Class Dojo
Class Dojo is a great tool to monitor student behavior, and it is easy to use. To sign up you pick if you are a teacher, parent or student. I chose teacher. After you type in a username, password, and email, you pick a name for your class. Then you name the students in your class, and they come up as monsters. Then, your class is made.
|
Class Dojo can help teachers connect with both students and parents. Students can go onto the class dojo site and see what the teacher posts in the class story. A teacher may post a reminder or even something they did that the student can look back at and remember. This story can also be shown to the parents, displaying what their child is learning in school. Another helpful tool is messaging. Teachers can contact the parents, sharing how their child is behaving in class.
While Class Dojo allows teachers to connect with students and parents, it also allows them to track the behavior of their students in class. Students can receive or get points taken away by the teacher. When a student shows something positive, the teacher can reward the student by clicking on an icon, giving a point to their monster. This icon shows
|
what positive action they did. There are also icons that show negative behavior. A student could lose points if s/he was misbehaving. A cool feature is that the teacher can create these behavior traits. I customized two traits for each positive and negative. For positive, customized traits could be doing the homework and staying on task. Two negative traits could be failing to stay in their seat and not listening.
|
As a future teacher, I can see myself using this tool to easily monitor my students. It is also a great way to involve parents, making them aware of how their child is doing, as well as what they are learning. Besides being able to track behavior, there are also other tools. There is a stopwatch that can count up and down, a tool where it picks a student randomly, and even a place where you can take attendance. On top of that, you can group students and give each group points.
This tool would fit under Domain 2, component d, managing student behavior because that is what Class Dojo does, it helps track the behavior of the students in the class which is an element of this component. Using this tool, teachers can create goals for each student; maybe get to a certain number of points and they get a prize or something similar to it. Setting these goals and creating expectations will help structure the student and help them understand what they should be doing.
|
Looking at Class Dojo, there are many great tools, but something that I would want different or added on, is when a student receives a positive or negative point, the teacher can input why they got it. It would help to explain the scenario in why they got the point, so the teacher can better understand what each point means, instead of just seeing a "working hard" on the student's monster. In my Ed Psych class, we are learning about how each student acts differently due to certain events in their life. We learned about Erickson's Crisis and how some students can be show mistrust or go on the negative side of each stage which can cause behavior issues. By daily monitoring students with Class Dojo, teachers can see if a student is misbehaved and can further look into various aspects to why this student is like this.
ClassDojo. (n.d.).