To Seesaw or Not to Seesaw?

This year, we are 1:1 in 5th grade with iPads. One of the apps my students have come to know is Seesaw. We were using Kidblog until it was no longer a free service. This bummed me out for a solid two days. However, I'm moved on and living life just fine without it. 

Read more about all that Seesaw offers here. 

One of the features I really like on the website are the Activity Ideas in the Teacher Resource bank. These gave me an idea of how to get started using Seesaw.  

Here are some Pros and Cons of using Seesaw:

(Please note these are all my opinions based on my experience as a classroom teacher)

The positives:

• All posts require approval. These gave me an opportunity to review all posts before they were viewed by my students. 
• Parents can login and view posts, comment on posts, and see what their kids are blogging about. I had several parents leave comments, like posts, and view content each day.
• Seesaw sends a "This Week in Review". You can see the traffic on your site, parent visits, student logins, etc. 
• Students can upload pictures, record video, draw something, add links from the internet, etc. The feature we used the most was "Note". 
• Students can upload a picture and annotate on top of the picture. This is great for labeling diagrams or working through math problems.

A few Cons:

• In the "Note" section (where we blogged) there are no formatting tools.  They couldn't change the size, make proper headings, officially indent, etc. 
• If they don't finish an activity and they log off.. Poof! It's gone. (This has been our experience..)

My Wishes for Seesaw (is anybody reading this?):

• Give students an opportunity to upload a photo and type text with it. Similar to Kidblog or another blogging platform.
• Add formatting features in the Note section so we can take our publishing up a notch. 
• Save drafts! Please let us save. Sometimes we have to take breaks with projects on our iPads and don't always finish in one setting. 
• Let us save! Sometimes we want to keep the work we publish on Seesaw. It would be GREAT to be able to save those things to our camera roll for future portfolios. 

To wrap it up, I'm a big fan of everything that Seesaw offers. I think you should jump on board and give it a whirl.

P.S. Some of "My Wishes" may actually be a reality on the app... and I may have not figured them out yet. :)