 Everyone, thanks for stopping by today. We are sharing five tips for getting started with skills. So let's just jump right in. I'm Angela. I lead the community team here at CISA. I was a classroom teacher, just like many of you out there are. And you can connect with me on Twitter if you have additional questions. I'm really excited today to talk more about skills because I think as a CISA teacher, it's really easy to quickly get excited about all that CISA can offer. And I'm ready to share kind of the next step for you, those of you that haven't jumped into skills yet because I think you're gonna love CISA even more. So here is our plan for today. I'm going to just introduce the skills feature briefly and then we'll talk about five tips for getting started and then we'll answer your questions live at the end. So be thinking as I'm going through some tips here what you might want to know a little bit more about. So let's just get started. One of the things I wanna let you know about, which is I'm really kind of quite excited about is that some of these updates to CISA are brand new as of today. So we are live today here in the US on January 22nd. So make sure you have updated your CISA app if you're using an iPad or a Kindle because then you're gonna see everything. It's also available on Chromebooks and the web at app.cisa.me but you don't need to do any updates there. So keep that in mind in case you're thinking, I've never seen that because some of it is brand new just today. So the first thing is we talk about introducing skills. So skills really is a feature that allows teachers to get real time insight into how students are progressing. And basically as you are using CISA and your students are posting and you're collecting all of these great pieces of student work, it's really a great feature to be able to take skills to those student posts because they're showing you a lot of what they know. So when we talk about skills, that is something that is a paid feature and it's actually part of CISA plus and CISA for school. So you see on the screen here, the three different levels of CISA. And I wanna let you know that if you are using free CISA, that's awesome and completely amazing but you can do a free trial of CISA plus which will get you access to the paid skills feature. So that's what I'm gonna show you really quickly here because I want you to be able to play around with it as well if you're not yet using CISA plus or CISA for schools. So if you are using free CISA, here's how you start your trial of CISA plus which includes skills. So when you're signed into CISA, you just tap on that, click on that skills tab and then you're gonna see, I've taken these screenshots because I don't know if you're like me but I always get a little bit nervous when people are like free trial, I think to myself, what am I signing up for? Is this really not free? Is it gonna go on forever? Am I gonna get myself into some weird situation? So I've taken these screenshots because I just wanna reassure you that when you go through the four steps that I'm showing here, there is no, there are no I got you moments. Basically after 60 days, if you don't wanna use skills, you don't have to use skills and get all of your student work stays there and everything. So I just wanna show you this quickly. It's really, truly an opportunity for you to play around with it. So again, you're just gonna click skills and then get skills and then you'll see these basically next two screens here. You can see all the CISA plus features in step three and then just click to start the 60 day free trial if you don't yet have these available to you. So I wanted to show you that quickly. So you wouldn't be nervous if you wanna just jump in there and try things out but let's get going into our five tips. So number one is you can choose your rating scale and color. So basically what that means is when students are adding work to CISA, you can tag it with skills but you can determine what that rating scale is for whatever system works best for you in your classroom. So really at this point, skills really suit a wide range of skills and teacher assessment styles and we support up to six stars for the rating scale. So you can choose if you want it to be three, four, five or six and these are available in your class settings and I'm actually gonna demonstrate this after I show you kind of the next tip as well. And if you're using CISA for schools, your admin can actually set the scale for the entire school as well. It really just makes it easier to organize that student work and do their progress in real time which is we love that, right? We love saving time and being able to save it quite easily. The other thing you can do when you're using skills is you can customize the grid color. So basically, if you're giving a student one star, it could be the color that's denoted here with the one and you can give a student up to depending on what you have the range here is up to five stars. So you can choose the color that speaks to you, right? So they're easy to read, their progress is color coded and you're able to choose this color on the web only. So that means only from app.csod.me you can choose the color but it shows up on every single platform. So keep that in mind as well. So what I'm actually going to do because I like to show it but then I really like to demo it so you know exactly what to do. So I'm here in a live CISA class that I use for professional development. So I'm signing as a teacher and I'm going to show you those two things that we just talked about. So I'm going to click on the wrench in the upper right and then when I'm in my class settings I'm going to scroll down here to this skills section. And you'll notice if when you start your CISA class it's defaulted to four stars as the rating scale but you might think you know you really do a lot of things, a lot of reporting, progress, you know monitoring progress with five on a five star scale. So I'm going to change that. Okay, so I've chosen the scale that I want to use for all of my skills that I'm going to be using in my class. And now I can also change this color scheme. So as you can see you can choose whichever one works best for you. We also have some gradient options here as well. If that's something that works for you