 Oh, everyone. Thank you for joining us here today. We are focused all about kindergarten and preschool today using seesaw. So I'm Angela I work full time for seesaw but my experience is 15 years in the kindergarten classroom. So I am super excited to be spending this time here with you today. We have an amazing presenter Jessica with us and Jessica will She'll give you a little bit more of an introduction about herself, but I just have to tell you, Jessica is someone that I have admired from a distance for quite some time. She has, I think, a very similar philosophy as many of us do, I think in the early childhood. So that is focusing on how we incorporate play in our classrooms and how seesaw can really complement what we're already doing in our classroom. So she's going to be sharing her presentation tonight. You will get the slides emailed to you and you will also get the recording sent to you via email because you registered for this webinar. But again, we are honored that you're spending time here with us today. A couple logistical things to note is there is a question box and while Jessica is presenting, I will be answering some of the questions that you type in that are kind of maybe questions that I can easily answer, but we will save some time at the end to, you know, have some conversations and ask Jessica some questions about some of the things that she is sharing. She's going to be sharing with us here today, but I am going to get ready to turn this presentation over to Jessica. She's going to get this up on her computer. And we're going to see her screen in just a moment as she's getting hers pulled up. Okay, I'm here. Can everyone hear me? Angela, can you hear me? I can hear you. I'm ready to play. Thank you everyone for being here tonight because we are thinking about how we can play with seesaw. And I know this is something that's in the teacher hearts of lots of people who work with young children. And in order to do that, we're really going to be thinking about the innovating play cycle, which is part of the work that I do with Christine Pinto where we work on a mindset where we're taking technology and we're taking the amazing organic and natural things that we know kids need. And using amazing tools like seesaw to really elevate the experience. So when we think about the mindset we think about a cycle of learning and a cycle of playing in a cycle of experiencing. And that cycle often begins with the idea of connection and then moves to wonder and play and discover. So tonight we're going to start by connecting with seesaw and thinking about how we can use this tool as a point of connection because really when we start with a point of connection we're saying what is it that draws people ideas experiences concepts, or visions together and seesaw really to create authentic connections from the very beginning. So my goal when I work within seesaw or when I work within the kindergarten classroom is to really build a learning journal that has a sense of purpose and tells a story. And rather than just sharing a bunch of isolated activities we want the activities to flow together and we want to tell families about what happens with their child and what happens with a collective experience as well. So when I send my seesaw invites I actually send them home with my welcome letter in the summer. So families are able to be signed up for seesaw right away before the year even starts. And as soon as they sign up I make sure I message each family and I make sure I give them kind of a personal welcome so they know it's not some kind of automatic robot type message. It's a message right from their teacher and they can feel that point of connection. So in addition to connecting with them through the message piece I make sure I have two welcome videos there that I create. And really the point of this these videos has well it has two different points. The point is to inspire and the point is to help children and families feel safe. So I'm going to show you lots of different ways that I use seesaw tonight I have a lot of videos embedded in this presentation I'm going to show some of them, but I'm hoping that people will take the time after to kind of go back to the ones that they connect with to either rewatch or watch the ones that we didn't have time to watch together. This one I really wanted to show everyone though because this is what families and children saw when they first joined me on seesaw this summer, and I think it really captures the feel of the beginning of our story so I'm going to play this video it's like a minute long, and then we'll continue talking about how you might want to use seesaw to interact from the very beginning. Oops, sorry. Hold on it didn't play and try again. All right, so I told Angela before that one of my favorite things about seesaw is that it plays nicely with so many different tools. So I use a lot of different apps in conjunction with seesaw, but in putting these slides together for you tonight I really wanted to do two things I wanted to give you a space where you could feel inspired and excited for the possibilities to do, but I also want teachers to feel safe because all of the ideas that I present tonight can also be done right within seesaw so you don't have to have any other fancy apps. That video was actually created an iMovie first, and then I just put it right into the children's learning portfolios. But if you like the idea the concept that here's a way that you can try it in seesaw. So if you go to your camera roll you can actually add a series of photos. So I have a screenshot here of you so that you can see how that's done if you click on the camera roll button, and then look down at the bottom there's an add more option. You can add up to 10 photos there so if you wanted to add 10 photos of your classroom, and then record a message right in seesaw that would be a really great little step into creating a welcome for families. I have a great tip on this when you create these welcome videos, and you have a family join you mid year or once you've started your year, I make sure that I set up their portfolio for them. And I