 Hello, hello, and welcome to PD and your PJs. I'm so excited to be here with you tonight. I'm Julie from CISA, and mostly I'm just honored that you would take time out of your busy work week to join us to talk about CISA and how you can use it during Global Read-A-Lab. Quick introduction, like I said, my name's Julie. I was a high school ELA teacher for 18 years, did Global Read-A-Lab with big kids in 11th and 12th grades. I'm now on the teacher community team at CISA. I would love it if you could find me on Twitter and give me a follow. I'm at EdTechJulyJay. I share lots of tips and resources related to CISA. And then of course you can connect with our whole team on Twitter at CISA. Now I wanted to remind you that this webinar tonight is really focused on just using some of CISA's tools for Global Read-A-Lab. So if you are just getting started with CISA and you're in need of some info about how to get started and how to set up a class, I recommend that you watch the brand new to CISA webinars for your grade level. There's a link there. So when you get these slides, you can click on that. Just another reminder, these slides are coming your way along with the recording of this presentation. Those are coming your way in just a few hours over email if you're watching me live. So just click on all of these links later. You're gonna find lots of resources and you can click through those at your convenience. I'm sure you know since you're joining us here for this webinar, but the Global Read-A-Lab is something that was created in 2010 by Perneal Rip. You can see her picture there at the bottom right of your screen. I also included her Twitter handle up there if you wanna give her a follow and let her know that you're joining us tonight. So now the Global Read-A-Lab has gone on for eight years and you can see that millions of students have participated. Really, teachers just read a certain book or set of books out loud to their students in a designated six week period. And then while they're doing that, they try to make global connections using whatever tools they choose to use. So that's kind of the point of our webinar tonight is to tell you how you can use CISA to make those connections. So here are some of the ways that teachers right now are planning to use CISA during Global Read-A-Lab. They are going to use connected blogs, which of course you can use anytime during the year but is particularly helpful during Global Read-A-Lab. Also the activity library and then maybe even making some creations like book snaps or using CISA for their reading responses. So those are the topics that we're going to cover tonight in our webinar. And I am joined here tonight by two awesome teachers, Michelle and Bobby. They're both gonna talk for several minutes tonight and share lots of tips and links with you. So again, make sure to open these slides later and click through some of the things they've shared. You might also be sure to look in the slide notes because we've added some additional links there as well. So I'm about ready to turn it over to Michelle. How's it going, Michelle? Good, glad to be here tonight. There we go. Okay, take it away. I'm gonna mute and you can just take it away. Okay, so glad to be here to talk about Global Read-A-Lab. I can't believe it's been eight years. I just try to remember how many years I've been doing it for in my classroom. But I'm gonna talk a lot about the connected blogs because I think it's just, it's a great way to start your year and try to make some of those connections with other classrooms that you can carry on past the Global Read-A-Loud. So I think that's really cool. I even had a teacher today connect with me that had been doing some things with me with Global Read-A-Loud last year and she was connecting this year trying to see, hey, can we connect again this year about Global Read-A-Loud? And it's just really neat to see those connections continue on throughout the whole year. So it's just a great beginning of the year place to start. So why add to those connected blogs? So some great things to do is it's just, it's an easy extension from your CSOT class. So if your students are putting something in their CSOT journal, it is literally just a one button push to add it into their blog. So they're just going to see the little globe type icon and bam, it's gonna be in your classes connected blog. So it's just nice. We all love things that are easy. So this is really an easy extension of something that you're already doing. So as you're working through the Global Read-A-Loud and you're having your students maybe doing a retelling or talking about their favorite part, things like that, you can then also send that to your blog and connect with other teachers. It gives them that global audience, that broader audience than just your classroom and their parents. They're so ready for having something more. I think they love to have the family connected and seeing the things they're doing. They love when they're classmates, see what they're doing. But if you can widen that open to them, they're going to put a lot more effort into their things that they're posting and I feel like that engagement is really high that way. So like we said, anything that you put in CSOT can be published to the blog, the photos, the videos, drawings, PDFs, links, all of those great things. So it's just a, it's an easy thing. We will be connecting you to a link for, if you are looking for those connected blogs and you're having trouble finding other people to connect to or you really want to venture out, maybe outside of your building, we will have a Google doc that is in this presentation where you can sign up, put your name, you can put your connected blog