Seesaw’s Learning Loop: Connecting Teachers, Students, and Families with Matt Given

Matt Given is an experienced education technology leader and the CEO of Seesaw, a groundbreaking learning experience platform designed for PreK-5 students. With over 20 years of experience in education and edtech leadership, Matt has held executive roles at Kaplan, Catapult Learning, and EdisonLearning. Known for his expertise in universal design for learning and his ability to bridge the gap between home and classroom, Matt is a driving force behind Seesaw's mission to create accessible and engaging learning tools.

💡 5 Things You’ll Learn in This Episode:

1. How Seesaw connects teachers, students, parents, and administrators through its unique “learning loop.”
2. The evolution of Seesaw from a communication tool to a robust learning experience platform.
3. How AI enhances teacher workflows on Seesaw while keeping the focus on human-centered learning.
4. The role of inclusive design and feedback from over 100,000 teacher ambassadors in shaping Seesaw’s products.
5. The future of edtech tools in streamlining resources and fostering human connections in classrooms.

✨ Episode Highlights:

[00:00:22] Streamlining teacher workflows and improving classroom outcomes with Seesaw.
[00:03:13] Reflections on 25 years in edtech and the evolution of digital learning tools.
[00:07:16] Universal design for pre-readers and special populations.
[00:11:38] Seesaw’s COVID-19 transformation and post-pandemic innovations.
[00:16:45] Digital portfolios tracking student progress over time.
[00:29:20] Teacher ambassadors shaping product development with real-world feedback.
[00:36:14] Cautiously integrating AI for fluency assessments and translation.

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🎉 Presenting Sponsor:

This season of Edtech Insiders is once again brought to you by Tuck Advisors, the M&A firm for EdTech companies. Run by serial entrepreneurs with over 25 years of experience founding, investing in, and selling companies, Tuck believes you deserve M&A advisors who work as hard as you do.

Chapters

• 0:40 Streamlining teacher workflows and improving classroom outcomes with Seesaw.
• 3:31 Reflections on 25 years in edtech and the evolution of digital learning tools.
• 7:34 Universal design for pre-readers and special populations.
• 12:19 Seesaw’s COVID-19 transformation and post-pandemic innovations.
• 17:26 Digital portfolios tracking student progress over time.
• 30:01 Teacher ambassadors shaping product development with real-world feedback.
• 36:55 Cautiously integrating AI for fluency assessments and translation.

Transcript

[00:00:22] Matt Given: So we've pushed further into teacher workflows and making teachers days and lives better, and that's where we see Just this overwhelming support for the application within the teacher core, like our NPS scores, for example, our approval ratings within the teacher core are incredibly high because we are constantly focused on making their lives easier.

We're trying to do that really well. We have also stepped into curriculum more intentionally. And so again, we've talked about kind of pre readers and students and universal design. And so a lot of our. Early forays into curriculum have been in those areas.

[00:00:58] Alex Sarlin: Welcome to EdTech Insiders, the top podcast covering the education technology industry from funding rounds to impact to AI developments across early childhood, K 12, higher ed and work. You'll find 

[00:01:11] Ben Kornell: it all here at EdTech Insiders. Remember to subscribe to the pod, check out our newsletter and also our event calendar.

And to go deeper, check out EdTech Insiders Plus, where you can get premium content. Access to our WhatsApp channel, early access to events, and back channel insights from Alex and Ben. Hope you enjoyed today's pod.

[00:01:38] Alex Sarlin: Matt Given is an experienced education technology executive and CEO of Seesaw, the only learning experience platform developed specifically for pre K to 5th grade students. With over two decades in professional education and tech roles, Seesaw. Given started his career as a teacher, where his passion for education quickly propelled him into management and senior leadership roles.

Prior to his career at Seesaw, Given was CEO at Serify, where he led the company's portfolio of training and certification companies, collectively serving financial planning, insurance, and securities professionals and organizations. Given also spent the decade prior in various C level positions within edtech businesses, including Glyn Lyon, Catapult Learning, Edison Learning, and Kaplan.

Gibbon has been recognized for his educational policy expertise, including his successful influence on legislation in multiple states and testifying on the authorization of the Every Student Succeeds Act in front of a full committee hearing at the U. S. House of Representatives. education and workforce committee.

He has frequent press and public speaking engagements and has lectured on educational policy at Tufts University. Given graduated from the University of Georgia with a degree in psychology. Matt Given, welcome to EdTech Insiders. Thank you, Alex. I appreciate it. So first off, tell us a little bit about how you got into the ed tech world.

You've been in it for decades, a lot of different kinds of roles. Tell us about your ed tech journey and how you've seen the sort of ed tech world evolve over the years. Yeah, absolutely. So 

[00:03:13] Matt Given: we're working on 25 years, I think at this point, started out with Kaplan as a test prep teacher and then ended up being in the Kaplan organization for about 12 years in a bunch of different jobs.

