"The" App to Embrace Student's Agency

I find Seesaw to be cumbersome for students and parents. Links to external content (primarily YouTube videos) are often broken. Many times YouTube ads come up before content is displayed. YouTube presents ads based on activity history on the machine accessing content and therefore the ads are not always age appropriate. Just the fact that students have to sit through any ads is enough to avoid these kinds of activities for a couple of reasons. First, it eats up time that could be better spent in learning. Second, it forces having to sit through these undesirable ads. Not a single parent I've spoken to likes having to deal with this product and I've found it is not because they don't understand how to use it. They know how to use it. It's for the reasons I've mentioned it should not be used. Another thing is these damn text boxes. It should be the template creator or the teacher that creates these boxes before assigning the activity. Unfortunately far too many teachers are too lazy to do this and cover their laziness with the excuse that making the students create these boxes teaches them about the digital world. In a word, NONSENSE! Last but not least, many applications like Seesaw were haphazardly developed and latched onto in an effort to address remote learning during lock downs yet little has been done to improve and address the shortcomings in these products. IXL is one that some thought has gone into and it is actually not a terrible offering. Seesaw is a hack job plain and simple. Parents I've talked to and I 100% agree that learning sessions are extended by at least 50% just dealing with the 'administrative nonsense' that goes with using the product. Bottom line here is that with so many kids returning to classrooms Seesaw and the like should not even be in use at this point. Overall Seesaw is a complete loser in my opinion and does little more than encourage teachers to avoid the actual art of teaching. Not that this is surprising given our current culture that seeks to lower standards in practically every way.

This year we logged in and we found no data of the previous years. I asked them to make it available, or at least send me the data bulk. They refused to send it. It is not clear yet if they want money or we lost years of school projects for both of our children, but at the moment it looks like we may never get it back.

To say the least, it is a creative tool that engages children and offers different tools to complete the assignments, which serves as a form of Augmentation as shown in the SAMR Model. I would only suggest to make sure younger students spend time familiarizing themselves with the app because it can be quite tricky for the little ones at first, but once they got it down tasks will be completed faster.