have the welcome videos right there because they're great for any time of year when you have a child or a family joining your class. Alright, so when we have a point of connection then we start to wonder and I love using seesaw to wonder seesaw is great for sharing the things that happen each day and capturing experiences. But it's also really amazing for setting the stage for what's about to happen. So when I use seesaw and I'm thinking about wonder I'm thinking about how I can use it to activate prior knowledge for kids, how I can level the playing field for them, how I can support processing time because some children need more time just to think about what's going to be happening and how I can really use it to extend learning for families. So I create digital newsletters and one of the special things is about my newsletters is that that's are not always a reflection of what has happened there sometimes a look ahead at what will happen. So I'm just going to share like a little clip of this video up top. This one I made in book creator and I was able to upload it into seesaw as a video. So I'm going to show just the beginning just so you have an idea of how we can create a sense of wonder and start to introduce activities. And then I just wanted to show the end of this video also so you can hear how I give directions for how families can utilize it. So hopefully this one will play right away. Hi everybody. Let's think about pumpkins. Here's our kindergarten newsletter to start to get your brain ready for all of the things we'll be enjoying together as we begin our next week in kindergarten. When you arrive in our classroom on Monday morning take a look at the Wonderwall. We will continue to wonder about fall but we've added some new pictures to inspire our learning. Talk about them with a grown up as you get your brain ready to think about fall colors and pumpkins. What are you excited to try in kindergarten this week? I'm looking forward to another great week together. If you have an idea that you're ready to share now go ahead and add a comment in your seesaw portfolio. You can use the sound button or have a grown up type your comment for you. See you soon. Love Mrs. Toomey. So without even being fancy about it you can create a wonder video right in seesaw. One of my other favorite things to do is use the video tool to capture or explain an experience for families because often a wonder for families is when their child comes home with a folder of papers and they open it up. And there are all kinds of interesting things in there but they really wonder what do I do with these? What have you been doing with these? And sometimes kids can explain the experience and sometimes there are lots of directions that go with them. So instead of having written directions I will often share an experience and I have a video here that I'm actually going to skip over the video and anyone is welcome to go back and enjoy it. So this is a sample of how I share the background of an experience and then I actually model the activity so that families can do that activity at home. So they're receiving the materials and they're receiving the instruction together. When you put this into the learning journal you can add it as an everyone item and I love doing it this way also because families will ask questions there and it starts conversations. So CSAW is also a conversation starter, a space where families can feel connected and kind of wonder together. So thinking about the idea of using CSAW to front load wonder, you can use the tools right in CSAW or here I have shared some of my favorite tools that I love to play with when I'm using CSAW. And when I created this slide I actually put a link to each of these different spaces where you can explore just the possibilities in creating spaces for wonder. All right, my favorite part of being a kindergarten teacher is that we get to learn and play and so much of our learning happens through play-based experiences. And one of my favorite things about CSAW is that we don't have to start from scratch within CSAW. You can take any of the amazing things that you are already doing in your classroom and you can capture them in CSAW and create a different kind of experience. So here we do word work every day. We play with letters and words and I add the iPads to the each center so that children can capture their learning. So instead of having homework that's word work at the end of the day, I make sure that children have captured their learning and then I use this to extend experiences at home. I'll often leave a comment on their word work and I'll ask them to either extend it or try again at home and they leave me audio comments at the end of the day with family. So it's a way of really personalizing learning experiences. So I have a few just really short little videos here just really quick samples of the ways you can use CSAW to capture that idea of playing with letters and words. Oops, I'm going to click back. Sorry. That one didn't work. We're going to try again. One more time. Here we go. So the children have the hands-on experience. I get to see if they can identify those letters, if they can read the word and my feedback to this child might be can you use this word in a sentence and they would get back to me on that. Also using lots of things like sand trays. This one was actually Valentine's Day. So it was salt and red glitter. And you can tell these are truly authentic learning journal pieces because you can hear the background noise. And that's something that we talk about in our classroom. We know that children are going to be recording their thinking and that we need to have gentle voices. But I also don't try. I try not to wait for perfect quiet moments because I want our classroom to be a busy happy learning space. So as long as we're using gentle voices and they're able to capture their thinking then we can make it work. So I never want teachers to feel like they need to create the optimal environment for use with CSAW because we work in early childhood spaces and early childhood spaces need to have happy learning noises. One of my other tools that