information. If you have a password, you can put that information in there and then you can have that, have your blog connected to other teachers right away so that it's all kind of set up. And the nice thing last year that I know I did is, I think I had 11 or 12 connected blogs for the Global Read-A-Loud and the pressure is a little bit off. First, some things I know, I've done other global collaborations and it's like, oh, I didn't get to this or I didn't get as much sent to that classroom as I wanted, but the connected blogs, it was nice because if I didn't put a lot in or if my students didn't put a lot in that week for the Global Read-A-Loud book of the week, there were always other teachers that had different posts on their connected blogs. So I felt like that was just kind of nice. It wasn't such a pressure because you know, you all have those weeks where it's like, you know, I didn't get as much as I wanted to this week for Global Read-A-Loud. So that's just a really nice thing with Seesaw connected blogs. So like what I said before, this is just a great beginning of the year partnership to start with other schools that you can keep for the whole year. So it might start with just Global Read-A-Loud, but then as the year goes through, maybe you're gonna connect other ways as well. So it's just kind of a really nice way to keep those connections going. Oh, we'll just, there we go. So I was just saying before we started that, you know, this year, I am feeling really excited because I know in my building, we have a really large first American population. So the selection of books and authors is very unique this year. I'm used to just having that one author for the picture book selections and having all the books by that one author. And this year, I'm not as familiar with these authors and there's so many different authors and so many different books that I'm not really so familiar with, which is exciting too, but also maybe like some of you guys, you're out there thinking, gosh, you know, I'm not really familiar with these books. What kind of activities can we do to connect our blocks? So this website here, the Bitly site that you have, and then I believe this is the one that I created last year. What I had did was put every week the book title and then have people kind of give us some ideas on the Google doc. What kind of things do you think we could do on our Seesaw blog this week for this book? Because like I said, I'm not as familiar with these books and these authors as in years past. And it's really that share the love, like see what other people have for ideas and there's always great things that come up. So these are the picture book author or a picture book selections this year. And I'm also really interested to see what people are gonna come up with for that sixth week where it's your choice. Because I'm not finding a ton of extra, but I'm sure there's lots of things out there that I haven't seen either. So yeah. Thank you so much, Michelle. And thanks for being patient with me as I was clumsily clicking through your slides. Just a reminder, everybody, you're getting these slides and there's a lot of links. So as you're going through, be sure to click on all the resources and look in those slide notes. We're sharing a lot of different ways that you can connect with blogs. And if you've never used Seesaw blogs before, that information somehow too is linked in these slides as well. So definitely take a look at that. That's not covered in our brand new to Seesaw webinar. So if you are new to Seesaw and that seems like new information to you about the blogs, then just take a look at some of those resources. Thanks, Michelle. I'm gonna turn it over to Bobby and then of course we'll all stay online for questions at the end too. So we'll talk to you in a few minutes, Michelle. Hi, thank you. Okay, hi, Bobby. We're ready to start with the activity library. Hi, everyone. I'm really happy to be here tonight and I'm super excited to talk about Seesaw and the use of Seesaw through Global Readaloud, two of my favorite things. So I was an elementary classroom teacher for 28 years, second and third grade. Before I stepped into this role as a tech integrator K through six. That's when I first found out about Global Readaloud. When I was looking for things, I've always had a strong passion for ELA when I was a classroom teacher. So it just really resonated with me as something that I really wanted to promote to my teachers. So that's how I kind of came into it. So tonight I wanna talk to you about how to use Seesaw's amazing activity library which launched at the end of June. Do make sure that if you are using iPads that you're on the most current that you've updated the app so that you can access all the full features of that activity library. But it's just incredible, it's growing all the time. So now when you press the green plus, you're gonna see four choices when you're logged in as in your account. You'll see that you can browse the activity library, create or share activities, post as student journal as always and send announcement. So that activity library just has an amazing amount of activities that are already in all ranges of topics and all grade levels, it's just super versatile. So you can search by topic, by grade, by subject and it's very easy. If you see an activity that you like and you might wanna use it, you just tap that little pink heart and it will then move into your library. So when you're in there, I'm sure you've seen it, it'll say Seesaw library on the left, the far left and then right next to it is the my library. Once it's in your library, then that of course means that you can assign it to your students and it becomes an assignment. What