Seesaw's design helps both boys and girls to benefit equally.

The Role of Multimodality and Voice
Seesaw's primary strength in promoting equitable outcomes lies in its multimodal design. It moves beyond traditional, text-based learning and provides multiple pathways for expression and engagement.

Equalizing Expression: General educational research often notes that boys may be more hesitant to engage in writing-intensive tasks, while girls may be more reserved in speaking up in a loud classroom. Seesaw's multimodal tools (like voice recording, video, and drawing) allow students to choose the medium where they feel most comfortable and confident. This equalizes the opportunity for all students to share their thinking, regardless of gendered preferences for communication.

Empowering All Learners: The platform empowers all students to become creators, rather than just consumers, of content. This focus on student agency benefits both boys and girls by giving them ownership of their learning. Students can choose to document a science experiment with a video, explain a math concept with a drawing, or reflect on a story with a voice recording. This flexibility helps to prevent gender from becoming a limiting factor in how a student demonstrates their knowledge.

Addressing Disparities in Traditional Classrooms
Educational research has shown that gender differences in the classroom are often a product of socialization and classroom environment, not inherent ability. Seesaw's design helps to counteract some of these dynamics:

Reduces Gendered Peer Pressure: A student's work is typically shared within the platform's digital portfolio, which may reduce the social pressures that can exist in a physical classroom setting. Students can share their work without the anxiety of speaking in front of a whole class or being judged by peers. This can be especially beneficial for students who are shy or introverted.

Encourages a Growth Mindset: The focus on a portfolio of work over time, rather than a single grade, encourages a growth mindset. Both boys and girls are given the opportunity to revise their work and show progress, reinforcing the idea that learning is a journey, not just a destination. This model benefits all learners by emphasizing effort and improvement.

Yes, Seesaw's product is specifically designed to support several groups of disadvantaged or marginalized children, primarily through its core functionality and its approach to accessibility and communication. The key groups it is built to serve are: English Language Learners (ELLs), students with special needs (including those with IEPs), and students from low-income backgrounds.

Here's how Seesaw supports each group:

English Language Learners (ELLs) / Multilingual Learners
Seesaw's design breaks down language barriers and provides a safe space for language acquisition.

Multilingual Support: The platform has a built-in translation feature that automatically translates text, notes, and captions into over 100 languages. This ensures that families can stay connected to their child's learning in their native tongue.

Multimodal Tools for Practice: Students can use tools like voice recording, video, and drawing to practice and demonstrate their understanding. This is crucial for ELLs who may not yet be confident in their reading or writing skills. They can, for example, practice speaking English without the pressure of a live audience.

Targeted Content: Seesaw offers a dedicated curriculum called Seesaw English Language Development (ELD). This supplemental curriculum is designed with multilingual learners in mind, with scaffolded activities that build academic content knowledge and language skills concurrently.

Students with Special Needs
Seesaw's flexible and customizable nature makes it a powerful tool for special education and inclusive classrooms.

Universal Design for Learning (UDL): The platform's tools (e.g., audio instructions, visual aids, and customizable templates) are built on UDL principles, which ensure that students with diverse abilities have multiple ways to engage with content and show what they know.

IEP and 504 Support: Teachers can use Seesaw to easily document and track progress toward a student's Individualized Education Program (IEP) goals. The platform's private notes and folders allow educators to securely store evidence of learning, such as photos or videos of a student performing a skill, which is valuable for progress monitoring and sharing with families and support staff.

Reduced Distractions: Features like "Focus Mode" can simplify the user interface by limiting the tools available to a student, which helps those who need a simplified environment to stay on task and avoid feeling overwhelmed.

Students from Low-Income Backgrounds
The product's business model and communication tools are designed to bridge gaps in technology access and family engagement often associated with economic disparities.

Free Version: Seesaw offers a free version that provides teachers and students with access to its core features. This ensures that schools with limited or no budget can still use the platform to create digital portfolios, communicate with families, and provide engaging, creative assignments.

Family Engagement: The Seesaw Family app is free for parents and caregivers and allows them to receive real-time updates on their child's work. This two-way communication channel helps build a strong school-home connection, which is a key factor in improving academic outcomes for all students, especially those from low-income households. The app's accessibility from any device (phone, tablet, computer) helps overcome barriers related to a lack of traditional computer or internet access at home.

Seesaw adheres to several key principles of inclusion and equity across its product design, functionality, and business model. These principles are aimed at creating an accessible, empowering, and culturally responsive learning environment for all children, teachers, and families.

