ClassDojo - My Thoughts!

My experience in using ClassDojo has been limited by the fact that I didn't test it out with my students until the last week of summer school, but it was extremely positive.  On a whim, I set up the class and tried it one morning.  I got off to a slow start, but immediately saw my students engagement increase.  They were excited to see the points on the board, and really wanted to hear the audio notification!  One of my students tried harder at reading then I have ever seen while we were using ClassDojo!

I found the site easy to use, easy to set up classroom, and very easy to award points using the mobile log-in on an iPad or iPod Touch!  I even found myself giving more positive feedback to students, and avoiding negative comments.  This in an area that I think makes ClassDojo unique.  By having a list of positive reinforcers in front of me (or one of my instructional assistants), it forces you to go to the positive first.  I'm the first to admit that I have a tendency to focus on negative behaviors of students and this really helped me stay more positive.

I have chosen to turn off notifications (visual and audio) for negative behaviors, this a personal choice.  I still tracked those behaviors, but didn't want the students to get caught up in seeing negatives displayed for the entire classroom.  The students didn't seem to notice, they just liked seeing their number go up!

As of right now there is no way to track individual students across different classes, but in Twitter conversations they have mentioned this functionality is coming.  I think this is my biggest holdback with the site.  While students do have a place to access their data and customize their avatar, the data it shows is aggregated from different classes and the student has to enter several different codes to get it working.  I'm hoping that upcoming updates will help with this, because I think it is essential if multiple teachers what to track one student and get the most accurate data.

I also think the data keeping could have some improvements made.  It is a nice feature to have a classroom report emailed to you at the end of each class, with an overview of the points given.  This is wonderful in a general education setting.  In a special education setting it is not enough information.  As I stated in the previous post, you can email individual student reports to yourself or parents, but you have to enter an email address for each student, every time you end the class.  This can obviously become cumbersome very quickly!

With that being said, I think this is a very transformative tool for classroom management, and will be very seriously figuring out how to make it work for my classroom situation.  I think using the "percentage" as a way to gauge a students behavior, might be an extremely positive way to look at it.  Not just numbers (which is essentially what I'm doing now), but a more complete picture of their day.  In my head I think that showing students their "percentage" throughout the day may help them see how they can improve their day, if needed.  I haven't worked out all the details, but it's the direction I'm heading in.

This tool has a lot of potential and I'll be looking forward to the upcoming updates!

Patrick


Share this

Do you know somebody else who would find this post interesting or useful? Please forward it to them. Did somebody forward this post to you? Visit Teaching All Students and subscribe to receive posts for free. If you need a tutorial please visit this post: RSS Readers.

30 days hath September...

So I'm an NPR junkie, it's on in my car almost all the time (I need my Car Talk and Wait Wait...Don't tell me! on Saturday's), and today was no exception. Today I was listening and they were talking to an author about his new book called Thirty Days Has September. It's a book about pneumonic devices, all those fun things we teach kids to remembers stuff - HOMES, Every Good Boy Does Fine, etc..., but it was the reason why he wrote the book that was interesting to me. The author described his son who has Autism and has difficulty understanding spoken language as well as using spoken language. The son had difficulty transitioning activities (not that unusual) and his father felt that since he didn't understand spoken language he was unable to understand what was happening next. That's when they hit upon his strength, the son had an amazing ability to recall music. They began using his strength to help him transition. As they would transition to an activity they would sing a little song to help him understand what would be happening - even something as simple as Splish, Splash, I was taking a bath - so he knew they were heading to the bath. Using this experience it helped the author decide to write his book.

The story just struck something with me. Sometimes it's the little things we take for granted that end up being life changing. Obviously for this child his love of music was many years just considered nothing more than a fascination, but all it took was one person to recognize the power of his gift and figure out a way to use it. This child's quality of life was increased because after hearing a song 1-2 times he was able to understand what was coming next, even using the tactic to tell others what he was doing (if you listen to the story on NPR you'll understand). Hopefully using this example we can all think about the little things that might completely change the life of a student.

Patrick

Share this

Do you know somebody else who would find this post interesting or useful? Please forward it to them. Did somebody forward this post to you? Visit Teaching All Students and subscribe to receive posts for free. f you need a tutorial please visit this post: RSS Readers

Thought on Communication

So instead of working on my lesson plans, planning for the first day back from break, I'm sitting on my couch writing a blog post. Why? I really don't know. I've been having thoughts about different things, and one of the main ones is how to integrate more communication into my classroom day. This is one of those things that took me a little while to understand as a teacher of students with significant cognitive disabilities.

In college I learned all about teaching reading to all students, theories, how to do so many things, but they never really touched on how important communication was to all of it. I can teach 10 students to recognize letters, but how will they use it if they can't communicate? This kind of realization is something that took my years to understand. I just hope that our new batch of special education teachers is able to grasp it much more quickly than I. Communication is everything to our students!

Patrick

Share this

Do you know somebody else who would find this post interesting or useful? Please forward it to them. Did somebody forward this post to you? Visit Teaching All Students and subscribe to receive posts for free. f you need a tutorial please visit this post: RSS Readers