And one of those was Right after No Child Left Behind, we started a business called Kaplan K 12 Learning Services. So, a startup inside of Kaplan and focused on serving, as you can imagine, K 12 schools versus kind of the test prep end of things. But it was around those state tests and exams. And it was a time where formative and summative assessments were becoming something that you did through technology.

And it was early in technology days, we started building technology around that. Testing and assessments in alignment with state standards, which were becoming the big thing in those days. And so those are some of the early forays into this kind of ed tech world for me. Very early in kind of the two thousands and have been there ever since.

And in K 12 EdTech, the vast majority of that time took a brief detour for three years into corporate training, but same kind of thing, just with adult learners, not kids in K 12 schools. So it's been quite an interesting path if you want to be an EdTech your whole career. So I've been there pretty much the entire time and have enjoyed it and loved coming back to especially.

The K five space, which I hadn't had as much exposure to before seesaw. So it's been great to be here. 

[00:04:27] Alex Sarlin: I really identify with that. I've done some adult learning and some early learning, but it's really interesting how much overlap there is. You think they're going to be like wildly different. And then you're like, wait, people, the brain learns the same way.

There's a lot of commonalities there. So that, you know, seesaw, as you just mentioned, it's specifically tailored to. The pre k to five market, so relatively young students, and that's different than the Kaplan's. Of course, tell us a little bit about what makes this age group different. What is especially interesting when it comes to ed tech and education about early learning?

[00:04:57] Matt Given: There are a couple of things that are pretty fascinating, and one of them is that for obvious reasons, you know, you have, especially in the pre k space case space, even in the first and second grade, You don't have students who can read to learn. And so, you know, a lot of what you're trying to get them to do, they can't just go do on their own.

So a. Common learning management system or assessment platform or something like that, they're not able to ingest the information or do what you would like them to do through that platform, because it's just not designed for a pre reader or someone who is just building their learning skills. I think what's different today than 25 years ago is those students are very technologically adept.

And so they have grown up with phones and tablets and computers around them all the time. And so. Using something like that to learn or to watch something or to understand something is not foreign to them, but they're still not readers and they're still not adept learners or adept at showing their learning in one very rigid way, like a multiple choice test, for example.

And so when you're focusing on developmentally appropriate applications, like seesaw is for younger learners. You're really trying to be able to give them how can they ingest information well, and that includes the teacher very front and center. So we are not one of the applications that is trying to get kids on a device to learn from the device.

That's not what seesaw is seesaw is really driven by the teacher and driven by that interaction with the teacher and the parent and the student. But through seesaw, they can show what they've learned and know. In a million different ways. So audio video drawing any of the above and all of the above together that they are very adept at using the tools that seesaw design for them.

Right? And so that happens to translate well into special populations as well. So other types of orders that may be older, but may have developmental deficiencies that they are not able to. Read to learn as one example, but also use tools in a very fine motor way or something like that. So seesaw is very adept at making sure that all learners can access their ability to show what they know and show what they know to their teacher, to their parent, to the administrator, et cetera.

So we really try to focus in on that universal design concept to make sure that the platform is accessible and easy to use for learners from. Two and three years old all the way up to adults. 

[00:07:16] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, I love the point about how over time the native or, you know, they used to call it the digital native, but, you know, basically just the technological adeptness of even young students has gone up a lot.

And the idea of using a sort of wordless interface, that's. We all do that. You know, every time you open your phone, there are these sort of app icons. There's all sorts of, you know, shortcuts and things that we don't do a ton of reading in our UI anymore the way we used to. And I think it's interesting to hear that that kind of accessible user interface, as well as the multimodal inputs, which is, you know, UDL specific.

UDL is meant to be universal, but it's not trying to tailor to just the students who don't know how to do things. It's saying, Hey, there's lots of different ways to show your proficiency and that's useful for lots of different people. So it's really, I love hearing you say that even though everything is designed for young pre readers, it's useful for a number of different populations of different ages.

And as we know, you know, the audience of this podcast, not being able to read to learn is incredibly. Common, you know, 2 3rds of students in 4th and 5th grade and even up are not really, you know, fully functionally literate. So the idea of tailoring to that population and knowing that they can use the tool is really important.

[00:08:28] Matt Given: Yeah, I think it extends for that. So we talked about some special populations, but special education is 1 of those areas where. For example, things that are happening at school that are driving toward milestones for those students who may have, for example, occupational therapy tasks that they're trying to achieve and goals that they're trying to achieve.

That may happen at a school and is never seen by the parent at home because the parent doesn't have the time or bandwidth or just time in the day to work through those milestones very concretely at school. It's happening, but it's been invisible in a lot of ways. It's been written down or you hear about it at a conference, but through seesaw, you can actually see those things happening.

