they have chosen. First, let's send an announcement. Tap the paper and pencil icon and then select new announcement. You can easily search for and send messages to anyone connected to your school. You can send individual messages or create a custom group. Any teacher or administrator you add to an announcement here will automatically become an owner of this message as well. This means that they are able to send messages to this announcement thread, view, read receipts, edit message history and edit the message thread. Or if you tap add classes, you can send messages to groups of teachers, students and family members. First, select the audience. Choose teachers, family members and or students. If you select teachers as part of your audience, you also have the choice to toggle. Teachers in selected classes can send to this announcement. If you toggle this on, co-teachers in the class or classes you selected will become an owner of this message as well. This means that they are able to send messages to this announcement thread, view, read receipts, edit message history and edit the message thread. And then select the class or classes you want to send your message to. All of your seesaw classes will appear here. You can also tap my classes to filter classes by grade level. This allows specialist teachers or teachers with multiple grade level classes to message all classes in one grade level at once. Free users will not be able to message multiple classes at once. Then tap add selected to add the recipients to your message. Now type your message. All text written here can be easily translated if the recipient's device is set to another language. Teachers send announcements to remind families and students of school field trips, days off, or additional learning resources that can be used at home. To make your messages more engaging, tap the green add attachment button to add an attachment using any of seesaw's multimodal tools. You can attach a photo, drawing, video, and more. Once you have added your attachment, you will see it above the typed message. Simply tap send when you are ready. Instead of sending your message right away, you can also schedule it for a later date and time by tapping schedule. Use the day and time you want the message to send and tap schedule to confirm. It's that easy. To view and manage scheduled messages, tap view from within the message thread or tap the message thread list. Please note, you cannot edit a scheduled message until after it sends. If you need to make a change, delete the message and recreate it. Once you have sent your message, tap seen by below your message to view who has seen your message. There will be an announcement icon on any announcement showing that the conversation is an announcement. Depending on school messages settings, anyone can tap reply privately below the announcement and privately reply to the sender. Replies to announcements will start a new private conversation thread between the sender and the replyer only. Now, let's send a group chat. Select the paper and pencil icon and new conversation. Note, free seesaw users will not be able to do this. We will select a small group of students from a book club to send a message to. Students can communicate and engage with members of the group message by replying to the message. All members will see all messages. This is a great way to encourage discussion among students. There are a few settings and messages that teachers should know about. Members can tap on the three dots on a message they sent to edit the message, view who has seen your message, or remove your message. As a teacher, you can also tap the three dots on a message sent by someone else to view the message info, remove the message, or block the sender. When a message is removed, all members will see that the message has been removed. If a member is blocked from a conversation by an administrator or teacher, that member will be unable to begin a new conversation with the person who blocked them. If they are a part of a group chat created by the blocker, they will still see messages in that conversation but cannot reply to the group chat. If they try to reply, they will get a message saying replies have been turned off for the conversation. The member can be unblocked at any time. In each conversation, you can tap on the three dots to edit the conversation name, type and members. We recommend editing the label name to keep your announcements and conversations organized. Just tap edit label, type your new name, and tap save. If you decide you want to change the message type from a conversation to an announcement or vice versa, you can do that here. You can also make any existing teacher or administrator in an announcement thread into an owner here as well as change them from an owner to just a recipient. Just tap the three dots next to their name and choose either add as owner or remove as owner. Lastly, you can add or remove members from a message. A few more things. With messages, the inbox tab is replaced with notifications. This is where any notification for activity in the journal will appear. The red bubble will appear next to the messages icon when new messages have been received. We know that the messages inbox can get overwhelming at times, so we have some ways to help you stay organized. First, you can easily filter within your messages inbox making it easier to find the messages you're looking for. To filter your messages, tap all messages. Here you can filter by message types and select announcements or conversations to view, either all of your announcements or all of your conversations. You can also filter by the classes you teach. Just select a class to view all announcements and conversations you have for that particular class. I will show you a little later how students and family members can filter their messages too. Teachers, administrators, students and family members can also hide message threads that are no longer needed or relevant. Just hover over a message thread in your inbox. Tap the three dots menu that appears and tap hide message thread. The message thread is now hidden. If you need to find a hidden message thread, just tap the filter option and select archived and hidden. You will now only see the message threads you have hidden. If you need to unhide a message thread, filter for archived and hidden messages. Hover over the message thread you want to unhide. Tap the three dots menu that appears and select show message thread. This message thread will now be back in your inbox. Note that any new messages sent to a hidden thread will bring that message thread back into the recipient's inbox. Teachers and administrators can also archive a message thread that they started or are an owner of. To do so, teachers and administrators tap these three dots in the thread and tap archive announcement or archive conversation. Hiding a message thread will hide the thread and turn off replies for everyone in the thread. Follow these same steps to unarchive an announcement or conversation for everyone. Note that if a class is archived, all message threads associated with that class are automatically archived. To view archived threads, anyone in the thread can filter for archived threads. And view the original message thread. Teachers, owners, and administrators can tap these three dots to unarchive the thread. To do so, select unarchive announcement or unarchive conversation to unarchive the thread for everyone. Note that if a class is archived, all message threads associated with that class are automatically archived. Now it's your turn and just a minute you will pause the video to send a message. Just follow these steps. First, click the messages icon, then click the paper and pencil icon. Next, click new announcement or new conversation. Finally, add recipients, type your message, add an attachment, and click send. Pause the video now and take a few minutes to send an announcement or group conversation to administrators, teachers, students, or family members. Teachers use messages to send announcement with newsletters and reminders to families, to group message with the students and family members, to discuss student progress, to connect groups of students to facilitate discussion or group work, to group message with grade level teams for planning and collaboration, and to keep all communication in one place. Wow! That's a lot you can do with messages. To find more training on how to use CSaw, head to our learning hub at learn.csa.me and check out our training page at web.csa.me for slash training. Now that you have learned how to view and send messages in CSaw as a teacher, continue to part two to learn about the student experience of using messages.