You know Cristy and I have been working at school already trying to get our rooms ready. Her room is going to be super beautiful and color coordinated! While mine is much cleaner than usual, it it not quite "Pinterest" ready as Cristy's is about to be!! Just wait!! Cristy will be posting gorgeous pictures of her room along with all the awesome, new Teacher Pay Teacher products she purchased to help with the cuteness factor!!
Anyway, we are sooooooooooooooooooooooooooo tired of using that TRAFFIC LIGHT for classroom management. Don't laugh!! We know we have been using this system for a million years, but it is easy, mostly
Our basis for classroom management is Love and Logic and we love it!! However, we needed a way to keep parents abreast of behavior so we chose the "Old Faithful" traffic light!!!
Class Dojo is an online platform for managing behavior that even sends email reports to parents. We have just been playing around on the site. It runs on the computer, ipad, or even iphone as well as some other digital devices. The teacher sets up a class and the kiddos can earn merits or demerits for how they behave in the room.
It is so cool. The teacher can keep the system up on the projector for everyone to see or keep minimized. With one click, a merit can pop up for a student for being helpful, working hard, or any other positive behavior you notice. Also, with one click, a demerit can pop up for a student who is performing a negative behavior.
There is also so much more to this program that we need to explore. Including emailing parents at the end of the day/week, keeping graphs about behaviors, etc...We are not sure we will love it, but are ready to try.
Almost forgot a very important thing!! It's FREE!! Teachers love FREE stuff!!
Here is the thing we need help with!! The program refers to adding merits and demerits. We would really love some other words to refer to getting a good point or a negative point.
What can we use in the room and in front of other adults that won't sound too silly?
We want the kiddos to know what we are talking about when we say, "Great job!! You just earned a .... for being helpful or Please get back to work or you will get ....".
Good luck to all of our friends heading back to school soon!!! To our friends who have more summer, ENJOY!!!
I used Class Dojo last year and my students loved it!! (As well as me!) Much more efficient than the mark system I had been using. I just always called them points. "Thank you for cleaning up so neatly and quickly, you get a point." OR "We do not hit our friends, I am going to take a point away."
ReplyDeleteI would love other suggestions as well!! Points aren't super interesting!
Hope you guys love Dojo as much as I do!
Thanks Gillian. We are excited and glad to know it worked well for you. We thought about calling them reds and greens, fuzzies and spikes...but not loving those!
ReplyDeleteI used dojo last year and loved it as well. Last year I started mid-year so I'm very excited to start the year with my dojo! I simply called my positive and negative points. We discussed the names 'positive' and 'negative', they seem to grasp it very well. I too would like to hear some suggestions.
ReplyDeleteThanks Tim! We are ready for something new, more positive, and hopefully more effective. We will keep you posted if we get some ideas for what to call positive and negative points.
DeleteI used Class Dojo during summer school this year (I taught K-4 Math) and we just called them points. It was a lot of "Thanks for that, you get a point!" I also liked giving random students a point, especially when everyone was on task, I would say something like, "Wow, you all look so great I'm giving a random person a point. Thank you for all being on task, Congrats."
ReplyDeleteThey also have an app that updates automatically! I had it on my phone and when I wasn't near my computer, I could still give out points because I knew I would forget. The students would hear a little chirp from my phone and look to the board to see who earned the point. It was such a good time!
Good luck!
Vanessa
Kindergarten Schmindergarten
Thanks Vanessa!! We are so excited about all the cool features. We love the idea of random points. We also love that there is an easy way to award everyone a point with one click if they are all working hard, on task, or complete something great!!
Deleteit is nice but you need a computer in the classroom or a laptop with wifi :/ in chile few schools have a computers in the classrooms
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