So we see a lot of organic use cases where. Students that are unable to demonstrate those things in very rigid ways, again, grades and tests and things like that can literally show what's happening or the teacher can help them show what's happening as they're achieving those milestones. And that's been a real breakthrough for a lot of parents in a lot of schools that have used C software, things like special education.

We even see it in the higher grades in the sciences, as you can imagine, doing the experiment live and recording it and putting it into your digital portfolio to kind of demonstrate your knowledge. It's something we also see organic use cases and even high schools where it's not the same situation as an early learner or a special needs student, but you're able to demonstrate things in a differential way than you could.

before with just writing up your brief on your experiment, for example.

[00:09:56] Alex Sarlin: A hundred percent. I think as somebody who has so much assessment experience, I think it's really a movement right now, and I think a really overdue movement to think about demonstrating proficiencies or you know, how to submit work in ways that are not as the word you're using is rigid, but you could also say sort of standardized, right?

Scantrons, but the classic sort of simplification of assessment that we've had to do all these years, the idea of being able to, as you say, do a lab experiment live, record it and submit it so much richer than our lab report, let alone a Scantron. I'd love to get back to this when we talk about AI, because this is obviously a huge, But meanwhile, you know, this is an ed tech audience.

People are probably pretty familiar with Seesaw, but let's zoom out a little bit and just talk a little bit about Seesaw's evolution, right? You mentioned the sort of parent teacher connection and the fact that teachers are set at the center of the experience. It's not about learning from a tool. And Seesaw began its life as a communication tool, as a way for teachers and parents and students to all connect around learning.

And it's grown, it's evolved into a full learning experience platform. Tell us about Seesaw's evolution and sort of where it finds itself today, what role it plays in the ed tech landscape. 

[00:11:38] Matt Given: Yeah, not unfamiliar to other ed tech people that especially have been around for a number of years. We have kind of this pre covid period.

And there were periods before that around kind of the way devices were deployed into schools and the way bandwidth existed or didn't in schools and things like that. But kind of this pre covid period. So seesaw is almost 12 years old, just a little over 11 years old. So pre covid period covid period.

And then now we're in this kind of post covid period. And Seesaw has kind of fulfilled different aims through those three periods, and we can kind of talk about that a little bit, but early on. You know, the founders were very product oriented people, and they were really trying to focus in on, you know, what teachers needed to make their lives easier in the classroom.

And so a lot of the origination of seesaw was around facilitating teachers kind of journeys with their students in the classroom, and that went to. Communicating with the parents. And we call this kind of connection between the parent, the student, the administrator, the teacher, the learning loop. So everybody's in the loop.

Everybody understands what's happening. Everybody can see what's happening very, you know, visually auditorily through different means, including assessments and other things, but all these things are captured within kind of a Seesaw digital portfolio. And so those early use cases were in the classroom and were facilitating teachers.

It happened to be incredibly useful in a remote environment. And so seesaw really exploded during COVID just growing dramatically very quickly because there wasn't something like that for early learners to be fully remote and have their teachers really connect to what was happening at home and being able to bring that home learning back to the teacher, etc.

So seesaw had this tremendous growth during COVID as this kind of remote learning tool. And what we've seen post COVID is. Okay. We need to make seesaw indispensable for use in the classroom. So it was started there. It went fully remote and now we're back in the classroom again. How do we make that experience really indispensable for teachers?

So we've gone deeper into. Making Seesaw kind of enterprise ready for a district, so not only is the teacher, can the teacher use it, but administrators are being brought into the learning loop in a more kind of intentional way. We're able to add tools. I know we're going to talk about AI in a little bit, but that help facilitate teacher workflow around reading fluency as an example.

Something that you can really, again, in Seesaw, examine within the platform without having to go out and have a multiple choice test on a separate something. Teachers can design and guide what's happening with those assessments and those activities and the other things that are happening. So we've pushed further into teacher workflows and making teachers days and lives better.

And that's where we see. Just this overwhelming support for the application within the teacher core, like our NPS scores. For example, our approval ratings within the teacher core are incredibly high because we are constantly focused on making their lives easier. We're trying to do that really well. We have also stepped into curriculum more intentionally.

And so again, we've talked about kind of pre readers and students and universal design. And so a lot of our early. Forays into curriculum have been in those areas. So we have an early literacy curriculum that is a complete comprehensive scope and sequence around early literacy that incorporates some of these things like reading fluency tools and other learning tools that make teachers lives easier and leverage kind of some of the power of the most modern technology around AI.

We have a whole suite of curriculum around multilingual learners and English language development, which is again, like kind of an underserved population, especially through technology and things like that. And our tools are kind of uniquely positioned to help students, you know, they're learning English for the first time.

It's not a teaching them English program. It's making sure that they can ingest English language education across the content areas, right? So it's not a reading program for English learners. It's accessing the entirety of the curriculum for English learners. And so again, back to, we are going to keep coming back to this 50 times.

