 Welcome to everyone. We have our amazing ambassadors and certified educators who are also CSOT admins with us today and we are excited to share with you a messages Q&A. My name is Kara. I am from the community team with us. We also have Mila from our marketing team and Brittany from our product team and we are super excited to have you be here and experience this Q&A session with us. Our plan for today, our plan for today is to kind of fill you in. Some of you may already have dove in headfirst into messages but if not we're going to share a little bit upfront for what messages, what is messages. Brittany will give you a live demo today and we will also support your school with some early access resources that we have prepared for you and kind of walk you through what's available so you can share them out with your community. We will also of course have some Q&A time so we want you to share your feedback. We want you to ask questions and again use that question box at any time to drop your questions. We are here for you. All right, we are going to start with a very quick poll. So if you could click on your screen and answer the question that you see. Have you turned on seesaw messages in your school or district? So if you could just select one or the other that would be amazing. Thank you for that. Click that submit button and I will share with you a little bit of the results here in just a moment. So thank you. Oh I see everyone dropping it in right now. Look at that number increased. Awesome. Thank you for your participation. We appreciate that. Great. A few more of you will share and then I will close the poll. This is awesome. Thank you. All right, let's see what you all are doing. All right. We can see that some of you have not yet turned on messages. Totally fine and some of you have. So we are excited to have both of those audiences here with us today. Lots to learn and lots to share from both sides. So thank you for that. Great. If you are familiar with messages then this is just a quick review and maybe you'll pick up a few things as well. But if you are new to messages we want you to know that messages is the new safe and flexible school wide messaging tool designed to be used by your whole entire school community, admins, teachers, students and families. If you didn't already know messages is now available for early access to everyone at all seesaw for schools and new features for messages continue to be developed thanks to the help of our early access schools and districts. By August of 2022, so just in a few months from now, messages will be available to all users and the current inbox will be removed. So let's dive in to what messages can do for your school community. If you are AC software schools administrator, you can send messages or announcements to other admins that are linked to your account, all teachers, all students or families connected to the school. You can also send to the to entire groups of classes or grade levels or schools. Maybe you want to blast your families with an upcoming school wide event reminder. Maybe you'd like to share with your staff a reminder to join the meeting after school dismissal. Maybe you'd like to send a reminder to students in a club that's meeting that day after school or the next day after school. Your teachers have the ability to send messages to all of the seesaw admins connected to your school to all of the teachers in your school to students and or to families that are connected to the school. They can also send to their whole entire class if they'd like. Maybe they want to send a field trip reminder to families or they might want to message students updated homework assignment to reflect changes made late in the day that they just want everyone to remember by the time they get home or they want to share an amazing seesaw activity or lesson with the grade level teachers that they're teaming with. Maybe they would want to message multiple classes or different combinations of students all of that with this new messages feature. What can students do? And this is a common question. Students have the capacity to only message their teachers. Imagine if you will that students could ask clarifying questions to progress on an assignment, ask for help with an activity, reply back to a message a teacher has sent directly to them or respond to a group message with their teacher and other students. And let's not forget about our amazing families. Families can send messages to any seesaw admins, any teacher and other family members connected to their student only. Maybe they'd like to communicate details of an early pickup or the reason why their child was absent. Maybe they'd like to clarify questions they might have, you know, their child is absent and they're not sure what they've missed and they have questions. Maybe they'd like to share some concerns about recent student behaviors that they're seeing at home and wonder if the teacher is seeing it at school or even get curriculum support. All of that is available through messages. So seesaw messages are built with student safety and privacy in mind. Teachers manage how students and families communicate or student and family communication experience and students cannot message each other without the presence of an adult in the conversation. You can determine your audience and conversation type for your message and you'll love the options. You can foster a culture of participation beyond the classroom by promoting student learning and achievement anytime and anywhere and provide even more meaningful engagement with all learners. So we love all of the abilities that messages gives you. All right, I'm going to pass it on to Brittany and we're excited to have her here from the product team. Take it away, Brittany. Hello. So I'm going to do a little bit of a screen switching but thanks everybody. I'm really excited to be here. I am going to be doing a live demo. So this is actually seesaw messages live and I'm really excited to be representing our product team today, sharing some of the exciting new features that are in the new seesaw messaging. So as many of you know, the seesaw has had a basic version of messaging in the product historically which has allowed one-way announcements to families and students as well as one-on-one conversations with family members and millions of messages flow through seesaw every week and I