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Starting a new term, why not look at @ClassDojo?

By September 2, 2015One Comment

If you know me you’ll probably know I am a big fan of ClassDojo and have been for many years now. It is a fantastic tool for home / school communication and for developing positive engagement within your classroom.

I am not going to spend time in this post extolling the virtues of the great app, I endorse it through my experience of the impact it can have on engagement with students I’ve taught.

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As we move in to this new academic year however I thought it a pertinent time to think again about using it. To help with this, they’ve recently launched their ‘idea board‘. A place where educators from all over the world share their ideas and top tips for using this fab little tool.

From ways to use the new ‘Class Story‘ feature to setting up groups to quick ways to improve transition times within lesson; the idea board is a great place to get new ideas on how you can use it.

To pad out this post a little too as I felt it was going to end up being a bit short, here are 5 tidy little ideas I’ve had or that others have shared with me that have worked in my classroom before.

  1. Why not try adding yourself as a student to the class so that students can award points to you?
  2. Why not, in addition to adding your own school values, add values that the students themselves feel are important and worth recognising with ClassDojo points?
  3. Why not have Dojo focus weeks by changing the point value in different weeks for different positive engagement values. This way you can have a real focus on specific engagement types that might either need focussing upon or simply ones that you want to cover to further embed the positive ethos for learning you are working towards in your classroom?
  4. Why not set up some groups using the new groups feature to facilitate quick and easy delivery of points and monitoring for groups that you work with within your class, e.g. a guided reading group.
  5. Join in with #dojochatEU that takes place every Wednesday night from 2030 on Twitter to share ideas or to ask for help with ClassDojo with other users. N.b. Most #dojochatEU chats don’t actually focus on the App but on other aspects of education. That said, the majority of participants are, like me, big fans of their work.

I hope you find this post useful and hope too that you find your way to using ClassDojo in your classroom this academic year.

 

Mark Anderson

Mark Anderson, @ICTEvangelist. Click here to learn more.

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