For many years, I have had trainee teachers to look after
and every now and again I find that I must ask myself “why do you put yourself
through all this extra work every year?”
Luckily last year my trainee rose to the challenge and reminded me exactly
why by introducing me to the online Classdojo application! ClassDojo is a behaviour management tool for
the classroom. Each student has a profile – complete with their own avatar – to
which teachers can assign positive and negative points throughout the lesson. This in itself, is a really powerful tool which
can be used to re-enforce expectations, however, as a KS4 specialist I’ve tried
using it in a few more innovative ways to help engage students especially when
it comes to revision.
At the start of Year 11 I set up a dojo with all my students
on especially for revision sessions they attend. At the end of every week you can let students
know how many sessions they have attended and you can then make comparisons
between attendance and the progress they are making. You can then use this to help encourage other
students to start turning up. If I were
to take this to the next level I’d like to try and use this to engage with
parents and let them know what sessions their offspring are attending as this
function is available.
Within my day to day revision lessons, I have given students
a point for every question that they answer correctly. This doesn’t sound very exciting or
innovative until you start to take into consideration how Year 11 students can become
disengaged as they are having revision rammed down their throats in every
lesson. I found that within a few
lessons those students who I have to really push to answer anything started to
want to answer questions. On a
completely personal not I have to admit that I’m quite sarcastic and have
developed a unique understanding with my students who now get freaked out if I’m
overly nice to them. So, I went in and
edited some of the responses that come up on the screen to reflect my own
personality which has gone down really well.
The last more unusual use I want to talk about is using
Classdojo when carrying out class quizzes.
Traditionally I’ve only used dojos with individual students but there’s
nothing to say that you can’t set up a dojo with group names that students have
picked themselves. In one lesson, I sat
student in groups along table in groups of 4 and on half the screen had a web
page open with their group names on and the score they’ve achieved, and on the
other half I had a screen showing the students using a camera. I then ran the lesson like an episode of University
Challenge by giving each group a buzzer then giving points out when students
got questions correct.
I hope that these ideas are different for many others out
there and they have provided some inspiration for how you use Class Dojo for
other things not just behaviour management.
You can follow me on twitter @teacherchalky1 or on Facebook
@teachlikeahero.
Thanks for reading
D Chalk
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