I really like to use for playing with words is the drawing tool. I love to use the drawing tool especially when we're doing guided reading because it helps me to capture kids thinking. And for this activity, I actually had them use the drawing tool to practice pointing to words because we were working on one to one correspondence. So it really gives not only the oral are they reading the words or did they recognize the pattern in the story, but it lets me see if they're noticing that each word they say matches the word on the page. So here's a little sample of this one. And I love that example because there we actually captured a self correction that I might not have known if I were just listening, but actually seeing the visual piece helped me to guide that little person. Instruction for the rest of the lesson. So here's something you could try if you already have word work centers set up try out the photo tool and use the recording button. I actually have a link to this one here which I'm going to jump over now and anyone again is welcome to click on the link so you can see the actual piece. But one thing I wanted to note here is that I listen really carefully for miscues to guide instruction. I know sometimes teachers who are just getting used to seesaw asked me like I did this with a child in class and it wasn't perfect. Should I take it out of their learning portfolio and my answer is no that's the place where you capture their learning you let families know this is exactly where they are. And you give specific feedback so in this one there was a little girl that was reading all the words and she read the word from instead of for so I was able to catch her right there. And with her mom they worked through it again and she practiced reading the words and we made sure we caught her in her learning and gave her exactly what she needed. So don't be afraid of having items that are not totally perfect and helping families to understand the learning process and letting them in on that. All right playing with language and storytelling oh I could go on about this one because before we even put a pencil in their hands. We need to let children play with language they need to retell and they need to extend story experiences. And we can do this right within seesaw and we can do it with all of those amazing hands on things that we are doing already in the classroom. So I have a few examples to share up here when we were doing our Mo Willems author study I had sent in strips with positional words on them and they had to hide pigeon around the room and then read the words and show us where pigeon was hiding. Oops. Oh I'm sorry again that happened. I'm going to try one more time. There we go. Pigeon is behind. And again seesaw is awesome for app smashing if you use chatter picks it's a great way to capture kids thinking in sort of a fun playful way. And the idea of using seesaw and movement here we did a story walk and the children were working on beginning middle and or first next last. So the little girl here was able to capture her storytelling in seesaw. I'm going to pause it right there she is a super cute and when she thanks us for listening to her story so if you have a chance to go back and watch those slides. I recommend that one because it's just so super adorable to listen to but even just the idea of being able to capture children's language and not just for us but for them as well because I'll have kids that will go back and they'll spend time looking at their portfolios and reliving experiences and we can never underestimate the importance of that reliving for children. I had a little girl once who could not differentiate between two sounds and it's not until we captured it on video and she watched herself making each different sound that she was really able to connect with it. So go ahead and try it and see so I use the video tool and have children capture hands on experiences again I'm going to jump over this one because we're running short on time. But this one there's a little boy that does a Jack and Jill retelling I had the kids working in pairs. And again it let me hear whether he was matching his words to the text he actually has a miscue and one of his little friends. Corrects him on it so it gave me information about what was happening it's a way for us to have eyes and ears all around our classroom. Playing with creation I'm going to have to kind of go fast through this one but I hope you come back to this slide to really look at how seesaw is a tool that helps us to capture and create and elevate natural play based experiences. So sometimes we have these amazing displays that we put up in the classroom or we put up in the hallway and families never get to see them and they don't understand that there's a reason for all of these things. So when we painted our hands as snowmen and we put them on the paper and we practice counting by 10s. The families didn't know that there was a whole process when just their child's adorable little project comes home the adorable project is one thing. But being able to hear the kids count by 10s which is what happens in the video up top gives a context for the experience. And down here there's one where we use stop motion video experience and we had the children actually using triangles to create a bigger triangle and then I had them creating stop motion videos. I'm not going to go into that one now because that one's a little bit fancier but just the idea of being able to capture collective experiences so that their journal is not always what happens with one child but sometimes this is what we were doing as a class and it gives families context. So if you have a display that you're really proud of and there was a lot of things that went into kind of the backstory of building it put a picture of it in seesaw and add underneath a caption. And this one we were thinking about hurtful words kind words to use in school and we had done painting and we created a class book. And so I put all of our paintings into pic collage. You can just do a regular photo. And I said at the bottom can you think of a sentence using one of our hurtful