This week we had to investigate the idea of having a student scribe in the classroom. I have actually never heard of, or thought of this idea. I am very intrigued by this as I require notes to be taken in class. I see two reasons why this would be beneficial for my class. The first being some students may not be great note takers. By publishing notes, students can look at the published notes if they are stuck on the math, but they can also see how other students organize their notes and could learn note taking skills and strategies from them. Also, if a student is absent, they very easily can refer to the class notes to see what they have missed.
The App...
For this assignment, I played with the app seesaw. Seesaw is an app that runs almost like a blog. The teacher will create a class (or many!). Students will create accounts to log into the class. The teacher can also can parents access to seesaw. My daughter's teacher uses seesaw for her first grade class so I have used this app from the parent side of things.
How will this work?...
How I envision this working in my class is that students will take notes as always in class. I am not sure if I will have students volunteer to be a scribe, or assign the role on a daily or weekly basis so that everyone contributes. Once done with the notes, at school or at home, the scribe will take a picture of their notes. Seesaw is great because you can take a picture, but then do a voice recording with the picture. So the scribe can walk through the notes giving more precise instructions, or making comments on things that came up in class (such as things to be careful for, reminders, etc.). The scribe will then click the green check mark and the notes are then uploaded. The teacher must approve all posts! This will guarantee accuracy for the notes! At this point the teacher has the option to make these notes available for everyone, or just certain people (remember my daughter? Her teacher only allows us to see work relevant to our own child!) The teacher also has the ability to create folders, so they can group units together, so it is not a full long stream of notes, like on a traditional blog!
What does the app look like?...
This is the screen a student sees on the iPad. Lots of choices!
Once the student takes the picture, they can draw on it, and/or do the voice recording over to explain. Again, when done, the student will click the green check mark.
The teacher is alerted when material needs to be approved to be posted.
Super easy to approve!
Overall impression?...
I actually really like seesaw from the teacher, parent, and student perspective! The interface is very user friendly and easy to figure out. I would recommend this app for teachers to use in their classroom.
What problems do I forsee?...
I have used seesaw as a parent because my daughter's teacher uses it for her class. When creating these accounts so I could explore the teacher and student side, the app was weird since I already have an account I could not then be the teacher. I had to create different accounts for each of my roles using different email addresses. There may be a way around this, or a way to toggle between accounts under the same email, but if so, it is not very easy or obvious to do so.
The voice recording has a maximum time of 5 minutes. Hopefully notes don't need a voice over for longer than that, so if they do, the notes might need to be uploaded into two sections.
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