App Happiness

Okay, honestly I have a little jealousy over all of you with your amazing iPhones. I do have a good phone (an HTC Merge), but it's the silly things that make me want an iPhone. Number one reason: super cute phone covers! Mine isn't popular enough to have anything cute. I know...shallow...



I digress. Hope over at 2nd Grade Shenanigans is hosting an awesome linky party that actually gives me a chance to brag about one of my favorite classroom apps: Class Dojo! Have you heard of it?

This is an amazing behavior management tool, and I honestly don't know what I was doing before. Wasting a lot of time that I could have been teaching, that's for sure!

• First, you set up a classroom (or you can even have multiple classrooms if needed). Add all of your students, then it will assign a random avatar. Later the students are given a code to create their own avatar, which they LOVE!
• Then you create your list of positive and negative behaviors. It gives some to start with, but I found that I didn't need some of the ones already listed and really had to add a few as I noticed I wanted to award points and didn't have them.
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• Once you've done that, you start the class and put the screen up on your Smartboard/Promethean board. If you don't have one, I guess make sure it's on a computer where students can see it. That's very important. Also make sure that your sound is on. I set it to make a sound when I award positive AND negative points so students know to make sure they're on task.
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• Make sure you go to the following website on your smartphone (http://mobile.classdojo.com). No, it's technically not an app YET, but I think it will be soon. Then you can go into the desired classroom and award points from wherever you are: working with a group, in the hall, on the playground (it has a decent spread that it works from, but I don't know exactly how far).

I tried to take a screenshot, but apparently my phone isn't smart enough to do that (at least I haven't figured out how for free). Maybe that's a good reason for getting an iPhone! Anyway, I hid the students' last names, but I wanted to show you what it would look like. You can see all of you students with their avatar. When you want to award a point, click on the name of the student.

Then you will see the screen below. Chose positive or negative, and then click on the desired behavior. It will immediately pop up on the Smart/Promethean board with a noise (if you set it to make noises), and everyone is instantly redirected to stay on task.

My ONLY real negative about this system (and I've mentioned it on their site) is that you can only award points from your phone one at a time. On the computer, you can click on all of the desired names and award points at once. Say that three kids are all goofing off, I click on all of their names, and then choose the one behavior to award all three. Or frequently I would give the entire class a point for walking in the hall quietly, etc. I think they will probably fix this soon, and it may not actually be a problem on the iPhone. Not sure.

Basically, this app is awesome, and I think every teacher should have this!