 Hey everyone, welcome to creating your first activity. We are so honored you are here learning a little bit more about CESA. I'm Angela, and I really want you to know that we've had some amazing updates to CESA. So if you and your students are using iOS devices, that is going to require you to update your CESA app to at least CESA 7.1 or higher. Of course, we have amazing updates also on Chromebooks or any other computer that you use or even if you can get on a web browser on an Android device, you can see our updates as well. But of course, that doesn't require an app update. You just go to the web browser. So if you're here and listening to me, you can get a certificate for attending this session or watching this session, just listen for the code that I'm going to share. You'll see in the description on YouTube how you get the certificate or you can check the email with the follow-up as well. And here we go. Let's talk about creating that very first CESA activity. As I mentioned before, I'm Angela and I lead the community team here at CESA. And I really started using CESA in 2014 as they were creating the app. I used it with my amazing kindergarteners and we had five iPads. So I'm a really big proponent of creating with amazing technologies and it really doesn't matter if you don't have one-to-one devices. So we have lots to explore today. We are focused, of course, on creating that very first activity. So we have lots of things to talk through. We are going to show you how to create an activity without a template. We will show you how to add icons to instructions, add a photo template, insert images as templates, and of course spend some time answering your questions as well. So let's get started with creating an activity without a template. So what I'm actually going to do is I'm going to show you how as a teacher. So if you're signed into your teacher account right now on CESA, you could actually follow along with me and give it a go here as well. So when you tap that green add button, you will choose assign activity and that is going to bring you into what is known as my library. This is your space where you have maybe saved activities already, but you'll also notice this box where it says create new activity. So that's where you're going to want to click to start from scratch. When you do that, it will bring you to a screen that looks like this. There are some things that you'll need to fill out like what do you want to call the activity, you'll name it, instructions. You can add voice instructions, add examples, and add student templates. And of course we have some more options, but again in this example, we are not going to add a student template. And just to show you something, when you create an activity and it does not have a template, that is going to allow your students to actually just go directly to the creative tools. And they're going to see those creative tools after they tap that green add response button on the activity. So this is one thing that just to note with your students, if they have been really familiar with using CISA from the green add circle button from the journal view, you're really going to want to model and demonstrate when you share an activity, they actually will have to tap the add button on the activity itself. Okay, so what we're going to also talk about and show you are these icons that you can use that will basically allow you to insert these in your activity directions. So these are really handy if you're working with younger students that are maybe pre-readers that really like those picture cues. Maybe you're working with students at any age that just needs some nice visual guidance as well. That is very helpful. So what I'm going to do right now is I'm going to go into our CISA class. I'm signed in as a teacher. I'm going to tap the green add button and assign activity. Again, this brings me right into my personal activity library. I'm going to create our new activity. So again, that's what we're doing here today. So here we go. I'm actually going to create an activity. Maybe I'm going to talk about our Steam Challenge car building. Okay, so in my classroom, I had students construct a car and they were doing some testing with it. So I'm going to start my instructions. And one of the things I always like to do if you're working with younger students is I'd like to start the instructions with the icon first. Because then visually it lines up vertically and you'll see what I mean in a moment. So step one, I'm going to say tap the green add button. Okay, that's key because that's how they actually start the response from the activity. And then I'm going to say Use the photo tool. I could say take a photo of the car you built. Okay, and again you might be saying Angela, why do you have these colons and then the word add and then the word photo? Those are the shortcuts that come from this page that is going to allow me when I save the activity this icon is going to pop up. So whatever you type in between those colons is going to show up as the icon if it's on this page. Okay, so then I'm going to say tap the mic. Tap the mic and tell me about your car. And then finally I'm going to keep this one kind of short. Tap the green check and add to your journal. So I always love adding voice instructions no matter