Friday, October 14, 2011

Fun On Friday #125: ClassDojo

Hmm! An on screen merit/demerit chart.

An on screen chart that you can update from your desktop, from your smartphone, from a tablet device...

A behaviour tool complete with colourful, cuddly avatars.


One of the PGDE students showed me this and I'm still not sure what I make of ClassDojo. Good fun but practical, useful, effective? What do you think?

6 comments:

cunniman said...

Hi David

I have been using ClassDojo for the past fortnight and think that it's fantastic. I originally set up for S1-2 pupils, but soon found that even my senior kids love it.

It's a really simple and effective way to share positive rewards and in my experience learners have been really motivated by it. We even have "Double Dojo Friday" at their request!

It takes about 30 seconds to set up a class in ClassDojo which is a major plus.

I plan to write a short blog post on it sometime next week.

Mark

Mosher said...

I'll have a look shortly, but it seems along the same lines as the spreadsheet I used last year with green ticks, red crosses and gold stars.

That worked really well with my S1/S2 to the point where I had more luck getting them to be quiet by hovering a red cross over their name on the screen than by actually telling them to "SHHHH!"

Coupled with school-supplied "positive postcards" they could take home (and a bag of Haribo) it was genuinely effective.

David said...

Why is it that even eighteen year olds will try that bit harder for a gold star? :-)

This has had a really good reaction on Twiter and facebook too. It seems a lot of people find it useful.

David said...

From facebook:

Andy Mc Been using it with classes for a few weeks now and it's pretty effective

David said...

On Twiter, five different people chipped in with positive things to say about ClassDojo. Selected Tweets:

@vbrich Rich Olyott
...ask @mvass about classdojo, she's managed to get it started.

@mvass
...classdojo works a treat now in school

Mosher said...

I can't check this at the moment in school as the computers are offline for the holiday while they upgrade the system.

However, it's 50/50 whether it'll be blocked due to the usual over-zealous network management software that we can't control anyway. Worst case scenario, I'm going to start taking my laptop and mobile phone in to access the flipping internet via 3G.