Universal design and making sure that, you know, this is accessible to all students, regardless of kind of their progress in English, progress in years, progress in competencies, you know, how is it accessible to everyone? And so we put a lot of attention on there, you know, coming up next, you know, what's next, I think, you know, we'll dive into numeracy and some of the other kind of core content areas.

But again, I think building up on where we see organic use cases. With Seesaw where we've seen, we have 25 million users around the world, about 30 percent of our business, 35 percent of our business is outside the U. S. So we see use all across the world through all different types of grade levels and school situations, private schools in Taiwan, all the way to the school down the street.

I'm in Greenville where you are in Atlanta. So we get a lot of feedback. From that user population, as you might imagine, there's a lot of people and it's a lot of people giving us feedback on what they need and what's working for them, et cetera. So that's directly incorporated into what we do every day.

And so now one of seesaw's biggest challenges is explaining how. Big it is how robust it is because it does so many things. It's not just, you know, kind of a point solution for one thing. It's really this kind of indispensable center of an elementary classroom. 

[00:16:45] Alex Sarlin: It's so interesting to hear the sort of, as you mentioned, the pre COVID and post COVID sort of phases of Seesaw.

I think you're in an unusual. Position with seesaw, because it's one of these things where many of the things you had been doing pre COVID, the UDL thinking, the parent communication. I love this concept of a learning loop of, you know, all the different stakeholders in a child's life being able to be connected.

It's like this sort of Holy grail dream of schools that often they can't reach. So you're sort of already working on that. And then. When COVID hit suddenly, as you mentioned, remote learning for early childhood, remote learning for second graders, third graders, it was just not a space that people thought a whole lot about.

I mean, there were some companies that specialize in it. There are certainly homeschool companies, but it just, you know, the idea of a whole school's worth of second graders or whole district's worth a second grade, a whole state's worth of second graders, all suddenly working. Remotely just caught everybody off guard.

And I think it changed the whole ed tech landscape. And I think it makes a lot of sense that now, you know, in this post COVID period where we're sort of back in the classroom, but there's, I think, a different level of acceptance of ed tech and what it can offer to sort of keep everybody connected, keep everybody apprised of what's happening.

It makes a lot of sense that the product has evolved in all of these ways. The curriculum piece is a really interesting evolution. Let me double click on that really quickly because, you know, curriculum in the K five space, there are some incumbent players, right? There are some people who have been doing reading early literacy curriculum or reading curriculum for decades.

How are you seeing your approach sort of be a disruptor or be different than what's already existed in the curriculum space for these younger learners? 

[00:18:21] Matt Given: Yeah, you're absolutely right. I mean, there are obviously the core providers, the major publishers, the other things that have been in the space for a long time, and then they're the kind of point solution, get your kid on a device kind of applications.

And so, you know, we're trying to straddle, like what's actually working there and what does work for teachers, parents, students. And so when you think about early literacy in particular, the connectivity to home is a huge piece of the puzzle that all of the things you just mentioned, kind of the core providers and the early providers, Don't really have a solution for and so as we're you know Having teachers in the classroom working through whether it's decodables or early readings tasks and things like that or reading fluency What's the visibility level the parents into that progress and what can the parents do at home to support that progress?

So many parents read to their students or whatever, but they don't really Until the parent teacher conference or a note goes home or something else, they don't really understand the progress of that student against kind of where they should be for their age range and their ability levels and things like that.

With seesaw in the learning loop, you can kind of get a really good visual into that entire process. You can literally see them or hear them read at school, and you can record them reading at home. And that goes back to the teacher back in the loop. And so being able to not only kind of that high connectivity between what's Happening in school and what milestones should be happening for a student.

You can really bring that full circle and, you know, where we start to differentiate ourselves further is in the tools we provide for those teachers, for those parents to really understand how well their student is doing in those things. And when we talk about literacy in particular, but reading, it's the mission critical thing to, like, take your learning farther into the next step.

How do we make sure that students are really grounded there and how do we all work together? You know, seesaw teachers, student, parent, administrator all work together for that student's benefit and seesaw can connect all those dots. Yeah. And I think that's what's differentiating in a very real way is that everything else.

You know, a book is isolated to the person reading the book at that moment and tell that reading out loud can be recorded and shared with the teacher, with the parent, et cetera, and really understood. So I think there's lots of serious value to bringing the parent into the equation. On that, and it's not just again, it's not a communication tool where you get an email about it.

It's literally being able to participate in the learning with your student in a way that you couldn't even if you're remote, you know, so we love the stories about military families. An example in one parents deployed somewhere thousands of miles away from their student, but they can still see that reading happening in class and see their students read in real time, you know, not in some.

Video that was made later and passed along. It's just there in the CSI application. Like that's just one example of kind of the barriers that are broken down by a single site that can kind of do these things a single place where this learning can happen, this learning experience platform that we've developed.