if my students are readers or non-readers. I just think it offers a level of support for all students. If they need it, they can listen. So I'm going to go ahead and tap add voice instructions. Here we go. First, tap the green add button. Next, take a photo of the car you built. Then tap the mic and tell me about your car. Last, tap the green check and add to your journal. So those have been added. I also love to, whenever possible, add an example. This might be a piece of student work if you've done this activity before or it might be something that you are just modeling. As you get more advanced with activities, this is also the spot that you could include a multi-multi-media instructions. For example, you could insert a video of you teaching or giving instructions on something in this space as well. But for now, I'm just going to tap here. I'm actually going to go to upload. I'm going to find my photo of my amazing car. There it is. We're going to add that. I'm going to use that, of course, as the example. Now, again, here's where I would add a template, but for this example, we were not going to do that. So I'm not going to do that right now. I'm going to just tap in the bottom right and go to save. So there we go. Do you see my lovely icon showing up right here? And I also have the ability to give you the instructions. First, tap the green. Then what do you do? So what you can do right now is I would tap this assign button. And when I tap that, I am going to be able to then assign it to students in my class. So I would tap the class I'm in right now. I could choose specific students to share it with if I wanted to differentiate specific folders or specific skills to attach to this activity. This is great. If you have the paid version of CSI, you can add skills, which is really awesome. And then I can just go to assign to one class here in the bottom right. So then if I click this button, it's going to take me into the class. You'll notice I'm right now in the activity tab on the right. You can kind of see that that's where I am in my class. And here we are. Here is my activity that I just shared. I always love to use this add response to kind of test out my activity, right? Maybe before I share it with students. So I would tap samples, you know, you can tap sample student and then you can try it out. Notice here at the top students always have the option as well to view those instruction instructions again if needed. But you notice when I tapped add response, it brought me right into the creative tools. Again, that's because I did not have a template. Okay. So I would then go ahead. I can, of course, let's pretend I have a different car that I've done. It's looking quite the same, right? I'm going to draw on it. Maybe I'm going to show some parts. I'm going to tap that green check and there is my student response. So you can see it's shown as sample student. So that again, using sample student is also a really, really great way to model the activity for your students before. So one of the things I've really picked up on lately is sometimes I see teachers just, maybe they're just sharing like several, several, several activities because they find them and they think they have to share them right away with your students or assign them to your students. You don't need to do that. Just assign them to your students when they're close to actually responding. One more thing I want to point out here is at the top, this gray bar is actually going to allow you to see all of the responses in one spot, which is amazing and wonderful. Okay. So yay, we're cruising right along here. So we have talked about creating our first activity. Now let's talk about adding a template to an activity. So when you do that, you start the same way. You tap the green add button, choose assign activity. You will then see this option to create a new activity. And this time we are going to add a student template to this activity. Now there are tons of choices for templates and you can actually use any of these to create one just in Seesaw. So kind of my go to once for creating a template would be photo, drawing, or upload. That's what I usually have used when I'm creating a template, but you could use all of them. You could use the note tool and things like that. A couple of things to note. When you are adding a template to an activity, most in most cases, you will want it to be an image file. So those are things like a PNG, a JPEG, a screenshot, an actual photo. Because when you add it that way, your students are able to label on it, record voice, add photos on top of it, draw on top of it, all the tools that you want them to use, they are able to use. Now, if I uploaded as a PDF, they can't do a whole lot. They can record their voice on one page or they can type a caption. So they don't have as many options. So a lot of teachers get stuck here because they don't realize they just added it as a PDF. So you also get this warning. If you are adding something as a PDF, we say, uh, just remember your students cannot draw or label on PDFs. So are we ready to try it? When you want to add a photo as a template, you can choose to use the photo tool and that is going to open the camera on your device. Or you can add a photo from your computer or your device by using the upload