 Welcome to Sharing Book Projects with Seesaw. My name is Cara Brem and I am a former third through fifth grade and also seventh grade math teacher and a current instructional facilitator in a middle school outside of Raleigh, North Carolina. You are welcome to connect with me on Twitter at Mrs. Brem Tweets or on Instagram at Mrs. Brem Math, but know that I'm a Google level 1 and 2 certified educator. I'm a Seesaw ambassador for four years now and I'm also a national board certified teacher in literacy. And I'm so excited to have you here with me to learn a little bit about sharing book projects with Seesaw. So everyone who's with me should be familiar with the Seesaw platform. So I'm not going to be spending much time talking about the Seesaw platform itself, but I'm going to be talking about how I took my students from sharing book projects by just turning something in to actually making it be an interactive and really powerful learning experience for them and others. So I'm going to tell you a little bit about my students and my fourth graders specifically that were asked to do a book project. And I, like you, would present the project to my class. I allowed my students time and grace. I allowed them time to create. I allowed flexibility for submissions. And I also enforced that they were all going to share their student work on Seesaw when they were done. And by doing that, it totally changed the quality of work and the excitement in the project for my students. So I want to share with you my book project that I used. I called it a novel think-tact-toe. My students were assigned a book project and they were asked to share all of the end result products on Seesaw. So I have that here to share with you today and I actually even give you links to this. So if you are watching, it is embedded in my slides, but the students receive this novel think-tact-toe and I had students reading a variety of books based on their reading needs. So at one time, I believe I had six book groups going on in my room of 33 students and they all received the exact same novel think-tact-toe. So my books were differentiated. And just to kind of give you an idea here, each student got this about partway through the book. I did not wait until the very end of the book to pass off this book project, unlike maybe some other projects where you might, oh, we'll finish the book and then I'll give them the project. Because I wanted them thinking, excuse me, thinking and creating throughout the project and not just waiting until the end and then panicking, you know, students get that, oh no, I have to get it all done. They really dove in when I gave them that time to think and create and I don't regret that one bit. So when you get this, you're able to click on this and make a copy for yourself that will kind of force a copy for you. So what you'll be able to do is click on make a copy when you get it and then you're able to have that there for you to use and edit if you want. And I just ask that, you know, you give me a little bit of credit and feel free to then take the rest off on your own. But this project really allowed my students choice and voice. And some examples that we had going across the top of the project, the first row across the top, the students were able to decide what they wanted. So if you think of a tic-tac-toe board, you're thinking three in a row. Maybe you go across the top, maybe you go up and down, maybe you go in a diagonal. And we actually even played a game, a tic-tac-toe, a couple games so that they got the idea, especially I had a lot of English language learners in my room. So then I needed them to know tic-tac-toe and most of them knew it in their own language as called something else. So once they saw the game being played, they understood the rules or requirements for this project. So the first one was pretending that they were an advice columnist and writing a letter to their character telling them how to solve one of the problems. Well, I found out that, and I've done this project for years even before CESA was even alive. This is my 21st, goodness, 21st year of teaching, 21 years under my belt, 22, oh goodness. But I've had this going for a while, but I've tweaked it for CESA. And I found that more recently, since newspapers are dwindling out, they don't really know advice columnists as much, even though they still exist. So we had to talk a little bit about that, but they were pretending to be one of those. The middle one is creating a comic strip and the one on the right was choosing a song. So I want to share with you this comic strip. This is from one of my fourth graders. This is his actual end result here that he shared in CESA. So this is the comic that I made from my book, Knuckle's Window. I drew this thing one of the past weeks. What did you do all of the summer? I drew Miss Ranger and she sent a little class. And then I drew it on the second day of school. And each time it's all... All right. So you can see that end result, while it was still done on paper. I was not a paperless classroom, nor am I, but that end result is just being captured and recorded in CESA. Yeah, it might get you a little motion sick, but you know, I think that quality is in there. If you watch the whole thing, and the passion is in there as well, which is something we don't want our students to lose. Here was an example of a song. They chose a song and were able to rewrite the lyrics to tell the pros and the cons. And this student was one of my English language learners, and he was amazing. And he was also very honest. He wasn't understanding how to do that. And