know many of you rely on it as it's a really important part of the product. However, we also heard from many of you that you want more flexible options to support a wider range of conversations between teachers, families, students and admins in a school to enable student learning and so I'm really excited to show off some of the flexibility that our new messages product unbox including things like multiple class messaging for teachers, group messaging between teachers, adding multiple family members to a conversation, managing the conversation names and the recipients and much more. So today I'm going to pretend to be a second grade teacher named Mr. Daniel Tiger, so that's on this right side you can see Mr. Daniel Tiger seesaw class and my school has started using the new seesaw messages early access and it looks like I've got a couple new messages so I'm going to go in and see what conversations are happening in messages. So it looks like I've got one announcement from the principal, principal neighbor and it's a reminder, oh that's nice, it's a reminder to be kind to yourself and I also see that my K2 curriculum coach has sent an announcement as well, you can see here that I can't reply in this message thread because it's an announcement and that the K2 curriculum coach Ms. Henrietta Kau is really excited that she can now send messages across multiple classes that she's part of and also is really excited about the new seesaw lessons. So I'm pretty excited about that so I decide to go and check out the new seesaw lessons which is in here and let's say there's an activity that I found in seesaw lessons that I'm really excited about, I'll go straight there just for simplicity and my fellow teachers and I have often been sharing activities with each other, we used to use the seesaw kind of email to teachers feature for this but recently we've been really excited about how we can use messaging to have deeper conversations about these activities and have further conversations and sharing for other seesaw content or planning discussions or even just group chats with my teachers. So let's go back to messaging so that I can share this activity with a few of the other second grade teachers at my school. So this is like an existing conversation I have between a few of the second grade teachers in my school, Mr. Corny and Ms. Platypus and I can go ahead and share this new lesson that I think is really interesting with them. This seesaw lesson seems great, we can use it next week in SEL curriculum. So I go ahead and send that and that's said to them and I can continue this conversation and so I'm super excited that seesaw supports teacher-to-teacher messaging and group chat especially for teachers like me that are always in seesaw already and it really is unlocked a bunch of different kinds of conversations within my school. So some of you might be wondering now what does the family view of seesaw look like and you know you might have seen on this side I have already had that prepared but just so you can see this is a family member connected to a student in my class and this is an example of the mobile view of her seesaw experience and so for a family member what they would see is they also have access to messages here which allows them to see the various messages that were sent to them. So in this case they also got that school announcement I'll give it a moment to load so they also got that school announcement because that school announcement was sent to everyone in the school and there's also an existing conversation thread between the teacher, Mr. Daniel Tiger, the student, Prince Tuesday, as well as the the family member. Sorry give that a moment, all right. So in this conversation right now it's Prince Tuesday and his teacher and me and let's say that I actually would like Prince Tuesday's dad to be added to this conversation as well so I type a quick message in here please add Prince Tuesday's dad King Friday to this chat so I send that and over here oh looks like Queen Saturday wants me to add Prince Tuesday's dad to the chat so I will go ahead and do that. While we're here I'll show a couple of other things that are happening so for group chats and for announcements the owner of the conversation can change the name of the conversation I will do that now but you can see that that is available. There are different types of conversations group chats and announcements and they can be edited so announcement types member names are hidden and only the conversation owner can send messages group chats everyone can send messages and see who's in the conversation. So in this case it's a group chat and like I said I want to add King Friday to this chat so I go ahead and do that here where I can find King Friday there he is looks like he's a family of Prince Tuesday and now he's in the chat and I can go ahead and say King Friday is now in the chat. All right and just to show a couple of other things that are going on in here since there's been some pretty rich conversation happening about Prince Tuesday's work you can see that some of the beloved features from legacy inbox are here as well being able to attach something to the message and showing off student work and sharing student work. Translations is also available as well as well as the scene state which I know many of you rely on to see you know who has seen the message already and who has not. The scene state is available specifically to the conversation owner and specifically teachers and admins. So these are a bunch of things that are now available in the new messaging and just a few examples of how the new messaging experience really unlocks more opportunities for conversations about learning and seesaw between teachers, families, students and admins and we're super excited about this experience. So I'm going to transition back to the slides and some of you might be asking well this is an early access so I know you all are still working on this what's coming soon and that's a great question. So what's coming soon on the teachers and admin side? Some top requests from our early access folks are to bring back edits as well as to show some clearer information about the people in both the message list and the search for example the family name for the student could be more obvious number of people involved or the school name and things like that and so we're doing some work to add