[00:21:18] Alex Sarlin: It makes a lot of sense. I mean, I'm sure those are beautiful moments. That's really, that's a lovely image to think about with a military family following with their students work. And you know, it strikes me as I hear you talk about it. You're really building on the core competencies that Seesaw has developed, which is this learning loop, this ability to keep everybody in the, basically, as you say, break down the barriers between schools and home, between teachers and students in certain ways, like allow them to talk to each other, you know, at many different times, just sort of get everybody together in the same place.

And then it makes sense of the differentiation of the curricular pieces and the features around them are build on that they build on that core competency. It's interesting, you know, when I hear you talk about these two. People think sometimes of, you know, family communication tools, and they think of parent square and remind and things, which I'm sure certainly at times in seesaw evolution, have you seen as direct competitors and then some of the things you're saying now about, you know, places to assess to deliver curriculum to track progress seem a lot more like they're Would be in the LMS space.

I'm curious how you think of CSI as, do you see it as a sort of combination of an LMS and a communication tool? Would you consider yourself a learning management system? Where would you place yourself in the ecosystem? It seems like you're combining two categories that often people think of as distinct.

[00:22:33] Matt Given: Yeah, at least two. I mean, I think we end up competing for mindshare and dollars and all those other things with everybody you just described because they do a thing, but they're more of a point solution to something. Very particular and the parent communication apps specifically a lot of those you mentioned are very tactical in nature, right?

So we have to communicate this, you know announcement about school closing next week to parents. Okay, great We're gonna use that application Seesaw is used for that kind of stuff because we have you know A great way to communicate Seesaw application and the message comes out from the teacher of the school in English and you don't speak English You The Seesaw app can translate that for you into whatever language you want to do and vice versa.

You can write in your own language and push it back in English to the teachers. So great, the tactical element of that is awesome. However, it's not sufficient, right? So then you start layering in the other elements. So the LMS like elements about being able to assign work and have work be You know, participated with inside the learning experience platform is differential and seesaw because of the richness of the tools that are there to actually do the work or show the work, you know, it's not a PDF or a YouTube video in canvas or another, you know, LMS.

It can be a very rich assignment that the expectation is you're giving a rich response in audio, in video, in presentation, in drawing or whatever you're doing. LMS is that's not what they're for. They're kind of for delivering assignment flows and maybe delivering some information. But the work that's happening, CSAW is designed to capture what's happening outside the application, just inside the application.

You combine that with a, kind of, that rich communication with the parent, not just tactical communication, but education related conveyance of what's actually happening with that student in the classroom, and how you can be helpful in that. Right. Not just this is happening, but like, here's something you can do at home and pass back.

It's not just one way kind of announcement related or tactical communication. So you start layering these things together and you get seesaw where it's this very rich, you know, kind of connectivity between all of these things. And then you include the million, again, seesaw is very big, right? So the digital portfolio aspect of it, following students authentic work over time is another element that, you know, if you've had seesaw in your district for 10 years, which you've got a lot of great use cases like this, you have students through their entire elementary career, have this compendium of their digital portfolio that shows their progress from kindergarten all the way through fifth or sixth grade.

I mean, it's pretty amazing. And as some states go into. You know, the profile of a graduate, you know, what we want, the progression work to be over time for a student apps, you know, like seesaw in particular can capture that entire profile for that period of time in the entire, the entirety of the school.

And we're seeing Apple, we're seeing that happen organically. And now it's becoming kind of a focal point of many states and countries too. It's not just the U S that have this kind of idea of the profile, the graduate Canada's going in that way as an example. So we're seeing these, these things come to bear.

That we were interestingly positioned for already, but now can kind of participate in a real in a real way. And so that's really interesting for us. But it's so, yes, we do things that are like, yes, we do things that are parent communication, like, but the combination of all of the things is what makes seesaw unique.

And, you know, layer on top of that. Teachers actually like it, and parents actually like to use it, and I think that's what's going to come down the pike at some point is that just, and it's already happened to some extent, the kind of backlash around too many applications, you're changing them up too often on us, we don't want to learn something else, give us something that we really want to use in the first place, and it's really helpful to us, and I think that's kind of And emerging or already here, but growing trend.

[00:26:26] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. This, uh, product concept of the Sean Ellis test where you ask people what they, you know, how unhappy they'd be if the product disappeared and if they'd be very unhappy, if a lot of people would be very distressed, if the product disappeared, then, you know, you have real fit and it, you know, it just seems this post Essar moment and people are sort of streamlining and consolidating their portfolios, you know, learn platform says schools have up to 2, 700.

Ed tech tools, you know, accessible, which is just mind blowing to think about. And as people streamline the ones that will win are the ones that, that certain constituencies would absolutely go ballistic if they lost it. And you know, that kind of high NPS and high loyalty and value, especially value to multiple pieces of the ecosystem, which is obviously core to what you're doing to parents, to admins, to teachers and to students.

