Please welcome the co-founders of Seesaw. The digital journal for students and teachers in the classroom. What makes Seesaw special and deferent than many other products in the market is that Seesaw can be used directly by the students. They can use this application by themselves to record their learning, choosing from a wide range of formats. Choose what to share with their community, add a reflection or a comment to identify strength and challenge and finally create their own e-portfolio. In addition, all the student’s activities are monitored by the teacher.
The founders of this amazing software are Adrian Graham and Carl Sjogreen.
What is the story behind this venture of these co-founders?
Carl, from Cleveland, and Adrian, from Houston, Texas. Carl went to Harvard to study while Adrian went to Stanford Universtiy and studied computer science. Carl and Adrian first met at Google where they were both product managers. Carl worked on Google Calendar and Maps, and Adrian was a PM on Picasa and Groups. They left and started NextStop, the social travel guide, a community-based travel site which was later acquired by Facebook. Working at FB, they both learned how to think about social media and what is the key elements of being active on the social media.
At Google and Facebook, they have learned how to think about the product using the science while being cool, therefore you will be socially popular.
Finally, education was their focus. They start looking at the formats of communications that all schools used since years, and still are using till now, like documents, slide shows, photos etc. Then, together, they start building applications such as Shadow Puppet for school, where students can create multimedia formats and share it with teachers students but cannot share it with their families. After lots of feedback from teachers, they started a new venture and created the app Seesaw.
They think that the most important part of Seesaw is what Carl explained about Seesaw “.. the most powerful part is when their parents and classmates watch their videos. The child now has an audience for his work beyond the teacher.”
