Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “ClassDojo Tutorial – Easy Classroom Management”.
This video tutorial is going to focus on a free teacher, classroom management tool called class dojo and class dojo specializes in rewarding, and I guess you could call it punishing students based on their behavior. It’S very much a behaviorist, ik, BF Skinner type approach to helping students learn how to behave. It works like a charm, though, for many teachers and students and amazingly the students, love it in many cases. So you’ll have to decide if this is something that you feel good about using if you think it’s the right approach or not, but let’s take a look at class dojo here at class, dojo comm, you just click the sign up for free button, select how you Are signing up so I’m signing up as a teacher and then just fill in the information for your registration, then click sign up and class dojo will load. It does make you sign in now using your new account and then it takes you to your class.
Dojo homepage notice that it’s given me a demo class to play around with and explore how it works. It also gives me the ability to add a photo that the students will see of me and I can just click that button and drag a photo into this box from my computer or I could click Choose file to pick one. I could take a picture from my webcam and there’s other ways as well to bring in photos for my profile, but I’m just going to X out of that for now now notice. If you’re part of a school that uses class dojo extensively or even a little bit, you very well could just click.
This button that says, join your school and it’s possible that it could automatically find where you are and find a school nearby. But I’m just going to X out of that and type in the name of your school, and then you can select from the list the school that you’re part of – and this just makes it easier for students to find your account and be able to be added To your class and also parents – and so it’s it’s like joining the community on classdojo, so it’s easier for your community to find you and notice here in the lower left. It says: get the free class dojo app using the app you’ll, be able to walk around the classroom and enter in your device, how students are doing, and that will be reflected online on the website. Now I’m going to zoom in a little bit, so you can see this a little bit better.
All that I need to do now is click to add my first class. Now it gives me the option of picking a class icon and naming my class, so I’m going to go ahead and do that I’m going to click to give my class a name. You can be as specific as you want. If you do teach secondary. It is probably important to set up separate class dojo classes for each class period and you’ll see why in a few minutes here, I do think, though class dojo is more commonly used in kindergarten through sixth grade and you’ll, see why again in in a few minutes, But I’m going to click here where it says pick a class icon and I’ll just choose something that makes some sense here and then I select the year in school that this is for. This is for seventh grade and then click create my class okay.
Now, here’s the the bad news – I guess it says time to add your students and so at this point I need to go in and type each student name, but as you type, the different names notice that a little monster appears with the name. I just can’t figure out why students would be depicted as monsters. I don’t know what’s up with that, but anyway you can see that there they are kind of cute monsters and you can click. If you think that a particular student might be offended by the monster that was chosen randomly for them, you can click to change. The look of the monster at least a little bit and save and close now, there’s also an option to copy/paste names. So if you have a grading system that can export student names, you could just click and drag to highlight those copy them paste them in and it would add lots of students very, very quickly notice that each name should be on a new line.
I’M just going to add a few more and then we’ll get started. Okay, so my class is in I’m going to click Next and it brings up the behaviors that you might want to use with your students. So it says, create a new set of behaviors or import behaviors from another class.
And if you wanted to, you could click to import from those other classes. So one of the things that I want to track what behaviors I want to reward, helping others being on task, participating, persistence, teamwork and working hard, but is there anything else? If so, I just click to add, and I could name this behavior, so this could be bringing required supplies could save that, and so now, bringing required supplies is something that can be tracked in a foreign language class. For example, you could create one that says speaking the target language and notice that you can change what the icon looks like, so you don’t have to always have just the thumbs up, so save that.
So you can create your own set of behaviors. That will be tracked, so this is a great option to be able to do this notice. You can always add more later, so don’t feel stressed that you have to add every single behavior want to track right off the bat let’s go next now. I could have also added things that the student should work on in addition to the behaviors that are positive on that last step.
But again I can always add those later, but this final step is connecting with home notice that you can seamlessly share behavior reports with parents. You can basically ask parents to sign up for class dojo as a parent and they’ll see the reports and the feedback that you give their students, and then students can sign up and they can make their own classdojo monsters. They can customize them that can change what they look like and you know basically take ownership of their own behavior. So if I click connect parents and students it’ll help me know how to do that. So what it’s done is it created invitations for each of the students? That’S in my class dojo account, so I can click and then it downloaded them. You can see here in the lower left.
So if I click now it’ll open up – and it has information for each of my students – you can see in the upper left – it’s got the student’s name and it says what class it’s for and it’s got a student account code and a parent account code and If they’ll take this home sign up for class dojo, and they can do that either on the website or using an app it’ll, ask them for a student code, it’ll ask them for a parent. If it’s the parent signing up and very very quickly, you can have all your students customizing their own monsters, and you can have their parents kind of tracking how they’re doing so that they can also help their kids behave better in class and achieve better. So this is a great system. Now what if a student doesn’t take this home or he does but then doesn’t ever get signed up? That’S actually, okay, you can still use class dojo they’re still able to get some feedback using class dojo, but it’s just not quite as effective because they haven’t really bought into it.
