 Hello, hello, and welcome to PD and your PJs. I'm so excited to be here with you tonight to talk about ways that you can use CESA to stay in touch with your students over the summer break. Now, if you're a Northern Hemisphere teacher, your school year is probably just about to wrap up and we wanna give you ways that you can use this tool, CESA, that you've probably been using all school year over your break. So I have lots of tips and tricks to share with you tonight. If you're not winding up the school year, I hope you can use some of these ideas anytime you're on a holiday break from school. Real quick, you should hear my voice talking now. I do want to assure you that we are recording the session and you will receive it in an email shortly after we conclude. Most importantly though, we'll also share the slides and that's the important stuff that you can look at later at your own convenience and click through, click on some of the links and other resources and give them a closer look as you have time. Remember, you're not going to be able to click on anything during the live webinar but the slides will be coming to you in an email shortly. Quick introduction before we get much farther. My name is Julie. I'm on the teacher community team at CESA. I was a high school ELA teacher for 18 years and I was teaching 12th graders and using CESA every day with those big kids. But I was also working with tech integration and some of the younger grades for about half of my day. So I have some ideas I can share with you that have worked with younger students and some with big kids as well. Go ahead and find me on Twitter if you can take a minute. I'm at edtechjulijay. Give me a quick follow. I would love to be able to interact with you on Twitter and share tips and ideas. And of course, you can connect with our whole team on Twitter at CESA. Now, we're wrapping up a lot of our live webinars for the school year, but remember you can always view recordings at web.cesa.me backslashpd's and that's where you can find us again in August when we resume our live presentations. Okay, to kick off this evening, one thing I wanna tell you and you of course know this because you've experienced it with CESA over the school year that your connection with your kiddos doesn't have to be based on your school year calendar or even your classroom walls. I mean, you can keep in touch over the summer or over any school break once you have kids used to using those creation tools in CESA and especially once you have your families connected. So you don't have to feel like, you know, your year with CESA is over. Keep it going over the summer and I'm gonna give you everything you need to know to keep that going. Okay, here's a couple things I would throw out to you first before we go farther. If you are going to stay in touch with your students using CESA over the summer break, who is going to be posting? So if you think the answer is you, the teacher, then carry on with your CESA class and post as much as you normally would. So post anything you want in the student's journal in CESA. Students can comment then maybe from a connected family account, they're not creating their own posts and this will work really well if you have almost or all of your families connected to CESA. Now, when you open these slides later, you can look in the notes for this slide and I have a link for you to a really helpful presentation with all of my best tips and tricks for how to get families connected and that works for students of all ages and I do share some tips in there for younger grades and for older grades and lots of my practical experience. So take a look at those slides because that's a really helpful presentation. Remember to, and we'll talk about this at length later tonight, but you can also be using announcements and messages and not just the student journal to communicate over the summer and not only can you post things like photos and videos and links, but students can as well from a family account. So that's something to think about too. So if you're going to be posting then just keep posting in your class. Remember if you tag something everyone, then everyone will see it and you could still use the announcements and messages feature if that is something that your families are used to using. If you want students to be posting however, then what you need to think about is that they need to log in to Seesaw the same way they would do that in your classroom. So if they're an email or Google sign-in person you would need them to sign in with that email or Google account from home and then they could create their own posts. Now, if they're a QR login student that gets a little trickier because not all teachers are comfortable sending that QR code home with students for how to log into the class. So it's just something to think about. This option we talked about is a perfectly fine option. This would just be you posting and students probably commenting as a family member. If you really do want students to post in my opinion I think that works best with email login and something that you might want to talk to students about is making sure they're logging out of their account if they're using a shared device. So if you're on a home computer let's say and you're using the family's computer then we would want students logging out of Seesaw so that we're not having parents or other siblings or other family members and looking in that class. But if your students are old enough and they have their own devices and they're responsible enough to keep track of logins and passwords then that's maybe an option you can give them. I again want to just remind you don't archive your class yet if you want