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- Adrian Graham is the current CEO and co-Founder of Seesaw- he co-founded the company with Carl Sjogreen
- Seesaw is a student engagement app like a learning journal designed for students, that allows teachers and parents direct access to the students work in real time. It invites tech into the classroom instead of banning it. It provides the teacher with an opportunity to collect student work, review and grade it and share it with the parents. The teacher ultimately remains in control of what student work gets posted. Students can share their work with their teacher, peers and parents and have the ability to annotate over their own work. The two founders joined together in an experimental space instead of an educational space and realized the potential after starting the company. They were using the vacancy in transparency in education as a venture space.
- Graham and Sjogreen have been working together as project managers for years. They both started out working as project managers at Google and then later left and worked as Project Managers at Facebook before starting Seesaw. Seesaw is now used by over 55 countries in the world. Adrian attended college at Stanford and pursued Computer Science. They have been working in the tech space together for over 11 years. They were successful because they had experience, cared and also connected closely with a community of teachers (this was not their area of expertise). They utilized Twitter early on to make connections.
- I am inspired by this because of their suggestion to try something new, fill a space and then make it free initially to help market it. Use available tech like twitter get it in the hands of teachers and see what happens!
Constine, J. (2016, June 27). How seesaw accidentally became a teacher’s pet at 1/4 of US Schools. TechCrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2016/06/25/seesaw-education/
Learning Stuff. (2016, March 8). Interview with Adrian Graham and Carl Sjogreen. Medium. https://learningstuff.org/interview-with-adrian-graham-and-carl-sjogreen-1bb6de384b7a
Thank you for making us aware of this student engagement app. It resonates with my area of work – student engagement. Knowing that this app allows parental involvement in students work, and have access to real time data. It may give some parents a sense of peace knowing how their children is progressing in class. I’m also gladly to find this app mobile friendly, I found it in AppleStore with an overall rating 4.7 out of 5.
Thanks for your comment Zheng! I think they key piece here is about the fact that the parent has access to the students work directly as opposed to only the teachers feedback or comment on what the student may be doing in class. I think a crucial component for schools is to get buy-in from parents and this type of simple engagement can really help.
Thanks for your comment Zheng! I think they key piece here is about the fact that the parent has access to the students work directly as opposed to only the teachers feedback or comment on what the student may be doing in class. I think a crucial component for schools is to get buy-in from parents and this type of simple engagement can really help.
I think that the most important part of this entrepreneur is connection with the teachers. From everything that I’ve heard about Seesaw, it is highly focused on the student experience, which naturally translates into a better class experience. I don’t believe it would have been as successful if they had approached from a programming perspective. Focus first on making the best product.
Doug, I loved that Adrian and Carl leveraged twitter as a way to get their prototype out there. They really didn’t have a background in education but had done a lot of work on user experience and it created this really interesting crossover experience for them.
Hello Mike,
Do you see Seesaw as being a supplement to an LMS? Is this better suited to Elementary level students as opposed to Secondary? I know that you have experience (and your school) with SEQTA. Would this be a replacement and if so, are its applications and functions diverse enough? Could SeeSaw be better suited for something like Advisory/Home Room as it would allow homeroom teachers the chance to see what students are doing (and proud of with evidence pieces)?
Thanks,
Maurice
Maurice, I am not confident that Seesaw could replace an LMS but I think it would be a great supplement to an LMS and/or traditional report cards. I think engaging parents with the feedback process is so important. I really like your idea about using it for an advising sharing piece or way to create a portfolio for the students of their progress through the year that doesn’t have such a heavy emphasis on typing.
Seesaw was a classic example for me of not knowing what I had until it was gone. I was first introduced to Seesaw as a parent with my SK kid’s school (years ago now). My initial impressions were very positive and honestly surprised that a school from the Toronto District School Board was this forward-thinking in using an educational technology in the classroom and allowing the parents a peek at their kids’ classrooms. Material posted in Seesaw became starting discussion points for what my kid is learning/doing in school, etc. Over time I got used to it and just assumed that it will always be a part of my kid’s school experience, which meant that I was not using it that much (despite my kid’s teacher being very active in its use). Until of course the TDSB for some reason decided to cancel Seesaw and promote another similar service that they had purchased board-wide. Suffice to say that this alternative provided such a sub-par experience that I don’t even remember its name and I’m not sure if it’s still in use today.
I suspect that it was replaced with FreshGrade… When I taught grades 3-6 (two split classes during a pandemic) I used FG for my grade 3/4 class and Google Classroom for 5/6. I was not too impressed by FG and felt like GC had more functions that worked for me and my students.
Carlo – can you identify what the biggest differences between Seesaw and the other company were? I am curious as to what made it sub-par for you!