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.

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 do more.

“Educators have a specific objective in mind when we select a tool and then we customize,” Dougherty said.

Dougherty also used the tool to get her students to model more mature, college-level behavior. And in higher-level classes she allowed students to award points to one another and found if she prepared them ahead of time, students took this task seriously. And the act of withholding points from one another opened up great discussions for students. For example, she remembers one student refusing to award a peer a point in a debate because the speaker had gotten too emotional. That started a larger discussion about when it’s appropriate to insert oneself into a debate.

But Dougherty was willing to take a risk, and had the support of the administration.

“The classroom is a very high stakes environment,” Doughtery said. “You are getting evaluated. It’s a place where we expect teachers to always be on their A-game.” And that means they may not have time or freedom to try something new. They may even be at risk if they do.

VARYING EXPERIENCES

While Dougherty found ClassDojo useful, some of her colleagues didn’t have the same positive reaction. “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,” said Dougherty. ClassDojo fit her style because she was spending most of her class time on group activities, and less time up front lecturing. It was easy to move around the room awarding points as she checked in on each group’s progress. Teachers who focused on lecturing found it hard to juggle the points system with their usual style of delivering the lesson.

Joan Young, another teacher at a San Francisco Bay Area school, found the service just didn’t fit her class well. She tried the tool, but found that the point system brought out more challenges than benefits. She asked her class what they preferred and they voted for a non-tech strategy she had been using where they could earn “fascination time” at the end of the week by transitioning quickly and quietly between activities. She also felt the tool was too focused on the teacher’s actions. She’d rather see students evaluate their own behavior, learn from mistakes and take ownership of their own learning progress. She felt awarding points stifled that kind of thinking.

Still another teacher at Brockton never got the chance to try ClassDojo because his classroom didn’t have a computer. Brockton is a large public high school south of Boston with more than 4,000 students, and the administration hadn’t been able to get computers into every class. ClassDojo requires a minimal level of technology, just one device. Still, the gap between what many classrooms have at their disposal and what much of the ed-tech world is designing can be unbridgeable.

FUTURE PLANS

The ClassDojo team understands that their tool must work for educators, so they are responsive to suggestions and feedback. They are also far from done with the tool. Sam Chaudhary is excited by what it has been able to do so far, but has big plans for its future. “There’s a whole other half of education that’s almost completely ignored by ed-tech which is beyond building test scores, it’s about building character,” Chaudhary said. He’s thinking about adding a self-evaluation element for students on ClassDojo, to help move it away from teacher-centered instruction. He also wants to strengthen the parental engagement element. He doesn’t feel the current offering of and a percentage breakdown of behavior tells the parent what they really need to know.

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.

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 moment.” West is going for an even distribution of wrong answers that shock students and allows him to create discussion and activity around understanding the misconceived concept.

West found that his students performed better on the Force Concepts Inventory, a test for honors physics students and first year college students on basic physics concepts when he used this technique. So far, nine other Bay Area teachers are trying Braincandy techniques on physical science, chemistry and biology students, and West is receiving help from Silicon Valley techies and business entrepreneurs to build out his site. The time is ripe for teachers to use their natural inclination to innovate to help the kids that they are failing, he said.

“If I do more of the same and just do it better — I’ve seen that trajectory, and I feel like I’ve gone as far as I can with that and I need to try something else,” West said. “Based on my experience and the luck of the draw, technology is my channel.”

Adam Bellow, another ed-tech entrepreneur, recently developed a Pinterest-like tool for teachers called eduClipper. Bellow is based in New York and has spent much of his career helping teachers use technology in the classroom more effectively.

“The biggest issue that we have as teachers is finding and sharing good stuff,” Bellow said. “You have teachers that are open to doing these things, that want to, but who don’t necessarily know where to go or don’t feel they have a time to find them.” He wants eduClipper to fill that void and for students and teachers to interact on the site, sharing the buckets of useful links, videos and infographics with one another. Students could even use the site as way to develop a digital portfolio, he said.

Bellow built the tool to serve a need he found distinctly lacking. “The reason I’m building this tool is that I’ve seen so many companies build websites that they think are cool, or that they think address a need, without consulting teachers. Teachers are usually the last people to be consulted on many of these education technology companies,” Bellow said.

The site has already drawn 25,000 users and he actually isn’t accepting more until he rolls out the next version of the site. Beyond just helping teachers, Bellow is most excited about features directed at students and meant to encourage them to create. He wants eduClipper “to have students inspire other students to make real things,” the way that the Maker Faire events have done. With a body of work to carry with them, students would be able to show achievement through more than just testing.

