Seesaw and School Newsletters: How Principals Use Both Effectively

Many schools use both Seesaw and a principal newsletter. When both are well managed, families get the right information from each channel at the right time. When they are not coordinated, families get the same information twice, or get the impression that the school communicates constantly without saying anything they need to act on. The coordination is not complicated, but it is necessary.

What Seesaw is designed for

Seesaw is a classroom communication and portfolio tool. It excels at:

• Sharing student work and learning moments in real time, with photos and audio, from the classroom to families
• Two-way messaging between individual teachers and individual families
• Short, immediate notifications about classroom-level events: a field trip reminder, a project due date, a class achievement
• Building a running portfolio of a student's work over time

These are genuinely different from what a principal newsletter does. Seesaw is real-time, relational, and classroom-specific. A newsletter is asynchronous, broadcast, and school-wide.

What the principal newsletter is designed for

The principal newsletter is the right channel for:

• Monthly principal messages that address school culture and values
• Policy changes that affect the whole school
• School-wide events, dates, and schedules
• Data updates (attendance rates, assessment results at the school level)
• Resources families can use at home
• Any communication that requires formatting, links, or more than two paragraphs to communicate properly

Where the channels should NOT overlap

The most common coordination problem is principals using Seesaw for content that belongs in the newsletter, or including classroom-level detail in the newsletter that belongs in Seesaw. Both create channel confusion.

If a family has to check three places (email, Seesaw, the school website) to figure out when the spring concert is, your communication channels are not coordinated. The spring concert date belongs in the newsletter and in Seesaw as a brief reminder, with one being the definitive source.

Establish a channel guide at the start of the year

The most effective schools publish a one-page communication guide at the start of the year that tells families exactly what channel carries what type of information:

• Seesaw: Classroom updates, student work, teacher messages, immediate reminders
• Principal newsletter: Monthly school-wide news, policies, principal message, upcoming events
• School phone line or text: Time-sensitive safety and logistics (school closures, late bus, emergency)
• School website: Reference documents, calendar, menus, handbooks

Families who understand which channel carries which information check the right place first instead of scanning all of them looking for what they need.

Using Daystage alongside Seesaw

Daystage handles the principal newsletter layer: school-wide, formatted, monthly communication that delivers inline to family email. Seesaw handles the classroom layer. The two tools do not overlap in what they do. Principals who use both keep their communication clean and their families well-informed at both the classroom and school levels.