option. And today I'm going to choose the upload option because I have a photo ready. So again, here we go. We're creating an activity with a template. So here we go. Create new activity. I'm going to say true story. Um, this is from my son is in seventh grade. And just the other day, he had to, um, label the parts of a sewing machine because he is in, um, family and consumer science right now in seventh grade. So in this activity, I can say, you know, click on the add button. And again, did you notice in the first activity I said tap? And I'm saying click now. Think about what your students are using. If they're on a Chromebook, they're probably going to click on something. If they're on an iPad, they're going to tap something. So I try to use the word that the verb that matches. Um, and then, um, I'm going to say label. Label the parts of the sewing machine. And I'm not going to go through this whole entire example because you heard me and saw me show you before. So what I'm going to do right now is I'm going to go here and add a template. I'm going to choose upload. I have a file on my computer. So I'm going to grab that. Here's my sewing machine photo. And I'm just going to tap the green check. So there we go. There's my sewing machine. I could add the labels that I want him to use to label the sewing machine. And I could stack them down here at the bottom if I wanted to. And that would be something that my students could move around on the page. You can think about that. But I'm going to tap the green check. There's my template. Now, I could in addition include an example. Or because I've included a template, that's actually going to pop up in the example area if I leave example blank, if that makes sense. So let's pretend I've written all my lovely instructions, but I'm just going to save this. There is my, look at that. There's my, there's my activity. It has a template I can see right here, right? Because it's attached and it is an image. So I'm going to assign this, I'm going to put it in this class. I'm going to go into my class to view that activity. And there it is, waiting to get responded to. So I'm going to tap add response. Again, your students are going to see the same thing appear in their activity tab. It's going to look just like this. So I'm going to tap add response. I'm going to choose my name because I'm playing as a teacher. I'm just going to select sample student. But you'll notice it didn't take me to the creative tools. It took me right to the template that my teacher had put in this activity. Okay. I can still view the instructions up here, but now I'm ready to draw record voice and all of that on this activity. Okay. So let's keep moving along here. I'm talking about adding an activity template created outside of seesaw. So I will say, and maybe I'll show that before I move on to that, I should back up just for a second because one of the things, I'm going to do this kind of fast. So I'm going to go to assign activity. I'm going to go to create new activity. And I'm going to choose add a template because again, we're talking about creating templates, right? I just showed you a photo template, but I could go here and I could choose the drawing tool. And with all of the awesome new backgrounds in seesaw, I might choose to just build my template right inside seesaw. Okay. So this might be great if, you know, maybe I'm going to choose that. And then I'm going to add a label that's going to help me create a word sort for my students, right? So this might look familiar or maybe, you know, maybe you have some other sorting activity. Now, when I add these labels here, if I tap the three dots, I can actually lock this label. And that means I can prevent my students from moving it around, right? Because this is kind of, I'm setting this up as a sorting map, basically. I'm going to go to my shapes tool. Maybe I'm going to pull this in here. A nice line. We'll see if I can get it to line up how I want it to. All right. So there is my template that I've created just right inside seesaw. Okay. So lots of options. I'm going to tap the green check. And I can add that as an activity as well, right? So that's just one that I created inside seesaw. So now let's continue and talk about outside of seesaw. I kind of jumped ahead there for a second. A couple of my favorite tools to use if I need to create outside seesaw. These are the three. So Google Slides, Google Drawings, or canva.com, which is also free. These are just things that you can use to create a template in if you need to outside of seesaw. So I want to talk first about Google Slides. This is the same if you are using Google Drawings as well. If you're in a slide deck, you just go to File, Download As, and then choose JPEG or PNG. And it will actually download just the current slide as an image. And remember, that's really key if you want your students to draw on it, label, record boys have all the tools. So what I also love is if you're not yet familiar with the new Chrome extension, this is something that you can add. If you are working on a computer that has a Chrome browser, or of course, if your students have Chromebooks, you can add this extension to seesaw. And it allows you to capture the screen really, really, really easily. Okay. So it's basically you can capture the