he didn't ask, which was another conversation that we had, but he came up with his own song. He wrote his own song that he did, that went with the book that he read, rather than rewrite lyrics that already existed. So I think a couple things with that as the teacher that told me, we needed to have a conversation about asking, right? We need to understand directions, but also it told me, maybe I need to give examples or something more concrete to students in my classroom that might have different kinds of learning abilities and learning needs. And he's learning the English language. So that's truly a struggle of his. One of the things that I have in the middle of my board was a free space. And I want to talk about that first. So we're looking at the second row here. The free space, I allowed students to use as a true free space where no activity was expected. But some of my students, I allowed them to choose an activity they wanted to do in that space. So for example, it could be another activity from the project that might not have been quote three in a row. Or it could be something that they wanted to create on their own and really allow them that time to be creative and that time to engage students that I knew would take a longer time or that maybe rush through and said, oh yeah, I'm just going to use the free space. But you know that they can do more than you can take that and apply that free space however you like. But I tend to leave it just say free space and then go over that separately with different groups of students. So that helps with that differentiation piece. Here on the left was take out the garbage. So this was students creating an actual model of a garbage can. And they had to fill it with items that would be found in their character's trash and why they think they would be there. So this is an example of a student response. This student chose to make her own garbage can. This is the garbage can here that's blue. And then she tipped it on its side to get it in video. All right. Well, you're welcome to watch the whole almost two and a half minutes of her explanation of all the items in her trash can. But if the student is able to explain through video, it's so much more powerful than just maybe reading it or writing it down on a piece of paper. I found that the students were able to talk and tell more when they used video to capture their voice or they used the audio microphone to capture their voice. Then they were ever going to write out on paper for me, even my most creative writers. Another example here on the right was writing math problems using details from the story. So each problem had to cover a different math concept. So this student took a photo of math problems that she did on another piece of paper. Then she used the caption tool to not only tell the problems, but also share what the answer is. But here you can actually see her work out those math problems. But don't you love that that math is integrated right in there with the language arts? I love it. The last row across the bottom was students creating a T-shirt for a character. And that was interesting. I had students who created paper T-shirts. I had students who brought in an actual physical T-shirt and created that. So that was a neat one. And then this middle one here was party planning. And it was one that I really liked. Students had to create a thematic party for one of the characters to celebrate something that happened in the story. This is my invitation. This is my invitation. This is my invitation. This is my invitation. This is my invitation. This is my invitation. This is my invitation. This is my invitation. This is my invitation. This is my invitation. So you get the idea here that they're creating this surprise party and also she decided she was going to go beyond the invitation and she was going to bring the character a present. And so I thought that was a good extension even of the expectation. The last one here is creating a TV commercial for the book. The students were allowed to just record it using the Seesaw video tool or they could app smash using a green screen app. We use do ink, for example. But this student created a video for Indian in the cupboard of a very quick commercial. And I think you can watch it yourself when you dive in here. But a couple things. Here are some pictures from one of my tweets about it. But what I liked about it was they didn't leave the classroom to go to any fancy green screen studio. We didn't have that in our building. I used that green, you know, green butcher paper, the kind that use the cover bulletin boards. And I hung up two pieces on the wall in my room and had the iPad there and the two students, one recorded for the other one who was actually presenting. So their creativity has been, you know, unlocked and it's been just so powerful. I want to share with you how to actually create one of these activities. So I want you to follow along live and you can create them. So what we have here is just a play PD class for teachers. And this is the actual copy of the novel thing tacto. Over on the right hand side, you have the activities button with the light bulb. So when I click that, I can, if I've not shared any activities, I can browse the activity library. So that's where I want to go to the activity library. If I'm in that activity library, what I actually do here is I want to create my own activity. So I would go to my library. Instead of pulling an activity from the community, I'm going to go to my library. If you've never created one, then your library will be empty. But right here with this create new