some of these features in very soon. And I know this audience is admin so I know many of you care about what you're able to kind of manage and control at the school level and so some of the things we are also working on are school level settings for messaging permissions. So what that might look like is for some schools you may not want families to be able to message beyond your class teachers or you may actually want students to be messaging within their class. Things like that are things that we are actively working on to give more flexible settings for different school environments and what you all need for your situations. Similarly I know that for admins it's very important to be able to have some visibility into what's going on within your school at the messaging level and so that's another area that we are actively thinking about is how to provide some of that visibility for you on in the messaging world. So thanks to you and thanks to both our closed beta and our early access folks we've already made a bunch of improvements and continue to improve messaging every month and so some things that have happened even in the last month since we released messaging at early access is that we have limited the same state to the conversation owners. We've added better time stamping to all the messages because I know many of you need that for your own records and we've fixed a bunch of bugs that our early access folks have reported and we're always very thankful to you all for trying out our new features, giving us lots of feedback and sharing what you're learning and what we can learn from you. And so yes your feedback does make a difference especially in this early access phase especially as we continue to evolve the messaging product before launch so please keep it coming. Where you can share your feedback is this form bit.csaw.me slash messages feedback that's a feedback form that can be used and I personally read all of this feedback so I will tell you that right now. I do not personally respond because there is a lot of it but I do personally read all of your feedback and our team does take your feedback very seriously and is very excited to learn from you all about your experience with messages and what we can be doing to make it better and so we'll be sharing this in our follow-up conversation as well. Alright now back to Kara for talking a little bit more about using messages in your school. Awesome thank you Brittany that was fabulous there are a bunch of little questions here and there but we're going to save that and share those in just a few minutes in our Q&A section so awesome. We would love to provide you with some ideas to support your school so I have some examples here for a variety of ways that you might implement messages. So when you think about as an administrator you might use messages to send announcements with reminders to families about school-wide events or you could as a teacher let your personality show and send videos to engage students like the joke of a day or a group chat with other teachers about curriculum or student needs and to keep all of that communication in one place messages will do that for you. You can go back to it refer to it and have it right there so there's a lot of things you can do with messages and so much more that I'm sure you all as amazing ambassadors and certified educators can come up with to add to this list as you progress through messages you know so many ways that this could be used. We do have another quick poll for you so if you could take a look at your screen here grabbing it right now. Alright so on your screen you should see what excites you most about the new messages experience if you could just select one of those things we would appreciate that. Click on the submit button once you're done and I would be happy to share the results of the poll here with everyone in just a minute. We are very excited about all of the new messages features and we hope that you are as well. Brittany shared a lot of amazing things and again we know you have some questions but what are you most excited about. So we have lots of votes pouring in right now thank you for that I will just let a few more of you share here and then share the poll results with everyone. So many things to be excited about and Brittany and her team are working so hard to really you know reflect on the feedback that's given and make all those changes possible based off of our early access schools. Alright so a couple more are still popping in I can see those numbers still going so thank you for clicking the submit button so we know how you voted this is awesome and I'm going to close the poll right now here we go and share our results with you so all of the above love hearing that isn't that amazing but thank you so much to everyone for just giving us giving us your your excitement here we're feeling it we're feeling it thank you thank you. Alright we are going to move on to Mila and she's going to tell us a little bit about turning on early access. Hi everyone I'm Mila and I'm on the marketing team at Seesaw. For those of you here who haven't yet turned on messages I'm really excited to show you how quick and easy it is to do so as well as review some of the resources we have available to support you as administrators so that you feel prepared to make the switch. This will be a helpful review for those of you who have turned on messages already as well so stick around and let's dig in. As a reminder and as Kara mentioned in the beginning as Seesaw for schools admin you can now turn on messages as part of our early access program. At the time of the official launch which is by August of this year messages will replace the old announcements tab that's visible to admin and the inbox that's visible to all other Seesaw users regardless of the Seesaw plan that they have. But the sooner you turn on messages the sooner you can start taking advantage of all the great ways to communicate and connect with your school community that Kara outlined earlier and that Brittany demoed. Alright now let's jump in and feel free to follow along on your computers if you would like. First things first you need to sign into Seesaw as an administrator on your desktop or laptop computer with your credentials and early access to messages is turned on on a school by school basis so if you are a district administrator you will need