Integrating Seesaw within Canvas

We’ve heard it time and time again - Seesaw is so much easier for primary grades to navigate than Canvas! And while we agree that certain aspects of Seesaw are more “user friendly” for our primary students, there are also a lot of non-user-friendly aspects of Seesaw that can be easily solved by incorporating Canvas. That is why as online KG teachers this year, we’ve worked to integrate Seesaw and Canvas into a simple, user-friendly online system for both students and parents to navigate, making sure to integrate the best aspects of both.

We quickly decided that Canvas would be our “hub” for lessons, resources, and links. We created a simple homepage with links to daily agendas, Zoom links, anchor charts, and online and printable resources. Here’s are two samples:

        

In the Daily Agendas section, we included a calendar so that students and parents could quickly navigate to a specific day to see the day’s learning goals, videos, and lessons.

 

And then, when you click on a date, it takes you to the video lessons and assignments for that day.

This is where Seesaw comes into play. Because we felt that creating and submitting assignments was way more “primary-friendly” using Seesaw rather than Canvas, we chose to go that route. You’ll see in the picture above that it says “Reading Assignment(s) - Assigned in Seesaw.” Students and parents can click on that link and it takes them directly to Seesaw where they can have access to all of the assignments for the day. You can even take it a step further and link individual Seesaw activities (we can show you how to do this if you’d like).

In general, we have been super pleased with this system. Families know how to quickly and easily find the day’s videos and a run-down of the day’s expectations all in one spot (Canvas). Then, they can quickly and easily navigate to Seesaw to complete and submit actual assignments. It removes the hassle of searching and hunting for teaching videos, instructions/announcements, assignments, etc in Seesaw, and removes the hassle of trying to create primary-friendly assignments in Canvas and teach families and students how to go through the multi-step process of turning things in. Truly a win-win!

Kelly Badgett & Julie Jensen

Hazel Dell Elementary