students to be operating this in this way or if you want to be posting for families as well. And then remember to just check out that link about getting all families connected because that will help you if you wanna stay intact over the summer. Okay, so something that I would say you would probably want to do as your year is wrapping up is let your families know that you're going to still be posting in Seesaw because they might be thinking school is out and I don't need to keep checking Seesaw or there's not going to be anything to see in Seesaw. So you want to like give them a notification of some kind that says, yep, I have a plan for the summer and I'm going to stay in touch this way. If you would like this image you can grab it by clicking the image later when you get the slides but you could create something similar. My recommendation, again, like I said earlier you can be adding an image like this to an announcement and sending it to all families, okay? So you could send that to all families that way if you don't want to use an image and you'd rather use some kind of newsletter PDF that you've created, you could do that too or you could even record a video but remember you can add an attachment like that to an announcement. If you don't know exactly how to do that click this link and it will explain it. I think that probably works best if your family members are used to using announcements already. So if you've been using announcements this would be something you could post in an announcement to let families know you're still going to be using Seesaw over the summer. I did give you the video tutorial here too. This is how to add photos, links, notes, videos, et cetera to announcements or messages. So this is just another 10 minute webinar I did probably a few months ago. If you'd like to watch that later, just click on that. It's a really quick video that tells you all about how to do that. Something else to consider is if you haven't been using announcements this year and you haven't attached photos and videos to announcements maybe think of that as a goal for next year because the great thing about that too is that families can also respond with photos and videos. So if you want to keep those connections with students and families going over weekends and holiday breaks, I think announcements and messages are a great way to do that. So give that a look if that's a goal you have for next year. Something else to think about too, and we talk about this and especially when I do the webinar about book clubs that your students can be in more than one class. So if you wanted to have a small group for something over the summer you could create another Seesaw class and have students log into that class as well. You just need to remember to connect families to whatever new class you create. I was an ELA teacher, so for me the logical thing that comes to mind is book clubs that you probably can think of other clubs or projects that could involve a separate class. So if you're not necessarily wanting to Seesaw to every kid, maybe you had 25 students in your class but you won't have a small group working together on something, create a new class, make sure you connect families before the school year ends because that's how students in a lot of these instances are going to be interacting with you, they're gonna be commenting from a family member's account. But students can be in a lot of different classes and not just one. Connect families, don't archive the class. That would be my two tips for you if you're going to create that new class. And here's the webinar about the book club. So if you wanna talk about how you could do book clubs from home or you're interested in that, just watch this video later too. Also just like a 10 minute webinar. Okay, so I've worked with elementary school teachers in the past who have used Seesaw on school breaks for read alouds. So teachers reading a book out loud to students is helping make sure students have access to that when they're not in school, when school's not in session, reading books, talking about books, having students comment. This teacher actually also included secret messages or secret words at the end of her videos. So if students watched till the end and got the secret message, they could keep track of it and then they could enter their answer for a prize or a drawing later. So that was kind of a cool incentive for those kiddos to watch her videos. You could also even use a video like this for messages for like a summer birthday or for a summer holiday. So we have some things coming up that you could be commemorating and talking about in videos. So you could record some messages and that's a fun way to use Seesaw on a break. I also like to think a lot too about pop culture and current events over a summer break. I taught big kids. And so I was always thinking about ways to when we got back to school in August to talk about what the big trends or cultural phenomenons were over the summer break. You might remember it was like two years ago, I think in the summer that Pokemon Go hit. So it was not something any of us had ever heard of during the school year, but it became a huge phenomenon over the summer. So I wanted to interact with my students and talk about that if not over the break once we got right back to school. So who knows what things our kids will be obsessed with this summer. They probably haven't even been invented yet, but be aware of that and then think of ways that you could ask students a question, let them comment, post a journal prompt or journal response or something like that. They could have a digital discussion using Seesaw. So that's kind of cool to think about too. And then