#seesawlinkup project

One of the things that my nurture class have as a specific target is to show more awareness and curiosity about the world around them. We do this in a range of ways, watching the seasons, planting and growing things, going to trips to the farm or the park or the forest and talking about other countries in the world through stories, photos and songs. All great ways but not the most personally engaging. 

Last summer I was thinking about developing my classes understanding and curiosity about the wider world and I thought seesaw might work as a platform for this. 

I’m a big fan of Seesaw, to the point that I’m a seesaw ambassador. I have set up seesaw with co-teachers from within my school before, for example when I team teach ICT lessons it’s me and the class teacher in the seesaw class. So I knew the potential was there in-app to have multiple teachers, this got me to thinking well what if the teachers were from different countries? Exciting! 

In August I contacted Angela Gadtke, kindergarten teacher  in Minnesota and Seesaw Ambassador extraordinaire to ask if she’d like to partner in this with me. It would mean getting our students to create and upload content to a real global audience who would be able to ask questions, leave comments and respond with their own content all within the safe and teacher monitored environment of seesaw. I was so glad that she caught my vision and said yes to joining in. We planned together and through a google hangout and some shared google docs we got a plan for the project together. 

Our #seesawlinkup project was born and we have been joined by some other teachers too, Miss Kim from Canada and Ms Batra from India. Its only the second day of our four week project but it’s already making waves in my classroom. My pupils are very excited to hear and see messages from their new friends and send them photos and things that we have made. Today we made a book creator book to introduce ourselves to our new global classmates. My class can now find the USA, Canada and India on the globe and tell me if its a warm or cold place because of where it is (and the fact that Mrs Gadtke’s video features snow)

Each week has a focus that is shared eg our class, food we like to eat, our school and playground etc. Im excited to see how it all pans out. After day two I can already say it’s one of the most exciting projects I’ve been involved in as a teacher! 

I’ll keep blogging about it as we go and you can follow the hashtag on Twitter #seesawlinkup to get a wider view!