and I think I'm just going to keep with this one at the top. So we've got that going. So that's pretty easy, right? So the next tip I'm going to show you is how do we actually add a scale? So tip number two, how do you start and add a scale? So like I said, if you're brand new to using the skills feature I would just start really simple. So here you'll see how you actually add a scale and you'll get these slides if you registered for this webinar. But again, I like to show you how to do this live. So I'm going to go back into our CESA class. Just a thing to note to one nice feature is that whenever you add skills they stay on your CESA account. So that means from year to year those skills will still be there and from class to class. So basically if you, you know maybe you teach middle school or high school and have multiple different classes and sessions or maybe you're a specialist at an elementary school that's really going to come in handy when you're using them across classes. So here I am in my CESA class. I'm going to click on the skills tab here and at the bottom you'll see my skills grid here on the left, I'm not going to talk about that yet but on the bottom you'll see this button that says, you know, there's a little plus sign and skills. So I'm going to click right there right now and let's create a new skill. So it can be, it can be an academic skill. It can be a social emotional skill. It can be a leader, you know, things to do with leadership. It could be a state standard, whatever you want to create. So I'm going to say we will do, we'll say reading fluency, okay? And this quick code you can use if you are using a state standard and there's a shortened code for it. You might want to put that there because it could help you in other reporting systems that you might need to use or you could leave that blank but you have to choose to have a name or a quick code. Then you can choose the grade level. This is a third grade class, so I'll leave that here. I'm going to say the subject is reading. The category is, oh my goodness, I guess fluency, right? And then I can add a description. So these are all optional, the subject category and description, but you might find as you get started that you want to add as much as possible because down the road, I'm going to show you how you can sort by subject and category and things like that. So that might come in handy. So I'm just adding one skill. So I'm going to tap the green check and it's basically saving that skill to all of the skills that I kind of have in my bank of skills, okay? So I want to show you also this right here. When I have this, when I just added that, I should have showed you the total, I guess, before. So it says I have 13 total skills available in my class that I have added. Now, some of you might be thinking, Angela, what, I don't understand because there's only five columns here on the left. Why aren't all 13 skills showing there? So keep in mind, they're only going to show in the skills grid once you have tagged a student post with the skill. So no need to panic if you've added tons of skills to your class, they're only going to show up if something has been tagged with that skill here in the skills grid. So keep that in mind, but that's kind of a nice handy total that we have available at this point. Okay, so again, I think start really simple. So if you're getting really excited to be starting and exploring with skills, maybe just add one skill and, you know, have your students post to CISA, share to CISA, and then you can practice tagging and adding that specific skill. Now, this is really great. So tip number three is save yourself a little bit of time and tag skills to activities and student posts. What's great about this is it's going to save you a lot of clicks in terms of if you already have an activity that you're sharing with students tagged with the skill, you're going to be able to quickly add star ratings as their work comes into you. So again, I like to demonstrate this. So let's show you what this looks like. So the first thing I want to demonstrate is if I'm going to share an activity with my class. So I'm going to tap onto this green add button and I'm going to choose create or share activity because I already have something picked out and it's this fraction activity. So it's kind of just a quick checking with my students. So I'm going to choose share and I'm going to share it with the class I'm currently in, which is the third grade rock stars class. But here to the right, you're going to notice it says edit students, folders and skills. I'm going to click right here because I want to then click on the tab skills because I want to tag this skill equivalent fractions. When I do that, that means when students are responding to this activity and I'm approving their posts, I can just super quickly give them their rating as I'm approving, which is a huge time saver. So I'm not going back and adding the skill to individual posts, it's awesome. So I've chosen that I could tag up to 10 different skills to this activity if I wanted to. If you're doing lots of cross curricular activities, this is going to be great for you. So I'm going to tap that green check and then I'm going to choose share with one class. I'm going to go back to the class right now because you'll see that I've shared this activity. So it's showing up right there. But for the sake of saving some time today, I actually had some students already respond to this activity previously because I want to show you what it looks like when you are reviewing their work and how you can actually rate the skills as they rate the post as they're coming in here. So what I'm going to do is what's great is when I click on that view, I can see all of the things that are waiting for me are things that I don't have responses for yet, but I'm actually going to get out of this for a second because I'm going to show another view that might be more common to you would be the journal view. So just like normal, you might have this big huge red bar at the bottom be saying you have the student post to review. So I'm going to tap review right here. And what I love is now I can look at the student work and I can quickly decide if I'm going to get one, two, three, four, five stars totally up to you and you see as I was