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Any five English, language arts, math, science, social studies, and then six, 12 steam things and electives. If any of those groups identifies a product and says, “Hey, we would like to add this product to support our curriculum.” It goes through a much longer process where the team that sits and provides its feedback, the technology department, that’s it and says, “Yes, this is something that can integrate,” and then make a proposal to the school board and adopt it. And the fastest that can happen is probably three months. Most of the time it takes a year or even two years to fully go through the process of learning about it, training other teachers, finding that it’s of wide interest, and then adopting it and then training more teachers and then integrating it into our system.
Mm-hmm (affirmative). What are sort of the barriers when it comes to not having sort of everything together within the Google Classroom Window? So you’re saying there’s sort of this desire to have one user experience, everything there. What barriers does that cause?
Well, the human learning is the biggest one, but teachers are already doing too many things and trying to manage their content and learn their students and handle the… Building and district and statewide expectations of things they have to follow through on. And anytime there’s a new product for them to learn and they have to learn how to log in and learn how to navigate and learn how to enroll students and then learn how to teach their students how to use it. And then that at every element of that, that has to be learned and taught there’s a capital and time and learning required of the teachers. And we already have serious limits on the amount of teacher time that we can take.
And then once we have the teachers done that, then we have students and families who have to learn it also. And it just, all of it takes a huge investment of time, and that’s not going to get done in one shot. So there all of that, and then there’s the manpower in the technology department that every single integration and everything that we add on requires tech support and integration and troubleshooting. And so the fewer, the less we’re fractured into different platforms and different ways to troubleshoot and different ways to interact, the less investment we have to make in all of that.
Mm-hmm (affirmative), yeah, that makes sense. How has the experience with that been on Seesaw? Has it been any different, or are you still having similar issues?
It is mindbogglingly hard. Seesaw because they were a ground-up sort of grassroots start in the process because they were a huge demand with everybody in the country going to virtual learning, they couldn’t manage the demands for training that we were asking for support with and their response rate for the process of the roster, integration, technology, and integration. And I mean, they were running on three weeks response time for a simple technology request, which in this industry for technology integration is that’s dead in the water time.
And so we had hundreds of teachers and thousands of students who were expecting to use Seesaw. We had a contract with Seesaw, and them promising to deliver, and then we were getting zero response from them on how to do it. So it’s a sort of a scaling issue, I imagine. But even now our integration, if there’s a problem, there’s troubleshooting to be done, if someone’s like, “Oh, we have to contact Seesaw and the tech department,” everybody bangs their head on the wall because it’s kind of hard to get a response from them.
That makes sense. Thinking also about, again, like having this ability to integrate all of these products within Google Classroom or within Seesaw, or just having everything sort of easily right there on the screen, is that a feature that you would pay for to add onto either LMS?
It’s a feature that we would consider, but right now as tight as our budgets are, anything that’s a feature for interacting with content that doesn’t come with content itself, is in competition with content. So we have to make sure that we have 100% of our classrooms have all of the virtual content that they need in order to be able to deliver in this model of instruction. So we know that 100% of our students are going to be receiving some virtual instruction. Whether they’re coming to school part-time or are 100% virtual, we need to be able to deliver all of the content to them in this platform.
And [inaudible 00:05:27] if we’re going to add on to that features for creating ways to interact with the content, we have to be really careful about what we will pay money for, but right now our community is giving us a few with 100%. Are students doing some kind of virtual learning? We’re hearing a lot from families of, “Wow, I have still have seven different platforms that I have to learn how to use,” and making that easier as a demand that we’re hearing. But I also have to make sure that we’ve got the content to deliver to them.
Sure, that makes sense. Any other reasons or drivers for adding Seesaw on to your school’s roster of LMSs, and using that instead of Google Classroom,
There’s also the amount of interaction that’s happening via video. That lots of students are recording videos as a way of producing content of learning, things of responding to assessment of they’re creating a lot more video and having an easy to navigate way to both capture a video, edit a video, submit a video, comment on respond to a video, is all a huge demand for learning.
