Five Ways To Use Seesaw In The Early Childhood And Elementary Music Classroom
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Amy Burns Far Hills Country Day School aburns@fhcds.org
eesaw (web. seesaw.me) is a student-driven digital learning journal that serves as a platform for student engagement. Students can use it to post, showcase, and reflect on their musical works. Teachers can utilize it to showcase what goes on in their classrooms and assign activities for the students to complete. Parents can connect to their child’s Seesaw learning journal through an invitation by the teacher, and be able to access the journal from their mobile devices. How to Begin You can sign up for a free Seesaw account at web.seesaw.me, which will give you access to create 10 classes, with two teachers per class. This is great if you co-teach a class or if you are piloting Seesaw at your school and you want to partner up with a classroom teacher. Seesaw is compatible with iOS devices, Chromebooks, Android Devices, Kindle Fires, and computers. Students can sign in using their email addresses, or if they lack email addresses, a class QR code. Creating a new class in Seesaw is fairly intuitive and there are many resources at Seesaw’s Help Center (help.seesaw.me) to answer any of your questions. There are also a couple of Seesaw webinars found at my website, amymburns.com/ webinars, to assist with using Seesaw in the elementary general music classroom. NJMEA music educators receive PD credits for watching the webinars by sending me a summary of it and answering the question at the end of the webinar. For my younger elementary classes (PreK through grade 2), my students use the music class QR code to login with their iOS devices. However, your school does
not need to be a 1:1 school (one device per student) to use Seesaw in the early childhood and elementary music classrooms. Here are five ways that Seesaw can be used in an early childhood classroom with 1:1 devices, or just one device in the classroom. Showcasing Your Classroom Music Making or Music and Movements With one device in the classroom, the teacher can log into the class’s Seesaw journal, tap the plus button, tap “Post to Student Journal”, and tap “Video”. This launches your device’s camera and you can video your class’s music making or music and movements like folk dancing. In a 1:1 classroom, students can login to the Seesaw music journal and follow the same steps to video their music creations. These creations can vary from recorder music to orffestrations. Once you or your students are done videoing, press the green check button and post it to the students’ journals. If there are five students in the video, then you can post it to just those five students’ journals. Students only see what is posted in their personal journals. They cannot see what is posted in other students’ journals. When an item is submitted, the teacher is the only one who can accept and reject posts (see figure 1). If a teacher sees a post that should not be accepted, then the teacher rejects it and it becomes deleted. The parents will never see the rejected posts. When a post is accepted, the parents of that student receive a notification that an item was added to their child’s journal and they can figure 1 now view it. If you have allowed the parents to comment, they can leave their child a comment about their music making (see figure 2).
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OCTOBER 2018