clicking the colors change. So let's say I'm going to give this student four stars. I've got this next one to look at. I'm going to say three stars. And of course I'm going very quickly. You'll be more thoughtful than I am at this point. And then this is going to all be done. So I'm going to approve all of this. And what I love now is that when I go, prove or prove, I'm approving those three posts. When I actually go then to the skills tab here on the right, I'm going to click skills and I'm going into the skills view, I can actually then see those ratings that I kind of just approved. And again, I've done this a few times. So there's more than I just showed there. But for example, here we have Ali and under the skill equivalent fractions, I see a two. That two lets me know there are actually two pieces of work that have been tagged with this skill. The color yellow lets me know that's the last rating that was provided for this skill. So for example, when I go into here, it's great because the posts are then organized by that skill. So it's great to see progress over time for students as well. So again, the yellow means that the last rating was three stars in the color coding that I chose. Previously, when this work was submitted in a previous post, she had received four stars. So again, the color showing in the skills grid is going to be the latest. And again, if I go down here to Angela with the same skill, I see a three. So again, that's telling me there are three posts tagged with that skill. And the last rating is kind of this lighter green color. Okay, so that's four stars. So again, I can scroll and see all of the posts that have been tagged with that skill, which is super handy as well. Okay, so I wanted to show you that. The other thing I wanna show you is you saw how I could tag a skill, take an activity with a skill. But let's say that students are sharing to CSOW and you didn't have an opportunity yet to tag a skill. If you are in the journal view, like I am right now, you'll see this graduation cap under the student post. If I tap that, I can then easily add a skill, tag a skill to that post and then give it a rating. So this one is more related to the design process. So I'm gonna choose that. And I'm gonna right there give the rating. I'm gonna give five stars for that and tap the check. And you'll see now that it has a little one next to this graduation cap. That means one skill has been tagged and added to this student response, okay? So that's another way that you can add skills to student work. So keep that in mind. Wait, we have so many tips here to keep chatting through. Tip number four is that you are able to filter skills by student skill and more. So I love this. This is gonna blow your mind a little bit. So I'm impacting my class again. I'm gonna go to skills. And again, we have seen this skills grid here on the left, but let's talk a little bit more about it. So I am in a class and I have, you know, we have six students here in this demo class. So if I want to, I can go here to skills. And I can say, you know, I actually only wanna see how my whole class is doing with equivalent fractions. So I can tap that. And then I have a really quick visual of how my students are doing kind of what is their latest star rating related to this skill. So how do you use this? Oh my goodness, I use this all the time for small group instruction, right? If I wanted a quick insight, I'm thinking, oh boy, okay, I'm gonna pull Ally and Meryl. We're gonna do another little mini lesson on equivalent fractions. Here we go. Oh, my High Fires are Suvi and Wilson. I think, you know, I'm gonna give this to them next. So again, it's a quick way to visually kind of check in with where students are currently at. And again, you can even dig deeper to kind of see the progress they've made. The other thing that I like to show here is I can also filter by students. So if I click on student and I'm saying, oh, let's see how Milla is doing, right? So I can see how Milla is doing related to all of the skills that have been tagged to her work. Okay, and again, these numbers mean how many posts have been tagged with that skills. So keep that in mind. I can also filter by subject, okay? So if I only wanna look at math, we can just see what's going on with math in my class. Category is the same thing. So if you add that when you are creating a skill, that might come in handy for you when you want to filter, okay? One thing to keep in mind that I didn't mention yet, if you're just getting started with skills, skills are only visible to teachers. They are not visible to families and they are not visible to students yet at this time. So what that means is anything you are viewing in the skills view is private to you, the teacher or any co-teacher on the class. So this is obviously something that you could easily share with a family if they're in for a face-to-face conference. I could easily say, oh gosh, I'm having a conference with Suvi's family. Let's just quick pull up skills and see how she's doing across all the skills that we're working on. Or maybe we only wanna focus on math. So I'm gonna filter down to math. Of course, I wouldn't show other students if I was just talking with one family. So keep that in mind as well. Okay, next tip. Tip number five is if you are using Seesaw for schools, you can actually add skills in bulk. Now that is something that your admin would do, but boy, that is super handy. So if your admin adds skills in bulk, all of the teachers in the school have the availability to get those skills that are tagged with their grade level. And we have lots of templates that are ready for you. So if you are an admin using Seesaw for schools on our help center, we have lots of templates that we've already created based on all sorts of skills that you might be interested in exploring. If you're not a Seesaw for schools school and you're thinking, oh my goodness, I would love to get my hands on the Seesaw soft skills template, you can still go and copy and paste as you're building individual skills, but you can't do a bulk upload. So keep that in mind as well. So I have buzzed through five tips. I'm sure there's all sorts of things I may have forgotten to show you or talk about, but I'm gonna pause here and take some time to answer questions live.