Description and Benefits of the app:
Class Dojo is great because it is a free app
designed to improve behavior in a classroom. This is a perfect tool for
teachers because it is a digital reward and punishment system that does not
require you as a teacher to make physical things each year to keep track of
students rewards and punishments. It captures and generates behavioral trends
about learners digitally and you don’t have to sit long hours counting how many
“good cards/stars or bad cards” each learner has so that you will remember to reward
them when they get “10 cards/stars”. This can then also be shared with parents
and learners can also keep track of how they are doing. It also means that
parents can see each time the teacher rewards or punishes their child and they
can do something about it at home. Their progress is also documented for you so
that you can use it as a guide or proof during parent teacher conferences.
It is also a great way for a teacher to instantly
share news with parents and remind her class about anything. It has a message
option that can be broadcasted to the list of parents.
It is designed so that you can have more than one
class and you can keep track and print out each class and each learner’s
progress report.
You can also use this app as a register so that every
learner’s attendance is documented. Parents can then check whether their
children is actually in class and teachers can use this when they are
discussing learner performance with parents. You can also connect other
teachers to your class so they can also see the kind of behavior of each
learner. This then allows the school secretary to see your class register
digitally so that no forms have to be sent to and from the office in the
morning during admin time. It therefore saves lots of time for other more
valuable work.
The message option also allows parents to
communicate with the teacher on any matter. The teacher can also communicate
with the parents privately or as a broadcast. Learners can also talk to the
teacher personally in this manner.
Age group to which the app is relevant:
It will definitely work well with the small grades
from Gr. R and possibly to Gr.7. Little children still want to achieve a lot of
badges and be able to brag about them with their friends. It is therefore
positive peer pressure in the class to do as well as they possibly can. They
also know that their parents can instantly see each time they do something good
or bad. This also motivates them. This app might not work well with High School
learners because they do not care about badges anymore. It might however work
to inform parents directly about behaviour in the class.
Potential Challenges:
The challenge with this app is that our schools are
in South Africa. By this I mean that not everyone in your class will have
access to the internet at home. Parents will therefore not get your messages as
instantly as the app is designed for. Parents will also not be able to check up
on their kids performance. It can only work optimally if everyone in the class
has got access to the internet. Otherwise you can still make use of it for its
saving time purposes and documenting performance but you will still have to
send out printed reports and newsletters and make personal calls to your
parents. The possibilities with the app is therefore limited if everyone does
not have internet.
The other thing is that it is still a lot of admin
to assign a badge to learners throughout the day. One has to remember to do it
and one has to be fair and consistent. It should not overrule the day or take
learners minds off of what is important. Learners should not become obsessed
with it and it should not teach learners to do good only to be rewarded.
Otherwise learners will learn to do good only because of what they get rewarded
with and not because it is a moral decision. Then they will always do whatever
gives them the most reward whether good or bad because they never learned to
make choices based on understanding of values and morals.
This app is however a great tool to encourage
learners to do their best in class and a great way for teachers to keep on
track with their learners performance. Its also great for collaborating with
news, updates and reminders and can be used as a guide when you have to show
proof of learner performance. However, it can only be used optimally if
everyone in your class has internet and it should be used wisely so that it doesn't defeat the point of learning.
After 10 days ours looked like the one shown below..jpg)
It is maybe wise to use transparent cups so that you can see how much water is inside. If you cannot see you have to keep picking the whole head up to peep inside and that takes a lot of time.
