5 End of Year Seesaw Must-Do’s for Teachers

Hi everyone, and welcome back to EdTech Classroom.

For today’s Tech Tuesday, we will be learning some Seesaw tips and tricks to help end the school year and archive this year’s content.

I’ve always been a big fan of Seesaw, and this year in particular, teachers across the country have been relying on it as one of their tech platforms for remote learning. Now that the year is over, or almost over depending on your school or district, it’s time to make sure we close our online classrooms to smooth our transition into next school year.

This blog post gives technical steps to smooth your end of year transition with Seesaw.

We will be looking at 5 end of year Seesaw must-do’s for teachers.

1. Archiving Seesaw activities

For most teachers, this step will not be super applicable. In fact, unless you plan to have the exact same students in your class next year, this step isn’t too valuable.

That being said, archiving Seesaw activities is a great tool to use during the school year to help de-clutter your Seesaw feed.

Or, let’s say you are assigning students summer work through Seesaw, you can archive old activities to allow your students to focus on their assigned summer work.

How to archive your activities on Seesaw:

1. Click the activities tab
2. Look for the activity you want to archive
3. Click […] and “Archive Activity”

Once you have completed these steps, the activity will still be in your library, meaning that you’ll still be able to reassign it to students and assign it to different classes. You will also continue to be able to view student responses under “Archived.”

2. Archiving your Seesaw class

This step is arguably the most crucial tip to end the school year on Seesaw. At the end of the school year, you will need to archive your class.

Now it is super important that you do not delete your class. Instead, we will learn how to archive it. By archiving your class, you will still be able to access its content next year, including student journals and activities.

How to archive your Seesaw class

1. Click the wrench button in the top right corner.
2. Scroll down and click “Archive Class.”

As I mentioned, you’ll still be able to view your archived class. To do this, click on the gear menu next to your name. Then click “Account Settings” and scroll down to “Manage archived classes.” Now you can view your archived class again!

3. Connecting with families on Seesaw

As soon as you archive your class, families will receive an email with a link to download their child’s journal.

This is an amazing feature so that you don’t have to individually download student work and email it home to families. Instead, Seesaw does all the hard work for you!

How to connect with families

If you have already connected with families, they will receive an automatic email allowing them to download their child’s journal as soon as you archive the class.

If you haven’t connected with families…

1. You will need to first click “+ Families” at the bottom of the screen.
2. Click “Turn on Family Access”
3. Follow the directions on the screen

4. Do not delete your class, students, or journals

It is absolutely critical that you do not delete your class, your students, or their journals. Always, always archive everything. If you delete these three things, all student work and class activities will be deleted permanently. Seesaw is unable to retrieve deleted items.

When in doubt, archive!

5. If your school or district uses Seesaw…

Your Seesaw administrator (typically an edtech coach or principal) will make sure your students are set up for the next school year. Your Seesaw administrator will most likely:

1. Add missing student IDs.
2. Merge student accounts (for example, if a student was using Seesaw in your class and in a specialist class, their work can be merged to form one journal from the school year).
3. This will allow the administrator to then create historical portfolios…
4. And will ultimately make sure your students (both old and new) are ready to go for next year!

Thank you so much for reading today’s Tech Tuesday tip! I hope you enjoyed learning about these end of year Seesaw must-do’s for teachers. These tips and tricks will help smooth your transition into the next school year.

Thanks again, and I’ll see you back here next week on Tech Tuesday!