activity is where you would create your own seesaw activity that maybe you would share with your students or select students, right? And we'll talk about that in a minute. I'm going to create an activity for that character. If it'll type here, there we go, t shirt. So that's what I'll call it. And then this is where I'm going to type instructions for my students. So I like to number my instructions like create a t shirt for a character in the book, the pictures and words on the t shirt. Whoops, if I could spell here, right? Don't you love them, spell check helps you out. So the pictures on the words on the t shirt, let's see what I want to say should tell us about the, let's see the character in detail. Let's see, step two. How do we want them to do that? Well, let's tell them what to do. We're going to tell them click add. Oh, what does that mean add? Well, this is where students would be able to add a response. So when I type, click add. So we're going to say click the add button or add response button to share your t shirt, because maybe you have them sketch it out on paper first. That actually works really well. When they're, whoops, can't have two number two is when they're done with that, we want to tell them you can use any of the CSOP tools to capture your t shirt creation. And then you're probably wondering what's up with all those little weird signs, right? If you haven't ever created an activity before, those are icons that will appear in there. So we're going to click the check to submit for teacher approval. Now I want to share with my students an example. So I'm going to click on add multimedia instructions or example. And what that's going to do is allow me to upload a picture that I already have, which is right here hanging out for you. So I'm going to just drag and drop that I could pull it from my Google Drive or selected directly from my device, but I already had it downloaded. So I'm going to drag and drop that in there. So then they have an image. Since it's in here, excuse the blurriness, I could add labels to it. I could record over it. I could add another photo in there. Maybe I decide I don't want that label. I can delete that label. I can add captions. I could put a background in here. Should I want a background behind it? There we go. Something simple. I could draw on it. All that good stuff. But I'm going to add by clicking the check. Then if I scroll down, I can see that it's an example of what a t-shirt might look like is in there. Maybe I have students in my classroom I need to record my voice for so that I can record. I want to allow the microphone, record, create a t-shirt for a character in the book. The pictures and words on the t-shirt should tell us about the character in detail. Click the add button to share your t-shirt. You can use any of the seesaw tools to capture your t-shirt creation. Click the check to submit for teacher approval. And all of that's going to be in there ready to go for my student. When I'm done with that, and this is processing to add it in, then I would click save. And if I save this activity, it's now in my activity library. And when it's in my activity library, I can, what if I wanted to change something? I can edit my activity. I could delete it. I could share it with others. I could create a collection. And you can see in here where I put those funny symbols like the colon add colon, that's going to put this icon in here. Or the colon seesaw colon. That's going to put the icon in there. The same with the colon check colon. And if I want to assign this to special students, like maybe I want to assign this to all of the students in this class, or I want to edit the students, and I just want Andrea and Antonio and Cameron to have this, then I can just assign it to select students. If I want to put it in a special folder, like maybe I want to put this in my language art folder, I can add it to that folder. If I didn't have a folder for it, like maybe I want to create a folder just specifically to, you know, to my tic-tac-toe activity. If I want to assign this to my getting started and special students, I could, a different class, I could assign it to that class. I could also schedule it if I'd like. And I have that feature available. Now, when it's here, I might want to email this to teachers in my school, and I could send an invite to teachers in my school. Whoops, I'm not sure who I just sent that to, but they're about to get it. But I could also possibly assign this to our, excuse me, share this by clicking those three buttons and share this activity on social media. I could get a link to that activity. I could get an embed code because I want to put it somewhere, like on a web page, for example, and share it with teachers. All of that is available. So what I'm going to actually do is I'm going to, hold on a second, I'm going to exit out of here, and I am going to paste that link so it's in the slide so you can get a copy of that activity in the CSOL Activity Library so that it will be there for you. And there we go. When you get these slides, it'll be there and you'll be like, oh, there it is. I see it. And you can take it and use it if you'd like for your students. The amazing thing about this is that a lot of these ideas that I get from CSOL and to use in CSOL, I get from the CSOL community. So I encourage you to connect with the CSOL community on Twitter and Instagram, Facebook, on the CSOL Teacher's page, and the grade level pages as well. If you are joining me through a recording, the last three digits of your six-digit code are 947. But I thank everyone so much for being here today.