And over time, you know, that makes it a very sticky from a. 

[00:27:18] Matt Given: Yeah, 

[00:27:19] Alex Sarlin: it's true. I 

[00:27:19] Matt Given: mean, the challenge we face in that is that oftentimes when districts are doing that kind of evaluation, they're evaluating a point solution and not looking at the broad based thing. So our, our challenge is seesaw is.

Communicating this broader message, right? Like it should all happen together. You don't need to buy 20 point solution applications, get something that's going to actually streamline what's happening and make it, make those connective tissues really happen between home and school. So it's not without its challenges to be kind of unique in that space.

It's a huge advantage, but it's also, it's a challenge to actually communicate all the things that you can do, especially when people are trying to consolidate or trying to figure out like a solution for a particular thing. 

[00:28:01] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. I love that you brought up this sort of digital portfolio. Capability and how that in and of itself is this growing movement.

And I think it relates to the assessment conversation we were having at the beginning of assessment becoming more authentic and the idea of showing your proficiencies, showing your skill sets rather than it being just, you know, a, a degree or a, I graduated from high school and therefore you should assume I know all these things and can do all these things a lot more of a, Hey, let's actually take the work that's been happening over these years and turn it into a portfolio that can sort of.

Showcase a lot of different skills that the whole portrait of a graduate movement that you are referring to here. That's yet another space that obviously seesop plays in that of which there are competitors. There are people who do nothing but digital portfolio. So it's a really, really interesting combination of things.

And I can imagine it might be hard to position. You're walking into a. A district and trying to explain, you know, they might be looking for one of those things and not others, or they may already have solutions for others. And then they have to figure out how to place you. But it's obviously worked because you have 25 million students around the world.

Besides the COVID boom that you mentioned, you know, what do you attribute some of the growth of CSI? It's been around the world. Over a decade, but, you know, many other tools have been around over a decade, don't have 25 million students and have not grown at the level that seesaw has grown at. What do you attribute seesaw's growth to?

Yeah, I 

[00:29:20] Matt Given: think, you know, the focus on the, you know, the users and their feedback is a huge piece of that puzzle. So 1 of the really unique elements, and I've rarely seen this in my 25 years in the space. We have an ambassador program. We have kind of these power user teachers, and they're the center of a lot of what we do and what we think about as we as we build.

Pieces of the application, so there are over 100, 000 of them around the world, which is insane as a user community. And that's and those are the power users user community. So the ambassador program and our seesaw community is the broader way to think about it. And that includes early adopters and other kind of designations and folks that participate.

But that community of users. They're the ones that get kind of first access to things to try it out. They're the ones that kind of get to be able to play with, you know, some of the tools we're developing and thinking about, and they give us, as you can imagine, like at that scale, really rich feedback of what's going on.

It's not a focus group of 10 users and hopefully you get the information you need. It's this massive community of hundreds of thousands really giving us very rich feedback on what's happening. And I think that kind of responsiveness to actual teachers on the battlefield in the classroom, figuring it out has given us like really good insight.

And again, it's part of being kind of a product led company and, and, and the product being at the forefront. And again, during the COVID period, that served Seesaw incredibly well, because you had this community of people that were like, we have to have this for our remote learning. And now it's. You know, that tension of those teachers and what they need and what the districts are doing, especially in the U S with now restricted funding based on the, you know, change from having ESSER funding to not having ESSER funding and the, and the buildup of applications and people that districts did.

So we saw layoffs this year, we saw consolidation this year, and everybody has been kind of in the, everybody in the ed tech space has been in this, you know, couple of years of tough it's changing and the world's changing. What's the post world going to look like? So that community is also kind of, you know, a bulwark against being left behind there.

You know, I think we're outperforming our peers in a lot of ways during this period because of that. And because of that, you know, kind of teacher and community love, but the fact here, like, would you be upset if Seesaw left or would you be upset if an application left? This ambassadors would be very upset.

A lot of them have invested years up to a decade or more in building out their seesaw portfolio of lessons and what they do and how to use it. And as we improve it, they get to do those things. So it's really interesting and heartening. To know that we've got that well of not only support, but just like access to really great information about how things are used in the real world, not just how we think they'd be used.

Or 

[00:32:01] Alex Sarlin: there's this movement overdue, but I think really, really strong movement across the ed tech space now for inclusive design, co design sort of really trying to build not in a vacuum or, you know, a silo, but really build in. In conjunction with your end users and with a lot of feedback and more than, you know, just an occasional focus group.

And I think, you know, I don't know how long it's taken to build up, you know, 100, 000 plus, you know, beta group or ambassador group as you're calling it. But I imagine it takes a lot of work and a number of years to get that group. But it makes a ton of sense that having such a rich. Set up power users that want to use all the new, you know, the new features that want to try things out that want to give feedback that want to tell you what complain about what's broken.

