I have seen a lot of innovative practices in my school this year, and one of these is the clever use of the “fake” or “imaginary” student to organize and filter student work on Seesaw. The purpose of this post is to showcase this hidden feature that all Seesaw users should familiarize themselves with.
Classroom News Imaginary Student
This first example of using “fake” students to manage your Seesaw classroom comes from Year 2 classrooms. Teachers wanted to use Seesaw for sharing news with parents, but also realized that just posting a note to a busy feed would make it difficult for parents to find the latest letter home. They created a “fake” student named Classroom News (The Panda!), and now post to this student’s journal. As with all of these examples, the teachers made it so that kids can see other student journals on the righthand side bar of their Seesaws.
Resources Imaginary Student
This same year level wanted to share resources with parents and students in a place that was convenient and easy to find. They created a “fake” student named Resources (the Fish!), and post to this “fake” student’s journal. Now students have an easily manageable feed full of resources, such as a link to the above count-by video.
Tech Sandbox Imaginary Student
For the purposes of facilitating a PD on different cool tools that I learned about at AISA2016, I created a Sandbox fake student that could be used to store links to cool tech tools. I created a class with all teachers, and hopefully in the future we will have some time to dive into these neat tools.
So Many Examples of Imaginary Students!!
More Examples (by @SGroshell, above):
- The teacher has her own journal that students can go to for instructional videos made on the teacher’s iPad document camera
- Flat Stanley has his own journal where he posts photos of where he has been
- Each reading group has their own journal with the activities and resources that fit their reading level.
There are so many ways to use this fun “imaginary” student trick, and I am sure I am going to see more examples of this clever innovation in the weeks to come.
Education Rickshaw 
Thanks for the fabulous resources and suggestions. I like the idea of the “imaginary student” but if you set up so that all journals are visible on the right hand side, does that mean that parents have access to view all student journals? Is there a way to do this without opening all student journals? Maybe through a folder named Class News or Resources?
Just starting out with Seesaw and truly appreciate these tips!!
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That’s a good point – our school has been going the way of “public, nonlinear learning” so we’ve preferred to keep all journals visible from the student app. The parent app can’t see other students.
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Thanks for all your insightful SeeSaw posts! I am a little confused about the imaginary student as a way to share info with parents– if they can’t see other student’s journals, how does this work? Do parents have to sign up to follow their child plus “Classroom News”? Thanks a lot, Kristin
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