 Hello hello and welcome to PD and your PJs. I'm Julie. I'm so excited to be here with you today and I'm just honored that you would take time out of your busy back-to-school time of year to join me to talk about getting families connected in CESA. I have lots of tips and ideas to share with you today. Like I said, my name is Julie. I was a high school ELA teacher for 18 years. Now I'm on the teacher community team at CESA. I would love for you to find me on Twitter. I am at EdTech Julie Jay. I would love for you to give me a follow because I share lots of resources and ideas pertaining to CESA and then of course you can connect with our whole team on Twitter at CESA. Now in this webinar today I'm going to be talking specifically about getting families connected. I'm not going to be talking about creating a CESA account or creating a class or adding students. So if you're in need of that type of training please make sure you check our list of webinars. You can see the URL is right here at the bottom of the screen or you can always go to web.CESA.me backslash pds and you can take a look at any of our upcoming offerings. We just want to make sure you find everything you need if you're just getting started with CESA. So we're so excited to just talk about ways that you can engage families with updates from your classroom. So CESA is going to give your connected family members and parents some really personalized and visual updates about what's going on in the classroom and it's really just a transformative experience. I can tell you from my own experience in the classroom I was using CESA every day with 11th and 12th graders and we had families connected and they were kind of involved in our classroom in ways they never had been before. It was pretty amazing but I'm also a parent of younger students who are using CESA in their classrooms and it's an amazing experience as a parent as well. So whether you're a teacher or a parent I think you will love that experience of getting that peek inside the kids classrooms. So I'm going to show you some things today in the form of slides here and you're going to get the slides and the recording coming to you in an email pretty shortly after we conclude today. I'm just showing you some screen grabs and you can even see from this one I have arrows pointing to some of the right buttons that you will need. But the best part is after I click through a few of these slides today I'm going to take you right inside a CESA class and do a live demo for you so that you can see exactly how to do all the steps you need to do to get families connected. I'll show it to you in slides in case you need that as a resource later but then we'll go through and we'll do it together. Okay so I'm in my CESA class here. This is just a screenshot. I'll go into the live demo in a minute. Let's say this is my class it's called Mrs. V's fourth grade. I'm ready to invite families and what I need to do is just look at the bottom right of my screen and you see that button there that has the plus sign and families so I'm being prompted then to add families and if I click that button here's what opens up for me. What opens up for me is this pop-up that's going to ask me to turn on family access to make sure that I'm enabling it in my CESA class that families so I'm going to click this if I'm ready to connect families. I do want to assure you and make sure you make this clear to parents and potential connected families that you know they're only going to see items that belong to their own child or something that they're is tagged in so sometimes teachers will take a class photo and tag it to everyone or all students and then they would see other students in the photo but really they're only seeing their own child's work so sometimes people worry about that and they think oh well I see this work that belongs to another student and I really won't they're only going to see their own child's creation so that's something you can reassure people about but you're going to click that turn on family access button and then this is what's going to pop up on your screen you're going to have a couple of options here you can print some paper invitations that are unique for each kid in your class or you can send a sample email and I'm going to be honest with you today and saying I was teaching 11th and 12th graders and it was much more successful for me to send an email to parents and family members to get them connected big kids just aren't great at getting papers home you know there's not the same system of taking a folder home and emptying it out every night with your family members and hanging things up on the fridge so paper was not making it home with my big kids so I was having a lot of luck with email but of course I'm assuming you're probably working with younger students and there is a system where paper would make it home or even better if you're meeting with those family members at a meet the teacher or back to school kind of event then that's when you can get those paper invitations home so you're going to print here if you're connected to something that can print I'm going to show you exactly how to do that and each invitation will have a unique student name and qr code and again if you're interested you can just do the sample or you can click the email that then you paste into your own email to send to connected family members excuse me so here's something else that you'll really appreciate the paper invitation well I just cleared my throat there excuse me again we also have these paper invitations in a bunch of different languages so it's really important that you invite your family members in the language they speak so as you're clicking that paper invite button be sure to pull the drop down arrow and if you need to print that invitation in different language you can sure do that that's actually a really great opportunity to help get more families connected so I just wanted to remind you that was there and I can of course show you that in real time and I also want to remind you and this is like kind of something that's unclear to family members the first time they use sisa they're going to need to download the sisa family app if they want to connect from a phone so you know how you've been using the sisa class app so if you've been in webinars with us in the last few weeks and you've been playing along as a student you've been using the sisa class app you're using that in your classroom as a teacher your students are using that but and you know you remember it has the word class here in big letters parents and family members need to use the family app to connect so you need to make sure that you're making that clear to families if you're meeting with them face to face like if they're in your room for back to school meet the teacher night talk to them about the family app make sure that they're getting the right app because it won't really work for them to connect as a family member through the class app okay so just remind them about that it's pretty clear on the printed handout but it's a good opportunity when you're seeing them face to face to make that clear just to kind of help make that point I did a screen grab from my own smartphone the other day just to show you that like if you're in an app store on your phone I'm on an iOS phone here but this would be true even if you were on an android phone if you look in your app store for sisa you're going to see these two options the class option which is of course what we use as teachers and our students use it but also I'm seeing the family option and it's the family one that you're going to want your parents to get I included a video here for you to do in case that's a helpful resource I'm not going to play it during this particular training but if you want to see what it looks like from the perspective of the family app or for a family member you can watch this video later I just thought that might be helpful for me to include there I think this is a good time for me to pop out here and go into a sisa demo class and show you what it looks like to do all of this in real time so what I was showing you before we're just screen grabs that I pasted into some slides and that can be a helpful resource for you for later but let's just do it together in real time here I'll show you exactly the steps that you can go to if you're ready to connect families so I'm in a demonstration class we use this for PD