It would be remiss of me to have a technology and education
blog without reference to some of my favourite educational technologies, so
today I will tell you about my one of my current favourite apps for the
classroom …
Class Dojo
I discovered this app through a colleague at a previous job.
One day he started talking about this program that allowed you to award points
to students for their good behaviour and take points away for their bad
behaviour. At first I was sceptical; this seemed a bit too much like a primary
school app rather than something to be used in a secondary classroom. Still I downloaded
the app (it was free after all) and after spotting some funny shaped creatures decided
it was not an app for me.
Fast forward and I can now admit that I was a little short
sighted. Has the app changed? Not all that much: still funny shaped creatures,
still awarding points. However, I have come to the realisation that while the
appearance may be targeted at a younger audience, the uses for the app
(affordances) are for all classrooms. Not only does this app allow you to keep
real time track of student behaviour but it can actually improve your class’s
behaviour.
I first tried this app with my Year 9 History class for a
bit of fun. This is probably my best behaved class and I felt they would see
the spirit of fun the app aimed at and not be offended that I was treating them
like primary students. So I put it up on the overhead projector as they were working
on an inquiry based task (see my previous blog for inquiry based learning) and
just started awarding points for on task behaviour, helping others and hard
work. The effect was almost immediate, some turned around and tried psychoanalysing
their funny shaped creature as my representation of them (by the way: the
creatures are randomly assigned) while others took a few seconds notice and got
on with their work. However, once they got over the initial excitement of the creatures
their behaviour started to change: they started behaving for points! As I said,
this is my best behaved class but even the most off task of students started
knuckling down to their research in an effort to be recognised and earn another
point. This worked particularly well during the class discussion as everyone
wanted to contribute so they got a participation point. At no point did I offer
a reward for the person with the most points or signal that the points meant
anything: they simply wanted more points and that was enough.
A word of warning though, the points system does not work
for all students. In the same class discussed above, I had one of my best and
one of my worst students both react negatively towards the point system. Both
deliberately tried to get negative points as a protest against the system and
thus needed more traditional classroom management techniques to get them back
on task. So the lesson I learnt from this is that while it is fun to make the
points public, it is better to keep them private and maybe just show the
student their totals at the end of class or even not at all.
With this important lesson learnt, I spent this week using
it in my Year 7 English class. I did not make the points public this time but
instead just used it to keep track of their behaviour. This private use of the
system made it easier for me as I didn’t feel pressured to award points and it
helped me to be available to every student in the class. In particular, the
random student selector option prompts you to award positive or negative points
to a randomly selected student. This has been really useful as it helps me to
get to all the students and see what they are up to rather than then handful of
students who regularly monopolise my time. This has the added benefits of ensuring
that I am moving around the classroom and making everyone feel more included. Moreover,
the reports that can be generated from the app make long term classroom
management planning easier. For instance, after each class I print off the
scoring for each student – where it shows how many positive and negative points
they got that lesson and the behaviours displayed – and quickly review them
looking for multiple negative behaviours. By doing this, I have been able to
identify some organisational issues that effect a well-intentioned and
generally hard working student that I might have not noticed otherwise. So
rather than miss an opportunity to help him improve his learning across all
classes, consequently I have also noticed he is often the last to leave his
locker and head to class, Class Dojo has alerted me to a problem through mere
data.
In summary, Class Dojo is a great app for keeping track of
behaviour in the classroom. While it can be used in a public sense to get
students to monitor their own behaviour, I prefer to use it privately to help
me keep track of all the students in my class. Not only can you record and
monitor their positive and negative behaviour but the system allows you to add
your own behaviours and thus customize the system. This has been particularly
useful as I try to get my students to focus on organisation and practice Good
Learning Behaviours (GLBs) and thus I can reward them for these specific
behaviours. Moreover, the random student function provides a friendly reminder
to get around to all students in every class and the summary data helps in long
term planning. The best bit is that it is free and the recent update has made
it much more user friendly. So try it today… you’ll never see your little
monsters the same way again!
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