Seesaw PD

Today I had an opportunity to present a PD session on how to increase student voice in our classes using our Seesaw platform. 

My focus was to help teachers see the value of student's voice and to share practical ideas on what that will look like in the classroom. 

I was very aware that my colleagues might have been tired after already being in a PD session during the day and wanted to keep the session practical with lots of teacher's voice instead of my voice. 

Did I achieve my goal? 

I was very happy that everybody participated in the discussions and that we could walk away with some solutions to our barriers and challenges. Especially around the noise when recording and the bridge between year 3's and 4's. The solutions from our discussions were to create recording stations with clear signs to make everybody aware when recording is happening. And to create opportunities for the current year 3's at the end of the year to be introduced to Chromebooks at the end of the year in a tuakana teina model.

The examples that I presented to my colleagues demonstrated that collecting student voice does not involve complicated posts. It merely teaching and practicing with our students how to present their opinions and perspectives on topics. Initially student voice will be academically and focussed on teh work they do in the class, but a step further would be collecting student voice on topics outside the classroom, e.g. on the colour run, or whether we should change our uniform or not/ 

From the blog posts, it seems like most teachers took away something from the session that they could implement in their class. 

I look forward to closely following their student's posts on Seesaw to see if the information we gained today, transitions into their teaching practice. 

For myself, I will think of how I want to consciously teach my students to use their student voice to share their thinking. The meaning of a quality post slightly shifted for me. A quality post is not just on how your students present their work, but more on how they share their understanding of their learning. I want to teach my students that hitting a roadblock during our learning is a crucial part of our journey and explaining how we got around the roadblock adds value to our learning. When sharing this in our posts on Seesaw,  other students can then learn from our experiences and form their own perceptions. 

 

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Multipmodel Activties