another thing and I've seen this actually on social media in the last few days. I know a lot of teachers have great ideas about this and people in our community have shared lots of really great ideas. You could post an image like this like something called summer bingo, let's say or like a summer bucket list type of thing. And then if a family member comments that they have done that thing, like yep, we went to the splash pad, then you can three dots, edit the image, edit item and cross that off of the grid there. And then when everything is crossed off you could say you had a blackout or when you get five in a row you could say you've got bingo. You would just be waiting for families to post their comments there to either type or voice record them and then you'd have to edit the item to cross off their entry. But that'd be kind of cool for students to follow along in real time. It could be some other sort of STEM challenge, a scavenger hunt, a fitness challenge. My own kids PE teacher does a lot of cool fitness challenges or then of course anything related to reading. So that's kind of fun to think about if you would want to use CSU for that over the summer. If you had been doing conversation starters during the school year, keep that up over the summer too like things we could talk about at home. I did that a lot with big kids in fact that image there on the right is one of mine that I was using in 12th grade last year and then I had a sixth grade colleague who posted many different conversation starters every week based on what they were learning in class. If that was part of your routine in the school year keep that up over the summer or if you hadn't ever tried it, start it new in the summer. Just you know how it is like with kids when you say what did you do at school or what did you learn today? And they don't always have a great answer or they just want to say nothing. You can give parents and families some ideas of how to facilitate those discussions. And of course in the summer school won't be in session but you can probably come up with lots of cool things that families could talk about. So you could post those either tagged to everyone or post them as part of an announcement announcements and messages. And I also think you could use CSU to promote summer activities in your community. So if you have opportunities for kids to grow and learn in the summer, don't hesitate to use CSU to promote those. So like in our little town where I live we have a great summer library program. We have recreation classes. We have a free summer lunch program. Whatever else is going on in your community, don't forget that if you have families connected to CSU that that's a great way to promote those things to families. So again, add the image to the announcements or if you're not using announcements and you just want to tag it to everyone, that's still a great way to get all of that info home to families. I do have this old padlet here that several teachers contributed to besides just me about ways that you could use CSU on a school break. So you can click this link later and take a look at the padlet or feel free to add your own idea. A lot of those are winter themed activities because that's the first time that I started the board was over a holiday break, but you can just take a look there and add anything else that might be on your mind that you could share lots of cool ideas there. And then just a couple of quick tips before we leave. I want to remind you about how to prepare your free CSU account for the end of the year. Click that wrench in the upper right-hand corner and click all the way down to archive class. Now, obviously, if you're going to do some of these things that I've been talking about in this webinar, don't archive your class yet. Maybe you're not going to do this then till July or August, but when you are done using CSU for this school year and for these students and their families, then click the wrench and scroll down to archive class. Then remember too that families can download all of their kids' creations for free from an archive class. And this is a great link that shows you how to do that. So you can share that with family members. You could post that link in an announcement around the time that you're ready to archive it. You don't even really need to do it right now if you're not going to archive just yet. I, when I was a classroom teacher using CSU, I did not archive till about in August when I was ready to start a new school year. So there's no reason to do that now if you want to use CSU to communicate over the summer. And then just a friendly reminder, don't delete students or classes, okay? You don't ever want to do that. You're going to start new classes for next year. You don't want to turn off parent access. You don't want to delete a student. You don't want to delete a class that there's really no way to recover that deleted data. And you want to make sure that you don't inadvertently take away student and family access to something that they might want to be preserving. So don't delete students or classes. Don't forget to interact with me on Twitter. I'm at EdTechJulyJay and of course, you can reach out to our whole team at CISA. We have a great community on Facebook. And when school resumes in August, we'll be back live with CISA chat on Twitter on the second and fourth Thursdays of each month. And don't forget, you can always watch recorded webinars at web.cisa.me backslashpedies. Okay, what I think I'm going to do is say goodnight and stop the recording for now, but I will stay on for a couple more minutes. If you have a question, you can just type it in the question box now. Okay, bye-bye. Thanks for joining me.