ClassDojo

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What Works in Tech Tools: Spotlight on ClassDojo

October 24, 2012 | 11:35 AM | By

ClassDojo

With the thousands of ed-tech tools available to teachers, it can be difficult to find those that work well and complement teaching strategies. It takes a lot of time to research and integrate, and for teachers in cash-strapped schools, access to some technology is completely out of their reach.

Sam Chaudhary and Liam Don, the co-founders of ClassDojo, had the tech limitations of many public schools in mind when they designed the free service, a behavior management tool meant to reduce the amount of time teachers spend trying to get students’ attention. Classes need just one device — an interactive whiteboard, a computer connected to a projector, or tablet or smartphone.

ClassDojo works on three principles:

  • Build positive behaviors through positive reinforcement — basically “catch kids being good” and use specific praise to call out good behavior.
  • Real-time feedback is the most effective at improving and changing behavior over a period of time.
  • Any tool focused on behavior must engage parents as well.

HOW IT WORKS

Each student gets an avatar and either receives or loses points. The point tallies can be projected on the board for real-time feedback. Teachers and students can come up with mutually agreed upon behavior expectations, and because the categories are framed using positive reinforcement, the tool has the potential to do more than just call out good behavior. For example, a teacher might create a category like “was able to counter another’s point of view without insulting them.” And that behavior becomes part of a classroom norm. ClassDojo can also take attendance and creates pie charts and percentage breakdowns to share with parents.

“What I saw teachers struggle with is how to get the value out of a tool without changing the structure of what they were doing.”

Teachers’ experience with ClassDojo spans the spectrum. Jennie Dougherty, who taught English at a large urban public high school in Brockton, Massachusetts for three years, recently left to become the technology instructor at a school in East Palo Alto, a low-income Bay Area town. When she first encountered ClassDojo she thought it was just a virtual sticker star chart, a paper version of which she already used. ClassDojo met her basic need — then she discovered it could Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, Teaching With Tech, ClassDojo, Classroom management, ed tech, Technology in Schools

The Rise of Educator-Entrepreneurs: Bringing Classroom Experience to Ed-Tech

October 4, 2012 | 7:00 AM | By
By Katrina Schwartz

Most teachers are happy doing their job — helping kids understand and make sense of the world around them. But there’s a growing number of educators who are wading into entrepreneurship, frustrated at the lack of tools they need, and wanting to extend their sphere of influence. As technology becomes more widely used and accepted in the classroom, teachers are taking their ideas about how to improve learning environments, sharing them online, and creating web-based tools to benefit teachers and students.

At the same time, the fact that the multi-billion dollar ed-tech space is exploding has not gone unnoticed by investors. Programs like Imagine K12 run crash courses in ed-tech entrepreneurship, connecting fledgling companies to Silicon Valley venture capital firms (and staking out a six percent equity).

But, as most educators know, while tech entrepreneurs can sometimes hit gold, not every newly minted site or software is useful to teachers. That’s what sets educator entrepreneurs apart — they have relevant classroom experience that can’t be gained any other way than by doing the hard work of teaching.

CASE STUDIES

Jack West has taught for 16 years and has been at Sequoia High School in Redwood City for most of that time. He’s a physics teacher and is naturally inclined to innovate, even if his students aren’t as enthusiastic about his non-traditional teaching style. West returned to traditional teaching for eight years until he figured out how to use his innovative techniques not only to spice things up, but to actually help his students do better. That’s what led to the launch this year of Braincandy, a tool to help students understand the underlying concepts behind their misperceptions.

“Teachers are usually the last people to be consulted on many of these education technology companies.”

West and his co-founders wrote trick-questions on physics concepts that many kids get wrong. The answer choices are all the common misperceptions. The goal is for students to be completely sure that they’re choosing the right answer, the obvious answer, only to find out that most got it wrong. “These aren’t test questions. They are instructional questions,” explained West. “So what we’re trying to do is create a discrepancy event, a shocking event to open the door for a teachable Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Teaching With Tech, Braincandy, ClassDojo, Digital Harbor Foundation, eduClipper, Socrative

Class Dojo Wins Innovation Challenge at Education Nation

September 27, 2011 | 12:23 PM | By

The dynamic duo behind ClassDojo, an app used for classroom behavior management, won the top prize — $75,000 — at the innovation challenge at Education Nation today.

The young masterminds behind ClassDojo were one of three groups, including Kickboard and TruantToday, who were brought to New York to test their products and pitch it to teachers, education leaders, and policy makers.

Zak Kukoff, the 16-year-old CEO of Truant Today, a mobile app that alerts schools and parents when students skip class, won the $15,000 second-place prize; and Jennifer Medbery, founder and CEO of Kickboard took home $10,000.

The judges congratulated each of the teams for their ingenuity and vision, but said they chose ClassDojo because the developers understand the consumer insight, and the fact that it was Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: ClassDojo, Kickboard, TruantToday

Can Mobile Phones Help Teachers Manage Classroom Behavior?

September 7, 2011 | 2:17 PM | By

We can talk all we want about what students should learn in the classroom. But the reality is that most teachers have to balance “academics” with a multitude of other lessons: how to be good students, how to be good citizens, and simply how to behave. Behavior management is actually a significant part of what teachers have to do every day, and while there’s a wealth of information to help them with tips and tricks, there isn’t a lot of technology in place to help them with the implementation of best practices.

The startup isn’t just interested in “gamifying” good behavior. It wants to foster instrinsic, just not extrinsic, motivations in education.

There may be a solution with the use of tech — at least that’s what ClassDojo founder Sam Chaudhary believes. His startup is working on a Web and mobile app that will allow teachers to quickly and easily track class behavior. Those two things are key. Rather than filling out paperwork after a disruptive incident or trying to recall values to praise come report-card time when a child has no record of disruption, ClassDojo provides real-time feedback loops. ClassDojo hopes both teachers and students will benefit from this, and parents will eventually be able to tap into it, as well.

Currently, ClassDojo lets teachers track students’ behaviors with an easy +1 or -1 system — you Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Teaching With Tech, ClassDojo, Classroom management