Many readers of this blog use ClassDojo as a behaviour management tool in their classroom but for those who don’t, I would highly recommend it. Not only is it completely free, it is a really clever tool for rewarding children’s behaviour in the classroom and much more motivational than most other reward systems out there. The concept involves the teacher giving points for positive behaviours. A teacher can also remove points for negative behaviours but in Ireland, at least, this is rarely used. It’s up to the teacher to decide what to do with these points but some teachers have a shop where points can be traded for prizes.
There are a number of teachers in Ireland who are advocates of ClassDojo, myself included. While it is not a paid position, we get the benefit of hearing about the latest updates to ClassDojo. Over the last few months, there have been some great updates. For example, schools can now live blog parents throughout the day and now principals of schools can have a special type of account that lets them see into everyone’s classrooms. However, there are often some fun surprises in ClassDojo and one recent find for me was their cartoon series called Big Ideas.
These cartoons use the ClassDojo characters that children are used to to teach interesting lessons on a variety of topics, for example, one of the cartoons charts a monster called Katie who takes up an art class, only to find that it’s quite hard. Put together the fact that she’ll have to produce something for an art exhibition adds to Katie’s trauma! Thankfully, Thomas Edison is on hand to help her out. You’ll have to tune in to see whether his intervention was a success.
For me, ClassDojo is one of those rare products that actually saves teachers time and is an asset to a classroom. The fact that it is free is just a bonus as I would imagine people would pay for a service like this.