A message from the Principal

As mentioned at the beginning of term 3, our teachers have been busy continuing to regularly share samples of learning for each child in Reading, Writing, Maths, Art, Performing Arts and Italian using Seesaw, our ongoing reporting platform. 

It is wonderful to login to Seesaw and spend some time viewing these samples of learning across the school. The range of different types of work uploaded - including videos, audio comments, written comments and photos provide an incredibly detailed picture of what is happening in the classroom and the diligence, creativity and resilience our students demonstrate to make progress each day.

I was keen to share some of the great ways that Seesaw is being used to bring parents more closely into the learning process and to allow you to understand your child's progress in ways that were almost impossible with our older reporting systems.

The two pictures above are two writing samples from the same child - in March and in August of this year - clearly showing their wonderful learning growth.

As your child’s portfolio rapidly increases in this way, it has been pleasing to see most parents visiting Seesaw regularly to view their child’s learning and build their understanding of the growth they are making and the goals that they are working hard to master. 

From a school point of view, it has been interesting to collect data from the number of posts that have been sent out by teachers to how many family visits there have been since the beginning of the year. 

As we approach the end of term 3, we thought it would be a good time to share some of these stats with the school community.

As you can see, it is pleasing to see so many posts added by teachers this year on student learning. It is a huge credit to teachers who spend their working week planning, assessing, teaching, continually improving their practice and still managing to provide evidence and comments on student learning to students and parents throughout the term. 

Another interesting set of data is around parent engagement over the month of August. As a school, we have set ourselves a target to have at least 80% of families engaging in their child’s learning on Seesaw. 

As you can see from the data, we are a little way below our target, with exactly 2/3 of families logging into Seesaw to view posts in the last month.

When we look at this broken down to a class level, it is interesting to see the differences between different year levels, and even class groups within a year level.

We strongly believe in the power of sharing actual samples of your child's learning with you in this 'ongoing' way and their current learning goals.  

We are therefore asking parents to do the following.

• Regularly jump onto Seesaw (we suggest once a week) to see if any posts of student work have been released by teachers. We have found with Seesaw at times, notifications don’t come through to parents especially when two posts might be released on the same day. 

• If you don’t have your login details and instructions on how to access Seesaw, please email your child's teacher and they can provide these to you quickly and easily. We have recently discovered there are still 15 families who haven’t signed up to the system.

• As mentioned in previous Konnective posts, you are in control of how often you're notified about new information on Seesaw. If you would like alerts when teachers have posted new items, you need to turn on push notifications. Below are your options in the Seesaw Family account to ensure you have notifications on so you don’t miss out on posts:
  1. Tap your profile icon in the upper left corner.
  2. Tap 'Account Settings.'
  3. Turn email and/or push notifications ON/ONCE A DAY/OFF.

• As stated previously, please continue to provide positive feedback to the teachers on these reports. As this way of reporting is brand new, it would make their hard work worthwhile and reassure us we are on the right track to hear if you have found the Seesaw samples useful to understand your child's learning. A quick email or chat in the schoolyard about the work samples would be much appreciated. 

Teachers have received lots of positive comments from parents throughout the term already and it really has justified and supported the amazing work they are doing.

As always, we welcome your thoughts and feedback on things and please do not hesitate to get in touch if you would like to discuss things further.