Schools Clamored for Seesaw's App. That Was Good News, and Bad News. (nytimes.com) 18
An anonymous reader shares a report: The first requests that upended Seesaw, a popular classroom app, came in January from teachers and education officials abroad. Their schools were shutting down because of the coronavirus, and they urgently wanted the app adjusted for remote learning. The company figured it could do that with a single short hackathon project. "We were so naive," said Emily Voigtlander Seliger, a Seesaw product manager. Weeks later, reality hit: The virus spread to the United States, where more of the app's users are. Seesaw had been designed for students in a classroom to submit an audio comment or a digital drawing after a lesson. But thousands of teachers suddenly wanted it to work as a full-featured home learning tool. Rather than using Seesaw for a couple of assignments a week, they were using it for hours each day. It seemed like every start-up's dream: racing to keep up with demand from people desperate for your app. And in many ways, that has worked out well for Seesaw, a San Francisco company. The number of student posts on its app increased tenfold from February to May, Seesaw says, and the paid customer base has tripled from last year. The app is now used in more than three-quarters of American schools, including big districts like Dallas and Los Angeles.
[...] But Seesaw's experience also shows the kinds of hurdles that a company must jump in such extreme circumstances, going through years' worth of growing pains in a few months. Other digital education products, like Zoom and Google Classroom, experienced similar growth spurts and ran into their own problems -- such as unwelcome strangers who dropped into those early weeks of Zoom school. But they are public companies with resources to spare. Seesaw had just 60 employees in February, when the coronavirus hit the United States, and was trying to prove that it deserved a tryout for the big leagues. Small issues that the company knew about but hadn't addressed before the pandemic became significant problems. Teachers begged for app reliability, but some changes Seesaw made for at-home use didn't always work smoothly. While Seesaw executives wanted the app to be interesting for students, it had to be streamlined enough for frazzled parents suddenly running at-home school.
[...] But Seesaw's experience also shows the kinds of hurdles that a company must jump in such extreme circumstances, going through years' worth of growing pains in a few months. Other digital education products, like Zoom and Google Classroom, experienced similar growth spurts and ran into their own problems -- such as unwelcome strangers who dropped into those early weeks of Zoom school. But they are public companies with resources to spare. Seesaw had just 60 employees in February, when the coronavirus hit the United States, and was trying to prove that it deserved a tryout for the big leagues. Small issues that the company knew about but hadn't addressed before the pandemic became significant problems. Teachers begged for app reliability, but some changes Seesaw made for at-home use didn't always work smoothly. While Seesaw executives wanted the app to be interesting for students, it had to be streamlined enough for frazzled parents suddenly running at-home school.
See Saw (Score:5, Informative)
My kid's school system has been using See Saw for years. It's not unreliable. It works fine when the teacher uses it properly. My son, in particular, had all kinds of problems with this. There are specific places you are supposed to put assignments, help material, and requirements. Teachers would put material in the wrong place, or set upload requirements incorrectly, or link the wrong requirements to the wrong assignment, etc... He'd get a bad grade on an assignment because he uploaded it to the wrong place, or did the wrong assignment, then the grade would be corrected a week later after the teacher realized they had done something wrong and most of the class made the same mistake. I'm not putting all of the blame on the teachers, my son screwed up too, but everyone should be using See Saw the same way. You shouldn't have to dig into the on-line course materials to figure out where assignment requirements are when there is a specific place to put them.
Over the summer the school district held intensive training for See Saw and had everyone standardize on proper usage. This semester is much better - all assignments are in the same place, all requirements are in the same place.
We've had more problems with Zoom this year than with See Saw. I'm not sure if it is a training issue or not.
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I'm pretty sure the problem is people. They're the worst [esmemes.com].
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What's wrong with people? https://dilbert.com/strip/2017-01-08 [dilbert.com]
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I wouldn't blame the software as being unreliable, but the Teachers probably didn't get properly trained to use the system. This is a big problem with software deployments across all industries.
