Class Dojo - Classroom Management

This post is only a couple of days late.  I didn’t get anything done on this post last week.  I am not going to give you any excuses as to why, because we don’t accept many excuses from our students.  I just didn’t get it done.  However, I am here today on Monday, getting this post done.  So this week, I will actually be posting twice, hopefully.

Everyone knows that classroom management is a big time drain for teachers.  What if you had a fun and interesting way for keeping track of student’s good and not so good behavior?  There is a web-based, which has apps for iPhone, iPad, iPod, or Android device.  You don’t even need to be at your computer.  You can project from your computer to the screen and students can see when they have done something good or they are off task.  It can be used as a motivational tool for the students.  You even have the ability to e-mail parents the report of their child’s behavior for the week.  Student can even have a login to see how they are doing.  There are options for students to change their avatar once they reach a certain amount of points.

With Class Dojo, which is FREE, you can have as many classes as you need.  This is completely customizable, even down to the positives and negatives that you are looking for in each class.  You input your students and give them the avatar that you want to start out, either a monster or a critter.  You can even set the grade level and name the class.  Once your class is set up, you can print off a password for students to sign in, a different one for each student to see how they are doing.  Students would need to create their own account then put in their “secret code” to see your class.

 

Not only can you project the site on the board during class time, but also you can print out the results of the week in graphical form for you, your students, and their parents.  But you can email those reports to their parents.  This is a good way to keep parents in the look about how their child is doing well, and what they struggle with.  That is where the customization of the positives and negatives come in handy.  Parents can see if their student struggles with staying on task, talks more than they should, doesn’t participate, or something else.  The reports come in the form of a circle graph that show the breakdown of how points were earned and lost.   This also gives breakdown of how many points a student got in each area, positive or negative.  These are the reports that you can keep for yourself, send to parents, and even give to your students.

As I stated before, there is an app for the iPad, iPod, iPhone, and Android.  You will need to search the apps store for that.  In the iTunes store, the app will have the following icon.

Class Dojo, I feel, could be a wonderful resource for classroom management.  It will also give students the motivation, if projected, for students to do what they are supposed to do.  There are also ways of using the number of points per week as a reward system in class.  How that looks is up to you as the teacher.