I love about the activities is you can use them as is or you can customize them. So that's very easy to do, so you might see something that's in a grade level above or below and you really like the idea of it and you can just kinda take it and adjust it to fit the needs of your students and even your topic. So if you haven't had a chance to really get in there and look at that activity library, it's well worth the time. So for Global Read-A-Loud, what I've done is created a bunch of activities. I'll talk first about the activities that are in the Seesaw library currently for a boy called Bat. Originally, what I did was I made a hyperdoc using Google Slides, you may have seen that. I posted it on Twitter a few times and I started to think about, well, what about teachers that don't have access to Chromebooks, they're using iPad? Well, Google Slides doesn't really work all that great on an iPad. So as I looked through my slides of the hyperdoc, I realized if I just saved them as JPEG images that I could then use them in Seesaw as the template for students to interact with. So that's what you'll see if you go into Seesaw's library, search for the word Bat. So when you go up in search, I did tag them all as second grade, third grade, fourth grade, as far as the grade level designation. So if you go into any of those grades and you put in the word Bat, you will see all 96 of those Seesaw activities, lots of choices for you to have with that. So all different skills, from figurative language to vocabulary to using context clues and a full range of just about anything you might want. And then as far as for the picture books, like Michelle talked about, there are I think seven activities and on that one you wanna search GRA18 and be in either kindergarten or first grade and you'll see those activities come up. Of course, those are more heavily based around some drawing and the use of the microphone for the students to kind of voice caption their response work for those books. So then I'd wanna talk about how, in addition to using activities that are in that library, I'd strongly encourage you to start dabbling and creating your own activities. So you can do that. As I said, you can either be in browsing in the library, you'll see the ability to add a new activity or under the plus, you can see it says create or share an activity. So it's really easy. I mean, once you've done one or two, you can just kind of whip right through them and do them quickly. For me personally, when I'm making a student template for a seesaw activity, I primarily use Pick Collage, I'll be honest, but I also use Google Slides. I think I use Pick Collage a little bit more because it's already on my iPad and then creating the activity in seesaw on my iPad. But I would encourage you to look at both of those. And I'm sure there's other things out there. As I mentioned before, if you've got a good HyperDoc of Google Slides, if you go in and just make JPEGs images out of those slides, then you can use them and pull them in for the student template. And seesaw's got some great icon shortcuts. I've got a little screenshot of that there. So for example, if you want the little microphone to show up in the directions that you're putting in for students, then you just do colon MIC for Mike colon. And then when it actually publishes that activity, you'll see those little icons that students are so familiar with and are really helpful to them as well. And then another neat feature is that you can make collections. So if you're using the free version of seesaw, you can have up to two collections. And seesaw plus, you can have 10. So making collections is just handy if you've got kind of a different variety of all kinds of topics you could, as I did with that in my seesaw library, I've got the whole collection for a boy called Bat and then the picture books too. So it's very easy. What you do is you see the little tile for the activity itself and up in the top right corner, it'll say organize. And when you tap that, you can create a new collection or put it into a collection that you've already kind of created and formed a topic. So yeah, that activity library is amazing. And we've got some things that are in there for you for Global ReelOut this year. Bobby, you are an activity library rock star. I mean, if you've created 96 activities about one book, that is pretty amazing. And we are all benefiting from that and super grateful to you. And I appreciate how you talked about not just using what's there, but creating your own. And then also talking about collections because that's a great way to organize those activities once you get used to using the activity library. I'm gonna piggyback off of what Bobby was saying and just remind you that if you know middle school or high school teachers who are participating in Global ReelOut, we do have a few things there for them. You might just always search GRA18 when you're looking for something related to Global ReelOut. I think that's a great way to kind of identify that your activity goes with Global ReelOut if you are submitting it to the library. So there are a couple of things waiting for you there if you're a middle school or high school person doing Global ReelOut or spread the word and tell the other people in your school or district if you think they might be using one of those big kid books. I did Global ReelOut with big kids. And so I know that if I was in the classroom so I would really be excited to have the access to the activity library. I just wanna also remind you that as we're talking here tonight, like if you're not using blogs and you're not using activity library and you're thinking, okay, but what could my students do? Or maybe you even