What value does that bring to students, to teachers?
So because video cameras being integrated into laptops as suddenly and into cell phones has suddenly made them ubiquitous. It’s much easier for students to demonstrate their learning more immediately and directly by being able to capture video and being able to submit a video in a way that it’s managed like an assignment within a learning management system. If teachers are getting videos as email attachments or some other way that isn’t managed with the student data and tagged with the assignment, then it’s just a ton of gigabytes being used up in a way that is very difficult to manage for teachers but being able to create video in response to a prompt and to being able to submit video with students, especially if it’s a collaborative group with all of the students tagged appropriately as, “This is the work of August and Andrew and Daniel working together,” submitting this assignment and tagged with their data and manage that way inside a classroom. And as a response to a specific assignment is the way that people are trying to work, because people can imagine doing it. They want a way to be able to do it.
So if there’s a way to do it like Flipgrid or other things where you can create a prompt and get something blank, because video is ubiquitous and easy to use for people now, they expect to be able to use it the same way that we’ve used documents in the past.
Definitely. How has that currently working with Google Classroom, or is video being used at all there?
I imagine that video is being used there, but there’s an interface step, or somebody has to record, download, identify a file, call it something that needs to be uploaded. It’s not built directly into the interface. There is no Google video button that’s like, “Now I’m going to video.” There are some ad-ons that work that way, but it’s not integrated right into the device the same way that is with Seesaw, where there’s a button on the side that says record video, and you coordinate, you take the video and you say, “That’s my submission for this assignment.”
Got it. Okay, great. And so how is… is that a feature that you pay for within Seesaw or it depends?
That’s free in Seesaw right now, but we pay for the part where there’s a roster that’s integrated there and if a student moves between classrooms, their portfolio of work was with them. That’s something that we pay for.
Got it. Okay. Would you have paid for it if it was available as an upgrade to Google Classroom?
Yes. If we had paid for it… we’re looking at it alongside Seesaw, and someone said, “Let’s buy Seesaw.” And I said that actually for the same price, we can buy it in Google, and it fits within the infrastructure of everything else. And we’ll be managed that way, and we don’t have to have a separate platform then absolutely I would not.
Great. That all makes sense. Any other, again, drivers for adding Seesaw on in addition to Google Classroom and moving away from Google Classroom?
No, I would say that’s it.
Would you say that’s sort of a fair ranking, the order that we’ve spoken about so far? So number one is sort of ease of use for younger learners who can’t read. Number two would be sort of the idea of bringing everything together into one user experience. And number three would be this idea of video submissions and interactions.
Yes.
Great. Okay, perfect. And so now I want to dive into Seesaw just for one more moment. I like to sort of better understand the drivers for… not so much for moving away from Google Classrooms. So now what is a barrier with Google Classroom, but what are sort of the benefits of Seesaw? So aside from again, the ease of use and the integration and the video, are there any other things? Any of the reasons why you chose Seesaw specifically as opposed to, I mean, obviously there are so many LMSes out there, other reasons for choosing Seesaw specifically?
Because it was already widely used by individual teachers and [inaudible 00:12:10] so it’s just the demand for it was there because teachers were already using.
Got it. Great. Thinking about what Google Classroom does better than other LMSes, then Seesaw, what would you say that is? What does Google Classroom do better?
It integrates with the browser.
What do you mean by that?
Well, it’s right there.
How is, how does that work with Seesaw?
I don’t know how that works with Seesaw, but in Google Classroom, there is an extension for I can be doing something on the internet and say, “Oh, I want to assign this to my classroom.” I can click classroom and say, “Push this out to my class right now.” And it integrates right into the browser because the browser is Chrome. Google Classroom is Google. It’s all integrated right there on the platform. And since our filtering software is also browser-based and works in the browser and integrates with Google Classroom, it’s also there. So if you are a teacher, you wouldn’t be able to assign something around the filter because it’s all integrated right there in the browser.
