Interview with Adrian Graham and Carl Sjogreen - Learning Stuff - 0 views
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The consistent thing I’ve learned is that it’s very hard to make things simple. No matter how much you try, the first time you put it in front of someone, it’s too complex. You’re like, “Oh my God, how could they get this wrong?” But that’s your fault. It wasn’t simple enough. I came away from Google trying to build very simple experiences that lots of people can use.
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The real enthusiasm at Google is around technology: “Let’s build a cool, new technology. We’ll find a lot of ways to apply it. Our technology will be better than our competitors.” The Facebook approach was, “Well, technology is a tool to achieve these things we’re trying to do. Let’s figure out how to make it work. Sometimes that means building our own technology and other times that means using something that someone else has built.”
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But the people who kept using it over and over were all in schools. It wasn’t teachers using it to explain things, it was kids using it to document their thinking. They would take a picture of their art, and they would explain what they were thinking when they made it. Some kids would use it as a lightweight presentation tool. They would string together some photos of a science lab and make a lab report.
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Most of the tools we’ve used to document and communicate ideas haven’t changed much since the introduction of Microsoft Office. We have documents, spreadsheets, and slides. Those are sort of the universal formats for communicating information. That seemed kind of dumb given that those were invented in a world of keyboards, mice, and DOS prompts.We now had these things that had cameras and microphones and touch interfaces and decided that there should be some new way of communicating ideas.
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The child now has an audience for his work beyond the teacher. We hear time and time again from teachers that their kids want to do their best work with Seesaw because their parents are going to ask them about it when they come home. They also know their classmates are going to watch it.
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On the parents’ side, I was incredibly frustrated watching all the work that all my kids’ teachers were doing to communicate what was happening at school. There were weekly newsletters that were long and involved; photo albums with 300 pictures, only three of which were my child. All of this was behind a password I could never remember. Teachers were doing all this work that was taking away from actual teaching or their personal lives. The experience felt pretty broken to me.It also seemed that kids might be able to document their own learning and reflect on what they were making more independently.As a parent, I’d ask my kids, “What did you do at school today?” and they say, “Nothing,” and I had no idea what next question to ask because I just didn’t have a thread to pull on.
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the magic of Seesaw is all about changing the conversation from “What did you do in school today?” to “Tell me about more about this thing you made.” It’s a starting point for a conversation
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I cannot imagine a future where I will be okay sending my kids to school for eight hours a day and having no clue what they’re working on. This is the most important person in my life. I get immediate updates about everything else, and yet somehow I accept that I have no information on what my kids are doing for eight hours a day. It’s not possible that’s the future.
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This became obvious around log-in. We knew this was a real hassle in classrooms, and we thought we could solve it using a simple text code. But a tech coordinator at one school suggested using a QR code instead. “What would really make this easy is if kids could just scan a QR code to log in.” Carl and I both thought this was weird — no one uses QR codes. They’re a technology from 10 years ago that no one adopted. But we decided to build it to see if it got used.It turned out to be one of Seesaw’s most important features, especially in the younger grades.
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we really invested in those relationships. I would call them on the phone every week. We listened, we showed them stuff ahead of time. They would give us an idea, and we would actually build what they asked for. We developed a close connection with those teachers and they started talking to other teachers in their building and other schools and so on.Honestly, we took this word-of-mouth and advocacy approach because we were a little nervous to tell teachers how to use our product. We felt like we didn’t really understand the classroom enough to tell them what to do. So we went down this path of finding some teachers who are excited about using Seesaw and helped them tell other teachers about it. Our hope is that most teachers discover Seesaw from another teacher, not from us.
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Get it in the hands of teachers, and if it’s good, it will probably spread. Teachers are asked to use a lot of crappy software. When they find something good, they tend to recognize it
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I just wanted to tell you how life changing this app has been for me and my teaching, and for my students
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I have had millions of people who are slightly more organized because I worked on Google Calendar. Good, but that’s not really what I want that on my tombstone
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Parents don’t know what’s going on in their kids’ classrooms. It’s not because someone wants to keep it secret, but the information is not easily shared
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On the parents’ side, I was incredibly frustrated watching all the work that all my kids’ teachers were doing to communicate what was happening at school. There were weekly newsletters that were long and involved; photo albums with 300 pictures, only three of which were my child. All of this was behind a password I could never remember. Teachers were doing all this work that was taking away from actual teaching or their personal lives. The experience felt pretty broken to me.It also seemed that kids might be able to document their own learning and reflect on what they were making more independently.As a parent, I’d ask my kids, “What did you do at school today?” and they say, “Nothing,” and I had no idea what next question to ask because I just didn’t have a thread to pull on. When you ask a kid to describe something abstractly, particularly younger kids, it’s quite difficult for them to do it. If you show them a picture of something and say, “What’s going on in this picture,” they’ll say, “Oh, let me tell you all about this,” it totally gives them a thing to start with.
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I cannot imagine a future where I will be okay sending my kids to school for eight hours a day and having no clue what they're working on. This is the most important person in my life. I get immediate updates about everything else, and yet somehow I accept that I have no information on what my kids are doing for eight hours a day. It's not possible that's the future.