share devices and or you don't have much access to devices and you're wondering what your students could do. I just wanna remind you that it could be just as simple as a post, a student just posting right to their own journal without using an activity. And one really simple thing they can always do is a book snap. I included the link to a webinar. So if you click that header there book snaps it'll open that webinar recording if you wanna see an explanation of how to do book snaps and CSOT explained by kind of the creator of that Tara Martin. So you could kind of listen along to her explain it. I also included some links there. So when you get the slide, if you click that image that says book snaps or you click the words other apps it's gonna open some activity links for you. Remember with your students as little as kindergarten on up a book snap is just taking a picture of some of the texts that might be sitting at their desk or table. They're just literally taking a picture of the page that they're reading and then using those annotation tools in CSOT to underline or draw or circle or add text labels or add emojis. So they can really kind of respond to the reading that way. So I just wanted to remind you that that's an option. If you want to see some other activities that people have contributed to the library about book snaps just search for book snaps in the library. So they won't necessarily be specific to global read aloud. You could do them anytime but during global read aloud that would be a really simple way to have your students post something to CSOT. So I just wanted to make sure to include that. I also wanna remind you too that anytime you think about a reading response you don't necessarily need an activity waiting there for you to do that. I also included another link here. So if you click the header in the center at the top there that says reading responses, I sent or I gave you a link to a webinar by a reading facilitator named Stacy Bigum and she did a whole CSOT webinar just about reading response routines. And that was really helpful and she had some great ideas. I like to just remind people that you have all these creative tools in CSOT and for even our littlest learners of course the drawing tool is really helpful for that or the video tool, they could record themselves saying something and I had older students who often responded to questions or prompts using the note tool. So you could do that as well. You could ask students to retell the story or to answer certain questions or prompts or to analyze characters. So you could do any of those things using the creative tools in CSOT even not necessarily using the activity library. I included a few screenshots here. Again, these are coming from Stacy Bigum and her webinar that she had done for CSOT previously but I just wanted to show you some examples. You can kind of see that these are some younger learners or younger readers, the drawing simple drawings with then audio recordings to kind of add some voice to their drawing or even responding in the note tool. You can see that there were some questions there and then the students responded by editing the item. So that's a really simple thing your students can do too even if they're not using all those wonderful activities that are waiting for you. They're in the library. I also want to give you a final organization tip. Bobby talked about collections in the activity library but as far as your own students posts be sure to organize those into folders. I recommend creating a folder called global read aloud and a little trick you probably have heard of before is that if you use a period or a punctuation mark in the folder's name it will bump it to the top of the list. And if you work with younger students and want them to see that folder at the top that's a really helpful thing to do to go ahead and like just bump it to the top so they can tag that item with that folder really easily. You can even also use emojis in your folder names. I also wanted to include for you the steps for how you print a whole folder. So if you have students creating a lot of things relating to global read aloud and you want to print them all at once I wanted to make sure you had the steps for that and it's included there where it says here's and it's underlined so you can click that link and it will show you exactly how to print an entire folder. We're so excited to take some questions from you tonight. So feel free to type a few in. I can see a few waiting for me already. So I'm gonna wrap up with a couple of other tips and next steps for you and then we'll start taking some questions. I wanna remind you that you can join us for Seesaw Chat on Twitter on the second and fourth Thursdays. And if you are listening to us live that's actually this week. We have that on September 27th. Of course, if you're listening on a recording you can just join us anytime on the second and fourth Thursdays. It's at 4 p.m. Pacific. We have lots of community and our community is very active on all these social media platforms on Seesaw, on Twitter, on Instagram and Facebook. And so I would just wanna make sure you know that you can connect with us in all of those places. And of course, we'd love to see you on Twitter for that live chat and it's this Thursday at 4 p.m. Pacific. Okay, so Bobby and Michelle I'm gonna start taking some questions and thanks everybody for your patience as I kind of read through these but I will let you know if we have a few things that we can answer. Oh, okay. Joy has a great question about emojis. We can give you a couple of tips Joy. Joy's saying how do you do emojis in Seesaw? So like if you're annotating with the drawing tool think about switching from using