They get the software, with some abstract impression on how the software works, which may not align with reality. People are so resistant to their work changing, so they use the software in ineffective ways because it matches what they may have done in the past.
Electronic Health Records Systems. Often the Doctor
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I wouldn't blame the software as being unreliable, but the Teachers probably didn't get properly trained to use the system.
From my experience in software dev, usually it's 50/50 - the training wasn't great, and the users would promptly ignore the training and use the system however they would want.
The company I work for used to focus on compliance management software - it would organize your documents for when you are audited by the FDA or FCC or some industry standards group. Our services team was completely comprised of these auditors, so it worked exactly how an auditor would want it to work. The short of it was that if you
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I wouldn't blame the software as being unreliable, but the Teachers probably didn't get properly trained to use the system.
As a parent I assure you it was both. Software crashes along with updates and re-installs was par for the course for Seesaw in the Spring and early Fall. For the past month things have been very stable though.
Honestly Seesaw has been very impressive considering they appear to still be in startup mode. Seesaw's glitches were not as extreme as Zoom's, and were never long lived. At least in my experience for the past 7 months. There is a lot of room for improvement but that is from a lack of features not a bad
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Seesaw? (Score:2)
Can someone explain to me what "seesaw [wikipedia.org]" is supposed to mean in the context of a classroom app? "No time to learn, go play outside?" Kind of ironic given the pandemic.
"I see you're using Seesaw. How is it?"
"Bof, c'est comme ci comme ça... [google.com]"
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A fast change espectially for parents. (Score:3)
The school system, for thousands of years, is based on the idea that a bunch of students all go into the same room, sit down, and learn.
Because this idea is so institutionalized. Adults especially have such a hard time really comprehending this. As well many adults lack the IT Skills to make sure their home PC is functioning for such lessons.
For me the transition to Remote Work from Office work, was much smoother for me, than for others. Because I have the IT Skills to do my job without other people to look over my shoulder and tell me how to use my computer. I also did a lot of research in the Bast on how to structure work from home, (MBA Case studies)
However for those who don't work with technology, nor did research on the topic. It is like an alien world where everything seems upside down.
Also unlike the last pandemic that hit, you shouldn't expect things to go back to how it was before. We have this technology, schools and businesses have invested a lot of money into them, for them to drop it when the pandemic clears up, isn't reasonable. Expect more schooling from home for the long run, more working from home.
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The school system, for thousands of years, is based on the idea that a bunch of students all go into the same room, sit down, and learn.
Huh? No it isn't. You think ancient Rome had school rooms?
As well many adults lack the IT Skills to make sure their home PC is functioning for such lessons.
Huh? You think adults lack the IT skills to turn on a computer? Are you from the early 90s?
We have this technology, schools and businesses have invested a lot of money into them,
Huh? No they haven't. Most schools w
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Also unlike the last pandemic that hit, you shouldn't expect things to go back to how it was before. We have this technology, schools and businesses have invested a lot of money into them, for them to drop it when the pandemic clears up, isn't reasonable. Expect more schooling from home for the long run, more working from home.
For our jobs I agree, but for many students I certainly expect it to go back to normal for the most part. For older students there may be more digital tools used because of experience gained during this pandemic, but from the perspective of a Kindergarten and now 1st grade student's parents there is nothing good to gain from this horrible experience. They need to have a teacher by their side and to write on and read from paper, not a screen. Well, that is not completely fair, since I think better communicat
Training Users (Score:2)
The toughest thing I have seen for teachers and makers of apps like Seesaw (from a parent's perspective) is how limited they are on making changes as they learn because it takes time to re-train students and parents on how to use the app. I have had our 1st grade teacher make an improvement to how things are organized only to deal with students not finding assignments and significant time spent directing young children (and their parents) on how to adapt to updates. My daughter had two weeks of unfinished w