But you know, then you can see we're not broken, but complain about things they wish they had. You know, it's so powerful. It feels like yet another sort of emerging trend that seesaw has probably been in front of for a while. Now this is sort of hot topic in the tech spaces. How do you make sure you have You know, that fast, responsive, rapid cycle of feedback that you can actually learn from.

And it seems like it's been something that's baked into see stuff for a long time. It has. I mean, again, 

[00:33:13] Matt Given: you know, started out as really a product led company driven by the users. What did the users in particular, the teachers, you know, they're kind of the early, the early core user. Yeah. And still are the core, you know, they're the ones driving what's happening within the application.

So, you know, their feedback, the scale of that feedback, I mean, our product team is amazing, but part of what makes them amazing is they're very responsive and open to listening to what's happening. And I think as you know, we've been evolving the tools to that, you know, like how do we make your life easier from a grading perspective, from a.

Recording and capturing perspective from delivering curriculum to you. That's really relevant to what you're doing. Like those things are true. And now the next iteration of that is really bringing it much closer to our users around the world and in the States. And so tailoring things to the state standards, tailing them to the district scope and sequence, you know, all the way down to that kind of district and building level, like what are you trying to accomplish at the point of service?

Like, what are you trying to accomplish? And now we sort of do that internationally as well. So. We launched Seesaw UK last month, and so there's a British English version of Seesaw for users in the UK. So when you go into the platform, it's no longer the American app that you now have to force fit into your British world or your UK world.

It's a UK centered application, so the platform is in British English. Run off servers in London, so it's literally close to you. And we're trying to bring it closer and as we get and get into 2025 and beyond, there'll be seesaw, the platform will be in Spanish, the platform will be in Arabic, the platform will be in a lot of different languages.

And that goes to not only the platform, but as we're evolving the content. You know, just bringing things closer to that user, like how, you know, is that user at the center of our universe? Or is it or are they not? They are for us. And and we have to be, you know, much more focused on the uniqueness of that situation.

And I think part of that is idiom. Part of that is language. Part of that is patient and sensitivity to cultural norms and things like that within that within that group. So we're spending a lot of time there now. We're trying to, since we have such a large international audience, how do we not make them force fit to our U.

S. centered app, but how do we bring the app to them, whether they're in Latin America or the Middle East or Europe or wherever they happen to be? 

[00:35:23] Alex Sarlin: I think that's a great segue to talking a little bit about AI capabilities, just because you know, AI can do a lot of things. One of. Which is, is translation and localization and sort of helping audit, you know, particular tools or curricula for American idioms.

For example, I'm not sure if you're using it for that. I'm just saying that one thing it can do, but I imagine you're thinking a lot about different use cases for AI within seesaw because there's so many different things happening in seesaw. You have all of this authentic student work in video. That is something that in the past would have been data that.

I'm calling it data because it's an AI conversation, but that would have been, you know, information that would have just lived only in that video. But within AI world, that suddenly becomes this incredibly rich set of data that can be understood in all sorts of educational ways. I don't want to put words in your mouth.

How are you thinking about AI? 

[00:36:14] Matt Given: So we're really cautiously optimistic about kind of the capabilities of AI and want to make sure that, you know, we've been so human centered on the teacher. And so we want to make sure that as we're. Deploying a, and we do it some very basic ways that are very common. So translation is one of those things.

So we mentioned that in the application, if you're a parent that doesn't speak English, but your teacher only speaks English, if they're writing you on the application, you can get that translated. That's an AI feature or things like that. But the evolution of that is in things like fluency assessment. So instead of a teacher having to sit through, if they have a class of 30 students, 30 videos of their kids reading to try to individually.

Okay. That we can leverage AI to speed up that process and they can get kind of an evaluation of that student's reading and we do other things like that, too, but it's always kind of gated by that human and most often the teacher or the administrator. And so there aren't AI application parts of seesaw that are.

The student free in an AI environment, like we're not like they're not in those kind of freewheeling tools like chat. BGPT and stuff like that. We don't have that kind of accessibility to students in the platform, but for a formative assessment that you want 10 question test on animals in Africa. We have a I function to help the teacher create that test.

So there is kind of this infinite availability of different types of assessments that they can do and different types of things that seesaw can help them facilitate. But again, gated by that human and kind of curated by the human. Most often the teacher. So that there's not this kind of direct connect to student to some kind of freewheeling AI environment.

Like we're very cautious there. We want to make sure we're using this appropriately. And the same thing goes for the data that's associated with that. We're not mining our data from our student customers for AI development. We don't do that. We're very concerned with kind of the data privacy and protection and we want Have to fit into 150 countries, there are almost 150 different regimes for data, privacy and protection.