that pen to using the T for text because once you're in the text label tool then you can just use your device's emoji keyboard. And if you don't know where that is on your device I'm gonna encourage you to come to a webinar tomorrow with Tricia Lewis who is talking about how to find things like the emoji keyboard on a Chromebook. Bobby or Michelle, do you have any tips about emojis for Joy? I'm just familiar with the how easy it is on the iPad. I'm interested in that webinar. You just mentioned, Julie, about getting emojis for the Chromebook. So I wasn't really familiar with that. Well, that's actually, we just get that question pretty frequently like we're getting it tonight. People who are used to using it on like an iPhone or a smartphone or an iPad kind of don't know where to find that on a Chromebook or even on a computer. So Tricia has some great tips about that. So join us for that if you are interested. Hi, Mandy. Mandy saying, can students see other students' book snaps? So like with anything in CSI, you as the teacher have some settings you can choose. Those are by clicking the wrench in the top right or maybe in your part of the world they call it a spanner but you're clicking that wrench or spanner and then you have lots of settings for how you wanna customize your class. So you can choose to have your students see other students' creations or you can turn that off. So if you want students to see each other's work then just go ahead and turn that on. Hi, Sandy. Sandy's asking where she can find more info about CSI blog. I think all of that is linked in these slides. So I tried to include some how-to stuff for you. So when you get these, you can click on that. Otherwise, Sandy and everyone, I didn't include it in this particular slide deck but help.csid.me is a place where you can go to search for any topic you're looking for. Michelle, do you remember if there's anything else there that I should add or is it all? And it's probably under the help.csid.me if they search for connected blogs but I think I linked exactly like what are connected blogs. There was some info, I think it's probably off the help page but it was on that, I think one of the first connected blog pages. Okay, very cool. I do wanna tell you, Michelle and Bobby that people are giving you lots of thanks and appreciation in the question box. So along with just questions, they're saying that they really appreciated it tonight and learned a lot. Paula is reminding us that another great reading response activity could be the exit ticket. And so you can actually even search in the library for the term exit ticket and you'll find some things that people have created but I totally agree. That's how I use the note tool with my big kids a lot was like just a quick ticket out the door. We used it a lot in the time of day of like a bell ringer or an exit ticket where we use the note tool where they're just responding to a short prompt. So I totally agree with you. Oh good, Paula, I'm glad you appreciated that tip about putting the punctuation in the folder name. Yeah, that's a little trick that I learned from my colleague Angela but when I was a tech integrationist, I was using it in some like second grade classrooms and it was super convenient so that then they just knew right where it went. We're still on the line for a couple more minutes before my next webinar starts. So feel free to type in some additional questions if you want. I am down to not very many questions left in the question box. So feel free to type in a few more things while we're here. Paula, you're saying you contributed to the C-cell library. Can you give me more info about what label you were looking for or were you just trying to put the term GRA18 in your title of your activity? Let us know if we can help clarify that. Paula submitted something she's saying to the library so that's awesome. Lots of thanks and appreciation coming in. That's great, it was a pleasure. Yeah, everybody really liked it. This is a great topic and I can't wait to do this again next year with a whole different set of books too. I mean, Bobby, that's gonna mean you have your work cut out for you. You're gonna have to do 96 more next year. I better get busy. I know, right? And we really hope that you will add your information to the docs that will be coming out so that we can connect our blogs that way and it's nicely set up by grade level, by the category that you're gonna do, picture books or a boy called Bat or the other books as well. So that's a great resource. We hope we get lots of people signed up. Good reminder, Michelle, that is a great next step when you get these slides in the next couple of hours, everybody should just go ahead and if you're interested in connecting, jump on one of those docs or spreadsheets and add your information. And I would just love to see you all in CSOT chat. We're gonna be really talking about the activity library. So if that is of interest to you and you wanna kinda join us to chat, that's really low key. You just jump on Twitter and search the hashtag CSOT chat and then you can answer or tweet along. So that's actually just a really great way to connect with our community. So I hope you can join us 4 p.m. Pacific on Thursday. Well, I think we're done, ladies. I appreciate your time and your input so much. I'm gonna hop off because we have another webinar starting soon about family communication, grades three through five. So if you guys wanna join that, definitely look for that link and join us with Kara here in just a few minutes. But I loved being here with you tonight and I hope you can all join us again for another PD really soon. All right, thank you everybody, have a good night. Thanks everyone. Bye.