to go in and turn on messages for each of your schools or instruct your school or building administrator to do so. Once you enter your school's dashboard click on the gear icon in the top right corner to go to your school settings. At the top of the school settings window you will see a prompt to learn more about early access to the new messages experience click that and another window will appear that reminds you of some of the benefits of messages as well as lets you know that copying over any of the existing messages or announcements you have to the new messages experience may take up to 15 minutes. So we recommend turning on messages during off hours to minimize any disruptions to your Seesaw users and then finally click on messages once you are ready to go. This will take you back to your school's main dashboard view and you'll see the spanner that shows that the copying over of your messages and announcements is in progress. Once copying over is complete on the next slide you will see a new green congratulations banner and the messages button will appear here in the top left next to your account name. This change will then become visible to all user types across your school from other admin teachers, students to connected family members who will likewise see the new messages button appear in the same place in their respective views. Go ahead and click on messages and there you go you are in it's that easy. All right now that you've seen how to turn on messages let's do a really quick poll just to get a sense of are you ready to turn on messages for your school? All right let's see I'm gonna wait about 30 seconds. Thank you for voting or choosing an option here just a few more seconds so we will have other resources to share to help those of you who may not be yet ready to turn on messages so don't fear we are here to support you. All right another couple seconds let's see. All right Kara whenever you're ready to close the poll let's see. All right overwhelmingly we're seeing more on the yes side they're either already turned on or they'll get turned on soon for those of you who have questions or who have not yet turned on messages let's dig into some of the resources that will help you feel more prepared and so you know what you need to do. As an admin if you have not turned on messages yet this is where you can go to find more support and resources from inside the Seesaw product so again click the school settings gear which will open the window click learn more and then finally click the view all features that's circled here. If you have messages turned on there are a couple different places to reach that same central resource either via the banner in your school dashboard as seen in the top half of the screen or by clicking the question mark in the top right corner within the main messages window this question mark in the main messages window will be there for all of your user types so clicking any of these that I showed you will open up the following resource web.seesaw.me backslash messages this is a web page that is sort of your home base and houses a lot of information about messages and links to all of the resources I will mention here today so you will see some of the key new possibilities outlined on the page and features highlighted and then as you scroll further down the page we also have two training videos currently available one for admins and one for teachers they're short about five minutes so easy to digest and they go over the key functionalities your other admin and teachers should know about scrolling further down the page there are three more links uh let's go into the first one this early access resource resource page excuse me provides a brief kind of explanation of what messages is by user types so if family members are curious what's new or students want to know what they're able to do it also has a handy edible template letter that you can share with your school community to introduce messages and help set expectations the messages handbook is another resource and it's your complete guide to messages early access it goes over all of the messages features in detail such as what it looks like to remove a message or block a user or change the conversation type etc and then as always we have our trusty help center that likewise has information about messages and where you can submit a ticket if you can't find your answer we really encourage you as our seesaw ambassadors and certified educators truly our best seesaw advocates to lead the way uh with turning on early access to messages and educating your school communities about all the effective ways it can be used to support student learning every single day whether it's to help teachers have easier more meaningful check-ins with their students so students feel heard and understood or to exchange reflections and resources with your colleagues we truly designed messages to make building your connections and relationships at school as safe fun and easy as possible so on that note it's the time you've been waiting for it's question and answer time all right I can jump in here so many amazing questions coming in just shows the power of our community and how invested you all are in new features coming to seesaw we're just so grateful for you every day um Brittany this is a question for you many many community members are wondering will there be any option to schedule messages and announcements in advance of sending them this is a great question and it's definitely one of our top feature requests it is something we definitely want to work on we don't have a timeline for it yet but it is definitely something we are very aware of and is one of our top requests all right and many community members are also wondering what will this experience look like for families will anything be changing on their end yeah um in the demo I gave earlier the family experience it shows the family experience and um you actually I can go to that right now really quick um the family experience instead of having a tab for messages they will be able to access their messages from the icon the chat icon in their journal um and so for the family experience all of their messages for their classes will all be in the messages chat bubble great and then in your demo you showed Prince Tuesday's dad getting added to a conversation and members are curious if that dad will see all of the