and workshops and of course if you've been with us in some other webinars you've seen stuff like this before so this is kind of a pretend class with pretend students names I'm going to show you how I would connect families remember I'm going to go to the bottom right I'm going to go to the bottom right and click that plus families button and then I get this exact screen that I showed you in my slide a minute ago so I can print the paper invites or I can view the email since I didn't show you a screen grab email I'll just show it to you right now it's going to basically make an email for me that then I can copy and paste into whatever I use for email to send to family members and so if you already have parents who communicate with you over email this is a really helpful thing like I said I had a lot of success with that I just pasted this right in in my gmail and send it right to families it even suggests a subject line for you so you can do that and you also have the option of changing that and the other languages as well which is really cool or you can print the paper invitations and don't forget you can switch language as well I'm going to show you what this looks like so just so you can see how easy it is seesaw's doing all the hard work for you you're not having to create an invitation this printable for you and so I'm actually you know demoing to you right now on a computer if you are not connected to print from like an ipad or an iphone this wouldn't work the exact same way but if you're on your computer and you're connected to a printer this is pretty simple so I'm even going to get a page of instructions and FAQs here so if that's helpful for me to review I can review it as well I'm going to also get a list of people in my class who already have connected family members and right now at the very beginning of the school year I'm assuming if you're a northern hemisphere teacher you're right at your beginning of the year you're not going to probably have this list you don't probably have connected parents yet but later in the year this is really helpful because when you're trying to see who's left to get connected and who you need to reach out to it's really helpful to look at this list and you can always generate it just by clicking that plus families button and then the the print the invitations and you'll see that list even if you don't print it you could always just take a quick screenshot if you needed that information but then here's the good stuff here's my invitations and I want to show you you can see that it's a 12 page file I have one for each of my students here it's a unique invite with their name at the top it's just for them and it has their unique join code the name of the class and my teacher name appears here and then the student name is here lots of helpful instructions and information for parents here and then their unique join code so I can just with just a couple of clicks I print all of these in invitations for my students and get those ready to go for back to school night or to send home with students when school begins so it's pretty pretty cool setup and it's pretty quick and convenient for teachers so that's that's how we do it starting here with the plus families and then getting that print paper invites button it's just as simple as that so I'm going to pop back into my slides and go over just a few final things before we take a few questions okay so you saw how I generated the paper invitations and you could see that the student's name is at the top I give you some advice here make sure you're sending home the right paper with the right student okay because that is a code unique for them and remember families can connect just by scanning this code it just takes a second they need to do that so in the staff family app just like we talked about a few minutes ago so make sure if they're trying to connect they're doing it with a family app and of course they don't have to join with the app they can join with the url I'll go back to the slide and just explain a few more things and then I'll talk about the url I did want to just remind you before I clicked too fast that students can have up to 10 family members connected to their journal so this paper could be used over and over you don't have to print new invitations Alonzo could take this home and the people who live in his house could connect but he could even share that with aunts uncles grandparents or whoever else wanted to connect to his journal so that's pretty cool too they can have up to 10 family members make sure you're sending home the right right okay and this is what I was starting to say that family members can scan the code in the family app and join in an instant or they can type the web address or url that's listed on the invitation it shows up right here under from your computer so if a parent is not connecting with a smartphone and they just want to connect with a computer they can just type in that address and they can connect just as quickly there's just one extra step though they have to pick their student's name from a list because they're not joining with a unique code like this so they have to click their kid's name off the list and then you can easily too I just wanted to remind you that it's a little bit of a different system but it is super fast for both parents okay so if you are meeting with people in your class as far as as part of that back to school event we do have a website ready go for you it's something that if it's handy for you to do it you could project on a screen or you could have open on a few student devices I can see that it's slow to open here okay if you have a few student devices open like maybe you could have this on computer screens I'm ready for parents to see if you are attempting to connect real time in your classroom this is super the link is here in the slide okay so if you just click this later you can get to this back to school website it talks about what is seesaw it gives you a little video it walks parents through all this information we have the video available in a couple of different languages and then it gives those same sign-up instructions that I showed you on a slide earlier with even more tips it is really helpful if you have this available as you're meeting with parents so I just wanted you to know that resource existed for you it's that back to school or family website the other piece of advice I like to give teachers to is that if you're connecting parents and family members to seesaw make sure there's something waiting there for them and that they're not getting to a blank screen when they join it's really cool if when they log in to seesaw for the first time that they see something like a welcome video or even just a photo of your classroom anything that you want to post there for everyone you can just tag it to all students or everyone and then anyone who logs in can see it and it could just be like a welcoming message but that's really nice for families to see that when they log in for the first time so just make sure students have posted something before you connect families and we have some ideas for you a lot of nice things waiting for you in the seesaw activity library and if you want to join us for our first five activities pd the link is there and of course you know you can find all of our pds at web.seesaw.me backslash pds we give you lots of ideas for your students first posts in seesaw okay don't forget if you get stuck with any of these steps and you need help reach out to us through the help center you can search by a lot of really you can submit a help request here there's like three different ways you can get some help to start there that's a great place to start if you get stuck and then i always want to remind you before we end don't forget to connect with our community we're pretty active on twitter facebook and instagram so find us of those spots we even have grade level specific groups on facebook so i hope you can join the one that's specific to your grade and don't forget to find me on twitter i'm at edtechjulij i think what we'll do now is i'll stop the recording but i'll stay online for a few more minutes to answer questions so go ahead and type your questions in the question box and we'll take a few minutes to go over those over those i'm going to stop my recording today and then just wait the thanks so much for joining me and i hope to see you in a pd again really soon bye