words and I asked the kids to leave an audio comment and that night almost every child in the class left an audio comment, which was using kind words for their friends and it was just a way of feeling really like a collective group within that time. All right, one of my other favorite things I think I've said that sentence a lot of times tonight about seesaw is it's not just a way to play by sharing experiences that are happening in the classroom. It's also a way to look out into the world. I have a teacher partner Christine Pinto who works with me in California. I am in New Jersey and our classes work together all the time. We create experiences for the kids and are able to capture a lot of those experiences by sharing them on seesaw with families as well. So at the top this one was actually a link that I added because we had created an interactive Google slides field trip based on our videos that we created that I created actually by going to the farms in New Jersey. And the kids were actually able to look at all of the videos and determine which animal they wanted to research. I had limitations on what my kids could get to using Google. So I actually put the link into seesaw which actually was a super happy accident that it happened that way because it allowed then families to kind of take the field trip together. So we were able to give them again context for what is happening. So one thing I love to do is invite families to share pictures of things that are happening in their world especially when they connect to our classroom. And I use those pictures and experiences. So consider inviting families to help create extensions by sharing pictures with you that you can build into experiences and then share within seesaw. So I actually had a little boy that grew pumpkins at home and he took pictures the family took pictures of the whole life cycle of a pumpkin and we created a book in that and instead of it just staying in the classroom. I added the book to seesaw so that families could see the child's experience the collective experience and it sort of inspired them to start sharing photos from their experiences as well. All right when we discover with children. This is where we allow children to play and we capture their experiences we give them a chance to capture their own experiences and we can see the transfer of learning. So I make sure iPads are available during playtime not for the children necessarily to be sitting and working on but to capture what they're playing with. So I have several samples in here which I'm not going to even have time to work through because I because I squished way too much into here but I just want you to know that it is a great thing to let kids capture their learning. So we have six iPads in our classroom when it's nearing the end of playtime I will let children know if you would like to document your play if you have something that you need to share with your families or share with me. This is a good time to do that. It gives me a glimpse into what they have connected with into their personal interest. It gives me oral language. It helps me understand where I can go next with their instruction so that it will be really meaningful to them. So again if you want to jump back to these slides and see some samples of how children are using their playtime to capture their learning and seesaw. Here are some ways that you can try it and seesaw to let them play make the iPads accessible for documentation and then really let them surprise you so many times all of these learning journal entries are surprises to me. The kids will often use the photo tool the video tool and the drawing tool. So if you're using those tools during academic time they will transfer that to their playtime as well where we can really get a rich look at the individual child. So the idea with this whole thing in discovery is to capture their learning combine their learning and allow opportunities to reflect on their learning. Remember anytime you have a seesaw entry you can go to those three little dots down at the bottom and you can save any of those items so there are times where I'll take pieces that I have been put in portfolios and then combine them into a larger piece for reflection. So just really looking at that innovating play cycle again and what it looks like in seesaw and what it sounds like and feels like to the children. And I was thinking about all of the things that seesaw really says to kids and to me these are some of the things that says it says my ideas are important. It says I'm a creator. It says I'm independent. It says my voice matters. It says my play matters and really seesaw chose children. I make a difference in the world. And at one point there was a why see why we see saw challenge and I thought I would just finish up my time tonight talking with a look at why I see saw I think I've used every second you gave me a maybe too many seconds. Even I didn't want to give you the five minute warning because I was so enthralled with every every word that you were saying so I think it's great if you just keep this slide up but I think everyone would agree that we would just like you to keep keep sharing for maybe two hours but I personally enjoyed every every aspect of what you're talking about and sharing about today and share many of the same views as you and personal experiences. So that's awesome. I want to encourage those of you that are listening here today live to think about questions that you might have for Jessica that we could go into in the next few minutes here. I know we're literally just about at our time. However, I think we could all benefit a little bit if you want to hang out for a few extra minutes and get some questions answered from Jessica. I also want to respect your time if you feel like you're going to buzz out of here right now. That's totally fun if you're joining us here today. We love for you to fill out a quick survey that we show when you exit the webinar to let us know any feedback that you have and also ideas for upcoming webinars that we could offer for you as well. So I am going to open it up for questions at this time.