Digital Harbor Foundation

James Sanders, who worked as a teacher for many years, is another educator wading into entrepreneurship. For his day job, Sanders works as the Innovation Manger for KIPP, Bay Area Schools. But he’s also partnered with Esther Wojcicki, a journalism teacher at Palo Alto High, and Duncan Winter, to create ClassBadges, scheduled to launch Monday. It’s a digital platform for teachers and students to collect badges for mastery of certain topics. The badges represent learning experiences both inside and outside the classroom. For example, a student could get a badge for going to a museum and completing an exercise related to the visit. Sanders sees ClassBadges as a way for students to look back at a digital record of what they learned – plus it’s fun and uses elements of gamification that students are already accustomed to.

Sanders agreed with both Bellows and West that education is at a crossroads. “Everyone agrees this is finally a time where people are opening up to the idea of change in the classroom and the power of technology,” said Sanders. “People recognize that this is a powerful tool for learning.”

Educators are taking advantage of the moment, and the flurry of investor interest in ed-tech, to leverage some of their innovations into products. Here are some other educator-initiated companies and non-profits:

• ClassDojo: This free online tool, co-founded by teacher Sam Chaudhary, helps teachers manage behavior in the classroom by awarding points to students for positive behavior. Students get immediate feedback on their behavior, tied to a points system, which helps reinforce good behavior over time.
• Digital Harbor Foundation: This non-profit, cofounded by educator Shelly Blake-Plock, was started by educators in Baltimore to connect teachers, students and technologists to one another through the web. They want to foster innovation and entrepreneurship in students before they even graduate. For example, they have a reverse mentoring club where students teach older members of the community about technology. Or a STEM club, where students interested in science, technology, engineering and math are given real world challenges posed by industry leaders.
• Socrative: This web tool was built by a team of educators, engineers and entrepreneurs with the goal of increasing engagement and decreasing grading time. Through smart phones, laptops or tablets students enter digital classrooms where the teacher can control the flow of activities and games – getting an instant understanding of whether the students are grasping certain concepts. The tool can then analyze individual and class progress
• NoRedInk: Jeff Scheur started this company after three years teaching in Chicago schools. As an English teacher he spent hours grading papers only to have students ignore the feedback they received. NoRedInk uses material that is engaging to students, like their own conversations or their favorite TV shows to try to engage them in the question. As students answer questions the material adapts to how they are doing, drilling down on the underlying concepts as they progress through the activities. Teachers can track student progress and give assignments and quizzes tailored to each student’s interests. The hope is that NoRedInk makes grammar fun, so students will practice more than what is assigned to them.

These are just a few educators who’ve launched their own businesses in the education field. Who are others we should include? Let us know!

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 created to help build student character, reinforcing positive behavior.

Liam Don, one of the co-founders, said they plan to grow the team within the next six months. At the moment, the team consists of Don and Sam Chaudry.

You can read more about Class Dojo in this recent article: Can Mobile Phones Help Teachers Manage Classroom Behavior?

More coverage about Education Nation in the next few days.

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 can reward students for good behavior (participation, helping others, creativity, insight) or you can make note of negative behaviors (disruption, disrespect, tardiness). Reports can be generated per student or per class, so that teachers and students (and parents and/or administrators) can have a glimpse at what’s happening in a class.

And while tracking this sort of data is, no doubt, important for adults, its impact on the students themselves is also something that ClassDojo wants to highlight. Students respond better to feedback when it’s immediate — both when it’s reinforcing positive behavior and when it’s aimed at correcting disruptive behavior. Teachers can project ClassDojo onto a whiteboard or computer screen so the whole class can see their status; but in addition to updating the site via a desktop computer, teachers can also use their smartphones or other mobile devices in order to quickly flag these behaviors.

Each student has an avatar, and ClassDojo plans to implement levels to encourage good behavior. But as Chaudhary makes clear, the startup isn’t just interested in “gamifying” good behavior. It wants to foster instrinsic, just not extrinsic, motivations in education. How or whether that happens will be interesting to watch.

ClassDojo is still in beta, and the startup has a far broader vision than just this behavior management app. A former teacher himself, Chaudhary says his company isn’t merely interested in tracking and monitoring behavior — good and bad — in the classroom. Rather, he wants to share strategies for developing students’ characters. “We want to bring the same rigor to developing character as ed-tech as an industry currently reserves for developing test scores.”

ClassDojo is currently free while in beta.