previous messages in the thread or just everything forward from that point yeah also a great question um he will the person who has added to the conversation will see everything in the history of that conversation as well and this is something we want to make a little bit more clear in the experience too great rapid fire coming at you all right Karen says I love the search option in my email inbox is there a feature that will let me search for keywords or subject lines in my messages also a great question also a top request and something we are thinking about um also no timeline yet here but something we're thinking about all right and all of these questions have been asked by multiple people so you're you're you all are on the same page um are in another question if I turn on messages can I use it with staff before deploying to families or does everyone kind of get the new version at the same time everyone gets the new version at the same time currently as we developed some of these school settings I was mentioning earlier there may be some opportunities to limit access earlier and then broaden access later but at the moment everyone gets access all right and brainy can you talk a little bit more about admin permissions so can admins adjust you know how teachers can send messages who they can mess it what does that look like go into a little more detail there yeah that's something we'd like to we'd like to um change in the next hopefully a couple months so that's kind of listed in our coming soon items we're hoping that we'll get to a point where admins can set within their schools kind of who can message who so uh can family members message admins can students message admins currently no but you know in some schools they actually want that um and so some of those more granular settings around who can message who within the school that's set at the school level is something that we are working on for admins in the school dashboard all right and then can you talk a little bit more about if there is a concern that a family member or a student is using messages in an inappropriate way uh what is available to block that person or sort of tailor the messages that they can send yeah great question so there's two options here so the first is you can block the person blocking is an individual action so just to give an example if i wanted to block queen saturday um then as an individual queen saturday's messages would no longer be visible to me so this is more of an individual action uh and not a not a global action a global action is something and blocking is also um undoable so i'm going ahead and undoing that right now um a more global action for bad behavior is is removing so let me just go find one that i can remove uh let's let's just go here for for a second oh actually this is a good example but um if i wanted to remove this message uh from either the one-on-one conversation or a group conversation um only teachers and admins have this capability but um that can be removed so if a student is you know displaying bad behavior and sending a message that's inappropriate removing the message will remove it for everyone involved in the conversation and it is not undoable uh so you know i remove this message i cannot bring it back um and then the last thing that you can do if it's a group chat is similar to how i added king friday to the chat i can also remove king friday from the chat so if i remove king friday from this conversation they will no longer have access to any of the conversation so those are the various things that are available for you know cases of bad behavior or something that you want to just get a little bit under control thank you britney really appreciate the demo there i'm sure others did as well um a question from katie i like the scene feature can an unseen feature be added i want to know which families haven't seen my message etc yeah this is also something we hear about occasionally and um definitely something we'd love to think about more um but haven't i haven't really thought that deeply about that yet but i have definitely heard from some folks that seeing who hasn't seen the message is also valuable perfect and lots of feature requests coming in here which i won't go into but britney i have a whole list i'm going to be sharing with you after this webinar so thank you everyone for sharing your individual stories and what would work for your schools and what wouldn't we will definitely make sure all of these are received one more question um which is coming up a lot this question is coming from jen i have um to message multiple buildings there are sort of three schools on these upper schools is there a way to click all you know school one school two school three or you know what does this look like how how does one go about this yeah that's a good question currently uh if you are an admin so this is not an admin account but just so i can show you what's going on if you're an admin in multiple schools all of your classes across school should actually show up in your ad classes um modal so you should be able to actually select all of the classes across multiple schools and this is actually also true if you're a teacher across multiple schools you should you should have a way to select classes across even across school all right i think that covers many of the most popular questions and we see a lot of questions still coming in here so i will make sure to share all of those with britney and mila and cara and we will try to respond to all of you lucky for you you are ambassadors so you have a direct line of connection to the community team um if you have a burning question that wasn't answered and we don't get back to you feel free to post about it in the facebook groups and we will respond to you as soon as we can and i'll pass it back to cara all right we thank you so so very much we appreciate you being here and you know really uh preaching the excitement of messages with your school community getting your teachers to understand that we're here for them and we're here for you and that we can just foster that communication through the new messages feature so thanks so much for joining us today as a friendly reminder you will get a copy of the recording and you will also get access to all the resources that mila shared with you as well so thanks everyone for joining us and we hope to see you all soon