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) in Product Design
Seesaw's product design is fundamentally based on UDL principles, ensuring the platform is usable for a wide range of abilities and learning styles from the outset.

Multimodal Representation: The platform offers multiple ways for students to show their learning, including drawing, video, audio recording, and text. This is critical for equity, as it empowers students who are pre-readers, non-verbal, or have fine motor skill challenges to express their knowledge and participate fully in the classroom.

Accessibility Compliance: The product is designed to be compliant with WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility standards. It supports assistive technologies like screen readers and keyboard navigation, and provides options for teachers to add closed captions and alt text to user-generated content.

Simplified Interface: The user interface is intentionally simple and intuitive, making it accessible for young children (as young as preschool) and users with limited digital literacy. This reduces the learning curve and ensures all students can engage with the technology without significant barriers.

Empowering Learner Agency and Mitigating Power Dynamics
The platform's features are designed to shift the learning process from a one-way street to a collaborative loop, fostering student agency and a more equitable teacher-student relationship.

Student-Driven Portfolios: The core of Seesaw is a student-driven portfolio. This gives students ownership of their learning, allowing them to choose what to add and how to represent their work. This moves the power dynamic from the teacher being the sole collector of work to the student being the active documentarian of their own progress.

Feedback and Revision Loop: Teachers can provide personalized feedback on a student's work and send it back for revision. This promotes a "growth mindset" and teaches students that mistakes are part of the learning process, rather than a final judgment. It moves the focus from a single grade to continuous improvement.

Private vs. Public Content: While students can share their work with the entire class, teachers can also create private folders and a private communication channel with students and families. This allows for sensitive or personal work to be shared privately, protecting the student and ensuring they feel safe to share their thoughts and feelings.

Inclusive and Representative Content and Communication
Seesaw's functionality is built to break down barriers related to language, culture, and communication.

Multilingual Support: The platform offers automatic, real-time translation for messages, captions, and comments in over 100 languages. This is a powerful tool for bridging communication gaps between teachers and families from diverse linguistic backgrounds, fostering a stronger home-school connection.

Representation: The product's library of pre-made activities and templates is designed to be culturally responsive. It includes diverse imagery and addresses topics related to social-emotional learning and anti-bias education. The content aims to help students see themselves and their cultures represented in their learning materials.

Equitable Access in the Business Model

Seesaw's freemium business model is a key component of its equity strategy, ensuring that financial constraints do not completely bar access to the product.

High-Value Free Tier: A robust, free version of Seesaw is available to all teachers and schools. This provides core functionalities like the digital portfolio, communication with families, and a significant activity library at no cost. This ensures that teachers in under-resourced schools can still benefit from the product's core features.

Tiered Pricing for Advanced Features: The paid tiers for schools and districts add features like rostering integrations, advanced analytics, and long-term portfolio storage. These are valuable for school-wide or district-wide implementation, but their absence does not prevent a teacher from using the platform for daily instruction and communication. This approach ensures that the most impactful equity features (like multimodal tools and family communication) are accessible to everyone, while advanced administrative tools are reserved for paid plans.

Mitigating Bias

Seesaw's primary strategy for mitigating bias is to keep a human—specifically, the teacher—in control.

Teacher as the Ethical Gatekeeper: Seesaw's AI features, such as the Reading Fluency Assessment and the AI Question Generator, are designed to be a starting point for teachers, not the final word. While the AI can provide an auto-graded transcript of a student's reading, the teacher can and is encouraged to override the grade to account for nuances in a child's speech, dialect, or reading style that an algorithm might misinterpret. This "human override" ensures that AI bias doesn't unfairly impact a student's assessment.

No Student Access to Generative AI: To protect young learners from potential harms of generative AI, such as exposure to biased or inappropriate content, Seesaw does not provide students with direct access to generative AI features like chatbots. All AI-generated content is created by and for the teacher to use with their students.

Transparency and Accountability
Seesaw is transparent about its use of AI and holds itself accountable through clear policies and user control.

Explicit Disclosure: When AI is used in the product, Seesaw discloses it with a clear icon and text. This ensures teachers are aware when a feature is AI-powered and can review its output with that in mind.

Opt-in Controls: District administrators have the ability to enable or disable new AI features for their schools, giving them a high degree of control over what technology is used in their classrooms. This level of administrative control holds the company accountable to a school's or district's own ethical standards and comfort level with AI.

Data Privacy: All AI applications adhere to Seesaw’s existing, strict privacy and security policies. Seesaw will not use user data to train AI models without user consent. This ensures that personal information is protected and not used for unintended purposes.