Okay, great. All right. So now, I want to explore some specific areas and understand if they played a role in moving again, away from Google Classroom, and to Seesaw for the younger grades. So the first one I want to talk about is assessment tests and quizzes. And we touched on this a little bit, but I would love to know, in what ways are your teachers administering assessment tests and quizzes? What programs are they using? Et cetera.
In every way that they know-how. We don’t have a standard way to do it. A lot of teachers, I see teachers interacting and talking about, “Oh, I created a Google Form for that.” And then they share it around. So a lot of people are administering assessment tests, and quizzes, and Google Forms. But then if they’re using a platform like Learning A-Z, there are assessments in those platforms, and they use those things, and then they’re administering them as Google Docs and saying, “Here work on this and turn it in.”
Got it. When are they using, which one? When are they using Forms, and when are they using Docs, and when are they using these other platforms?
It’s absolutely the Wild West. They’re doing it whenever they want to idiosyncratically. There is no common approach.
Okay. So similar to like LMS in general, they are sort of free to fruit juice.
Yes.
What types of assessments are administered through Google Classroom?
Quizzes, tests. Those kinds of things.
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
We do have assessment. We have two different assessment platforms, one at elementary and one at secondary. And so NWEA makes a product called the Measures of Academic Progress. And that’s an assessment that’s a sort of a benchmark assessment, and we have that integrated so that kids log into a Chromebook and log in, and they can click a simple icon and start taking that assessment. And they do that probably three times a year, but the regular classroom assessments, curriculum-based assessments are whatever the teacher decides to do. Most of our district adopted assessments are performance tests that are scored with a scoring guide. So kids create them in Google Docs, and the teachers score them by hand and type things into a grade book. We don’t have an online assessment system for anything.
Okay. And then once these things are graded for all of these different things that teachers are using, are they then manually putting them into grade books? How does, how does the grading work?
If they’re in Google Classroom and using Google Forms, they can use Tyler 360 to import the results into their Gradebook and have all of that information right there. But the vast majority of what things teachers do is they grade things by hand, and then they type numbers into columns and a Gradebook. And there’s no automation or integration of that at all for us right now.
Are you looking for something like that or teachers looking for something like that?
We’re aware of things like that, teachers demanding it. Yes, I’ve been working for years, so we have turnitin.com for 9-12, and we are uploading standardized our consistent curriculum scoring guides. It would be amazing if we had a way of scoring student work, whether it’s a video submission or Google slides or a photograph taken of work that they did with pencil and piece of paper. And that that assignment could be tagged with the student information and then scored on a scoring guide. And then all of that data could be imported into the student information system and then extracted again, that is the Holy Grail of what we’re looking for.
And nobody I know from Writable to Turnitin to Google Classroom, has that process meant for scoring student work managed like there’s a million platforms in the world who will say, “Ask our questions, have the kids answer with multiple-choice or technology-enhanced and get the right answer and we’ll export the data for you.” EXcel does that, ExamView, Edulastic, all kinds of platforms do that. But what we’re trying to figure out is how do you score the product.
The content and the students create the work that they make for trying to score that with a scoring guide. It’s incredibly hard to manage student data and get consistent student data about the performance that work that they do.
Got it. So having something that can automatically score all of these different types of submissions.
Not out of four, because the teachers are going to score, but that contract. So if a teacher has a standard scoring guide for problem-solving in mathematics, if a kid takes a whiteboard and records a video of how they solve a problem in math, a teacher ought to be able to score that with a scoring guide. That’s got four rows on it and be able to say, “Blink, blink, blink, blink, that’s their 12 points.” And that data ought to be able to go into immediately into the student information system.
Gotcha. So, being able to score something easily within the LMS and having that information automatically sent to the student information system.
Yes. Can you do that?
Tell me. I don’t know.
I need to find someone who knows how to do that.
Gotcha. Okay. So this ability of sort of having grades more fully integrated from Google Classroom to the SIS.
Yes but.