And so we are very all those things and want to make sure we're doing the right thing. So we use AI internally for, you know, some kind of business kind of efficiency things and other things that are going on. But. I would say that we are cautiously optimistic. We are there, but you know, we still believe that human interaction between the teacher, the student, the parent, the administrator, and that learning loop is like the critical element.

And what differentiates. C soft from a plug and play application, right? It's just not that. And we don't want to be that we don't, we don't want to have the kid on the device 24 hours a day, right? Some AI algorithm telling them that they needed this different difficulty math problem, like, That's has its place.

It does like the, you know, the kind of that differentiated instruction through those methodologies have their place. We're trying to make sure that for elementary learners in particular, or special needs learners, that human element is so critical at those elements. So we want to make sure that's facilitated, not replaced.

[00:39:07] Alex Sarlin: Absolutely. And I, you know, you mentioned the learning loop and the different constituencies, the different stakeholders, the different people in a child's life around their education. It sounds like, you know, AI can facilitate connections between them, like translating between parents and teachers, but you're not looking at all to create a sort of student to AI, you know, just back and forth ping ponging connection, which I agree at many, many other AI companies.

That is exactly what they're focused on for better or worse. You know, I think we'll all see how this. pans out, but I think that's a rich, it certainly matches CISO's philosophy, but I think it's also probably a very smart way to look at, you know, AI. I think it feels like that back and forth pinging is where we're sort of starting and we're all hoping in the ed tech space that it will evolve to be more of a connecting technology and one that actually allows us to, you know, work together and connect with each other more richly rather than just be.

isolated in a room with a computer, even though it's easy to imagine that future. So outside of AI, you know, what do you see as the sort of next big trend in ed tech? And I don't mean a next big trend, you know, necessarily the next technology after AI or anything like that. But what do you see coming sort of around the bend when you look from your perspective as the CEO of CSUN as somebody with a long tenure in ed tech, like what signals are you seeing about what might be next in the space?

So this is going to be kind of like a hopeful answer, like what I 

[00:40:32] Matt Given: hope is going to happen versus what may actually happen. But you've been around the space long enough to we've seen trends come and go. And if you go to any of the big conferences, especially, you know, kind of the ASU GSBs of the world, stuff like this, you see whatever is the hot thing that year or for a two year period.

And then it may evaporate. And then you see, you know, big data was there for a while. Kind of evaporated. And like, you know, all these different things, mooks, right? The biggest thing in the universe for 12 months. And then you didn't hear, you haven't heard about it for a long time and not that those things disappeared entirely, but they're just not the focal point of where things are going or, or certainly didn't live up to the hype or the promise that they did.

And so I think. Part of what that has generated, like all the different push and pull of the hype and things like that has led to the situation you described a minute ago, where schools have a thousand or more, you know, ed tech applications available and all this other stuff. And so that's spun teachers into an untenable frenzy about like, I don't want to learn another application.

I don't want to do this. So hopefully the next trend is. Shortening the list to things that actually work for teachers, students and parents, right, like shortening that list to something that is manageable, understandable evolves with the classroom is more human centered in a way because, you know, again, pushing kids to be on their device.

They're already at home on their devices way too much. And I think we could all kind of say that that's not super controversial anymore. To say that, so why are we doing that more at school? So what are those authentic ways to leverage technology to make the human connection of education better? So, you know, I'm hoping that the removal of ESSER funding might be this forcing function to help districts really think through what's actually working and what is a smaller number of more powerful things to kind of bring technology into that human education connection.

Maybe step away, you know. From the device centered, like we're going to give this kid an assessment and then the technology is going to prescribe for them a lesson on the computer that they're then staying on the computer the entire time. And we know the offenders there where they where they want to do that.

And we're trying, like, we're kind of going against that tide. We want. The teacher, the student to be at the center of that and the authentic level of assessment around, you know, how they are actually learning and being able to demonstrate that in many ways versus kind of the multiple choice test or, or some other kind of limited series of answers.

But hopefully it's, it's, it's a forcing function to say. What's working for everybody, teachers, the students, all the, all kind of the humans involved in aviation, 

[00:43:09] Alex Sarlin: it seems plausible to me that that is how things may evolve again, post test or this idea of, you know, if there's less budget, where do you spend your money in a place where on tools that people really, really like, they really value, they really use, right?

Some, a lot of tools aren't even used that often. And our, Adding value to many different parts of the ecosystem. Clearly seesaw is is already doing that and is continuing to evolve to do it more and more and more. This has been a great conversation. I really appreciate you being here. This is Matt given the CEO of seesaw.

Thanks for being here on edtech insiders. Thanks, Alex. We really appreciate it. The time and the conversation. Thanks for listening to this episode of Ed Tech Insiders. If you like the podcast, remember to rate it and share it with others in the Ed Tech community. For those who want even more Ed Tech Insider, subscribe to the free Ed Tech Insiders newsletter on Substack.