Overview of Class Dojo
Thanks to a tech saavy coworker I now have the best classroom management tool working for me on my smartboard. Class Dojo is an online classroom management tool that allows you to track your students' behavior and earn them points towards rewards and prizes. When you set up your class, or classes, each student is given a monster character beside their name. You can display your whole class on the board at once and add or take away points as you teach. The program is customizable to your class rules or specific student goals.
Sound and Display Options
When they earn a point you have the option to have a banner display and a ding sound go off so students can see who earned it and what they earned it for. I prefer to leave it off during independent work so they are not distracted by it but it is wonderful for whole group lessons because it really gets the students motivated to volunteer. I also leave the sound and banner off for negative awards simply due the fact that this year many of my students would feed off that negative attention.
Remote Access
Another great feature with this program is that you can use your smartphone or tablet as a remote control to award points while you are working in a small group, walking your class in line or even on a field trip.
Data
Probably one of the best and most helpful features is that this program tracks and saves student behavior over time. At the end of each day, week or month, whatever you need to view, it graphs the students positive and negative behaviors. There is room at the bottom of each day's report for you to add comments. You can print, email and save this data for Parent Teacher Conferences, IEP and 504 plan meetings. The program will let you specify specific dates to display and as far as I know you will never lose your data until you delete the class.
Parent/Teacher Communication
This makes daily and weekly communication easy and effortless. My students with specific goals get their reports e-mailed daily to their parents and the support team that works with them. All my other students have their reports sent home weekly on Friday. You can set it up anyway you would like. There is an address book so you do not have to enter the e-mail everytime. All you have to do is choose the students you want and hit send report. There is a very professional message along with the e-mail and a link to view their child's report online. If parents have questions they can reply to the e-mail and it will come to the e-mail you used to create your account.
Rewards and Incentives
At this point there is only one reward online and that is to change the monster or critter that is beside the student's name. My students do like this and there are many monsters to choose from. In addition, I created a Class Dojo reward chart with many different prizes and the number of points they need to earn them. I also hand out award certificates every Friday to recognize students for the positive behaviors I look for. Other teachers I know who are using this let the points accumulate over 2 weeks or even a month. I prefer to start fresh every Monday. When I clear the points on Monday the data is saved so you can look back on previous weeks as needed.
I highly recommend this tool. It is free to sign up and use. You can have muliple classes created and it is a breeze to keep parents informed. Enjoy! http://teach.classdojo.com/
Mrs. Barcavage
PS- If someone would share with me how to attach files to my blog, I will post my certificate templates and class dojo rewards chart.
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