Behavior Management & More: ClassDojo
Would you like to acknowledge students for their POSITIVE behavior instead of always nagging on them for their negative behavior? Would you like to support the use of your content area's vocabulary among students? Would you like to celebrate teamwork in your class?
If you answered YES to any of the above questions, you should consider using Class Dojo if you aren't already!
Click below to read more about how to set up class dojo and different ideas for its use!
If you answered YES to any of the above questions, you should consider using Class Dojo if you aren't already!
Click below to read more about how to set up class dojo and different ideas for its use!
Not only do students, and teachers, get excited about the cute little monster avatars, but the positive "chime" and the negative "wuh wuh" sound serve as great reminders to motivate students. The app comes with default positive point behaviors, and negative point behaviors, but you can also customize this to match your school or classroom behavior expectations and language. You can even weight some behaviors as more points than others if you have a weekly or daily focus. Rewarding students for positive things they are doing in class is delightful, FINALLY you don't just have to nag them and give them the teacher look, or send them out for being bad.
There are also creative ways that you can use Class Dojo. For example, You can customize the positive points to be any of the following:
There are also creative ways that you can use Class Dojo. For example, You can customize the positive points to be any of the following:
- Content specific vocabulary that you want to hear in discussion so that students are practicing using new vocab.
- The eight mathematical practices because you want to highlight and reinforce their use in your classroom.
- In Social Studies you can make them be the civic qualities and reinforce their use in your class.
- Teamwork sentence starters that you want to hear students using.
- And many other creative ideas that I'm sure you could think of!
Class Dojo Basics
I would set up and use this for teams only, never individual students because I didn't want to call them out, and everything in my class was team-centered anyway. So in my class, hanging above each group was a college name. That college name was their team name, and even though their teams might change, these colleges did not, so it saved me a lot of time because I never had to change groups or individual students in Class Dojo.
To actually use it during class, I would put the Class Dojo website up on my projector, turn the speakers all the way up for the awesome sounds, and then open the app on my phone. While circulating around the classroom and working with students, I rewarded teams for the positives, and on rare occasion, took points away for the negatives. Students would hear the sound, and see what their team, or all teams were rewarded for. When students hear the negative sound, they always look to see and wonder, "Was that us?" I would do a mid-class check in and review the results, reminding students of the positives, and telling them that they can still turn it around if they needed to. At this time, students were often very honest and I got a lot of "Aww man" or "I told you not to talk out of our team." Then at the end of class we also reviewed their team and whole class progress.
For more on how to set up Class Dojo, see the helpful videos below.
To actually use it during class, I would put the Class Dojo website up on my projector, turn the speakers all the way up for the awesome sounds, and then open the app on my phone. While circulating around the classroom and working with students, I rewarded teams for the positives, and on rare occasion, took points away for the negatives. Students would hear the sound, and see what their team, or all teams were rewarded for. When students hear the negative sound, they always look to see and wonder, "Was that us?" I would do a mid-class check in and review the results, reminding students of the positives, and telling them that they can still turn it around if they needed to. At this time, students were often very honest and I got a lot of "Aww man" or "I told you not to talk out of our team." Then at the end of class we also reviewed their team and whole class progress.
For more on how to set up Class Dojo, see the helpful videos below.