After hearing about Seesaw from fellow teachers, an elementary teacher was very curious to see what it was all about and possibly adopt it for use in her classroom in the upcoming year.

Her first thought… let’s see what others say about it.  So off she went to the Internet seeking Apple and Facebook reviews, YouTube videos and other evidence of teacher enthusiasm that came up with the search term SeeSaw.

She found some nicely produced anecdotal evidence on YouTube where she learned how some teachers implemented it in classrooms. She was particularly interested to see how Kindergarten students used Seesaw and found the classroom video of real 5 year olds happily using SeeSaw very convincing.

To know the history behind Seesaw, she read a TechCrunch article:  How Seesaw accidentally became a teacher’s pet at 1/4 of US schools. She read actual quotes from Carl Sjogreen, SeeSaw’s founder, and even saw his picture and found this very convincing.

Nearly convinced, she looked at the app store where Seesaw had a 4.9 (our of 5) star rating with over 20K people (who she assumed most to be educators) weighing in. The family app had a 4.8 star rating so it clearly was deemed a hit with parents.

Like with picking a good restaurant, she looked for low scoring or negative reviews and saw that they were mostly complaints that were easily avoided with good planning or just the usual griping from uniformed people who didn’t understand  how the app works.

Is this the type of Evidence-based decision making you have seen most commonly used to select new technologies for the classroom?

(These are just your own initial thoughts, not for public discussion)

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