entire screen or you can actually snap a portion of the screen. And it makes it super simple because it goes right into seesaw. So one thing I want to tell you, when you are creating a template, everything that you create on that template sticks like glue. It is not moving. Okay. So imagine you just created this amazing Google slide and maybe you have all these movable parts on it. The moment you download that little friend as a JPEG, there's nothing moving on it. It is static. You have basically just laminated that. Okay. So when it goes into seesaw and you've added it as a template, then when you add labels or photos on top of it, that's where the movable parts come in. Okay. So I've seen some sad side teachers that will create, you know, really elaborate, you know, the Google slides and they'll create these really elaborate movable pieces. But if you try to get that into seesaw, it's not going to work for you. You are basically, if you're using an outside source like Google slides, Google drawing or Canva, you're basically creating a background image that you will be downloading. So keep that in mind. So as an example, here is I'm literally in my Google slides right now, right? So what I can do, I'm going to exit. So you see this full effect. I want this to come into seesaw as my template. So I'm going to go to File. I'm going to go to Download as, and there's my PN, or my JPEG or PNG, and you see it just got downloaded. So now I'm going to bop over to seesaw. I'm going to use the same one. I'm going to just delete this template. Let's pretend that never happened. And I want to add this outside template. So here we go. I'm going to upload it because it's down here. I'm just going to drag it onto the screen. And then I'm going to tap the green check. Now, this is where, again, if I want to add movable pieces to it, as the teacher, I can do that. Maybe you're going to get these all stacked for your students down here. The other thing, if you've not played with photos that are movable, wow. Now, this is not going to really go with my letter ending word scheme here. But if you're working with younger learners, or maybe students that speak multiple languages, things like this where you can sort photos, do picture sorts, that's huge. So think about that option as well. So when I tap the green check, let's pretend I have tons of words and tons of photos on there. When I tap the green check, and I'm just going to say, ah, testing template, okay. Add button, not really writing all the instructions. You get the idea. I'm going to save this. It's going to go in my activity library. I'm going to assign it to my students in fourth grade. If I want to view it, I'm just going to click here to get back to my class. And there it is. Now, I want to show you what this looks like because I added movable parts to the top of the template. So here we go. I'm going to go to add response. I like to test a sample student. So now when your students go into this activity, do you see this? They are able to move this around. They can move this over here. Of course, they could add more words, right? So they might say, ah, the word pan. I know that that goes over here. They can write words. They can, you know, whatever they want. But do you notice I am not able to move this an, right? Because again, that was built in Google Slides and I added it to CSOT. So keep that in mind. I'm going to tap the green check. There we go. Now, let's keep cruising here in our slides. And I just always like to give a little shout out to our help center, right? Help.csot.me. This should be your very first stop if you have a CSOT related question. Great resources there. We're going to go into some questions momentarily. But I got so carried away. I forgot to give anyone a code for listening to this session. So the code you're going to need, if you're listening to the recording, is 109861. And I want to actually show you one other thing that is brand spanking new in CSOT and super exciting is when I go to the green add button, I'm going to go to assign activity and I'm actually going to show you an activity that I created using our new multi-page option. So here's an activity I created and it has a template and the template has five pages. Okay. So I created this right in CSOT. We're doing a STEM challenge and I as a teacher created this to guide my students as they were doing their testing and building of their cars down inclines, measuring distance and all that, right? So I included this in CSOT as a template. They are then able to respond and you'll see all the directions here, build a car using any classroom material, tap the add response button, take a photo of your car and tap the mate to make a prediction. That's page one. Then they go to page two. So they're actually creating a multi-page story with the template here that I created. So that's pretty awesome as well. If you haven't yet explored that, it is a premium feature but you can just start playing with that if you're using free CSOT by just hopping into a free trial to get going with that. So that's really exciting as well. We're really eager to see how that opens up so many more opportunities for students to really, really get created. So what I would like to do now is really figure out what questions you have for us here today.