So I’m going to click, OK and it says you’re, ready to give your first class dojo rewards remember focus on the positive, so I click done, and it takes me now back to my home page and you can see. I now have mr. Richardson’s language arts class and, if I click on that, it’ll bring up a roster of my class so using this roster I can provide feedback for each of my students. Let’S say max, does something really great? I can just click on Max’s name and I can select what he has done.
That’S good so helping others, and you can see you get a pop up and a sound effect that lets. People know that somebody has done something good now. A lot of teachers that use class dojo will put this up on the screen and when a student hears that sound, the students all look up – and they see oh max – has done something great and it becomes kind of like a game. It could be an example of gamification turning your class into a game. Max just got a point now, let’s say Jason does something inappropriate. Maybe he is off task or he’s unprepared, you click that and a different sound effect plays, and so because that might be embarrassing for Jason.
A lot of teachers choose not to display this on the screen or if they do, they only put positive comments when the students are there. You know in person witnessing this, so it’s really up to you as the professional to decide. You know how you want to do this. Do you want this to be a public, shaming kind of thing, or do you want this to be something that is more privately done, so the philosophy that I’ve always tried to use is to pray publicly and criticized privately, and so personally, if I was going to Put this up on the screen, I would only put positive comments in at that time and then later I could go in and put in some negatives now. The other thing about putting this up on the screen for the students to see is that it could also be a distraction, as the students hear the sounds or see the popups come up, it might distract them from their work. So just some things to think about.
Now I’ve shown you how to enter the positive and negative feedback by clicking right here on the website, but you can also use the apps there’s free apps that you can download on your smartphone that make it so that you can just see your class there and You can tap to put in positive or negative comments that will then appear on the screen and you just get the app and sign into your account. It’S really easy to do. There are some display settings in the upper left corner.
You can change how big the monster looks or how small you can sort the students by first name last name, you can put combined point totals or separate, totals or don’t show points, and you can choose to show award notifications, both positive and negative, or just positive. So this is a good solution. If you want to do like, I said and praise publicly but criticize privately, you can do that just by unchecking needs work and it won’t show that to the class and do you want sound effects to play so click Save and those changes will be effected, notice That you can click to start a timer and there is also a countdown feature.
So that’s a nice built-in tool, there’s also a tendons. If you click on attendance, you can quickly mark who is absent and save the attendance here in the upper right. Now.
That’S not all class dojo has some other built-in tools as well, that are great for teachers, one of which is random, so random. What it does is it randomly picks one of your students, and you could use this to decide something like who’s going to be. First, in line for lunch – or you can also use it just to make sure that your randomly giving some feedback so that you know maybe there’s a student that doesn’t get enough attention.
It might randomly pick that student. So some people like that as a way to kind of throw out some random feedback that might help students beyond you can also award multiple. Okay, if you choose that you can say: okay, Nate Pedro, Rebecca and Thomas are working well together, so you select, all of them.
Click give a word, and then you pick what the award is and then, if you need to, you, can reset the bubbles so that one or more of your students have their points reset to zero. Okay. So that’s how you use class dojo as a way to reward and punish – I guess behavior, but that’s just half of what class dojo is for. Yes, you reward them in the moment for how they do. But then there’s also reports and you can click here at the top of the screen on reports, and it takes you to a view of your whole class, and so I can just glance at this and see that 86 % of the feedback I’ve given my class Is positive and there’s a list here of everything that I’ve done? I can also look on the left side and see the student and how each student is doing.
You can click to view it as a spreadsheet that you can then open up. So there’s the data in a spreadsheet and then what? If you would like a report for each student, you can do that as well. You just click on the student’s name, and it brings up a report specifically for that student and you can go in and click print to print out. That report choosing, of course, the date range that you would like to print for, and so this is a great way to say to a student look you’re doing great here’s a couple of things you do need to work on, but you’re headed in the right direction. Also, it might work for parent-teacher conferences print out one of these for each student and have it ready at parent-teacher conference so that the parents see that not only is academic work important, but your behavior in class student behavior being on task. Those are important things as well. Now there is one more section of classdojo to talk about, it’s called messages and when you click on messages notice that there’s an option to do a class broadcast – and this will allow me to send a message to all the parents in the class now at this Point I don’t have any parents signed up, but if I did, I could just click to send message to everybody saying: there’s a field trip coming up. There’S a report card coming up, there’s an assembly just all of these great announcements that can be sent out to the parents with a click of a button. Now, if parents don’t get that message that they should sign up for class dojo using the code that I send home, I can invite specific parents. Let’S say Mary is just struggling a lot in the class.
I could click invite parent and I could put in Mary’s, moms or dads email address and then invite them specifically to sign up for class dojo, so clicking back on the home screen. Let me just say that you can add multiple classes as many as you need. Just click Add class, and you know, class dojo, like I said at the beginning, is a little bit controversial.
Some people just do not like the approach, others love it, but I will say I have tried this with a couple of classes and it has been a positive thing. It’S definitely aimed toward kindergarten through sixth grade, but I’ve known people to use it through eighth grade and beyond. There are some alternatives for class dojo and in future tutorials I’d like to show those one is called class 1-2-3 and another is called class craft. So I hope to have time in the future to create those – and I hope, you’ll check them out. Please subscribe to my youtube channel technology for teachers and students for more tutorials that you can use for the classroom. .