Class Dojo: Behavior Management System

While student teaching I have encountered many classroom management programs. I have seen clipboards with about a million behavior codes, ticket reward systems, pink slips, etc., but my favorite by far has been an online behavior management system called Class Dojo (www.classdojo.com). This website allows teachers to create multiple classes in order to keep up with the behavior of allll of your students. It is FREE to use and allows students and parents to keep up with individual students' behavior.

When you get signed up, you will get a tutorial of how to use the program. It is very helpful to go through the entire tutorial so that you can better understand each feature of the program. Once you have completed the tutorial, you may create your own class. All you have to do is name your class, put in a list of all of your students (you can even copy and paste a student list), and then you are ready to go! To give a student a positive or negative mark, you click on the student's name and the positive or negative tab. Each tab lists some behaviors pertaining to being on/off task, teamwork, materials, etc. The BEST part is that you can customize the behaviors to fit the needs of your classroom! INCREDIBLEEEE!

Whether you view the next part as a pro or a con is your own decision. Class Dojo offers signups for parents and students. You can either invite the parents by entering their email in the program OR you can print out a list of parent codes and send them home with the students and the parents can go to the site and put the code in to automatically view their child's behavior for the day, week, month, etc. Some teachers may view this is a problem because parents will constantly be asking why their child received the marks they received. It's really up to you if you want to use this feature.

The idea of using Class Dojo is to keep it pulled up on your Promethean board, or just on your computer screen, with speakers also attached to your computer. Having the speakers is essential if you want the students to know when someone receives a mark, whether it be positive or negative. The reason for this is that when you assign a student (or students) a positive or negative mark, a sound is played to indicate the type of mark. When students hear this they can be assured that at least someone, if not multiple students, is doing good and that motivates them to do good as well. The same can be said if a negative mark is given to someone. The students hear that someone got a negative mark and this may influence the students to change their behavior if they know they are doing something wrong. If at all possible, I would keep the program pulled up on the Promethean board, though, so that students can see their names and know when and what kind of mark they receive and can also know the reason they received that mark.

All I know is I absolutely plan to use this system one way or another when I begin teaching next year. I think it is absolutely awesome! I hope you all check it out! If you love the online version, check out the app for teachers by clicking on one of these links: ClassDojo for iPhone or ClassDojo for Android.