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Hello educators. Aaron Quigley here with another teacher tip for you. Right now we're going to take a look at a classroom management system that has drastically changed classrooms across the nation. It's called Classroom Dojo. Classroom Dojo is going to allow you to use both visual and auditorial responses to keep your class on task. It also has some built in tools to help pacing of lessons such as timers as well as an attendance grid. Let's go ahead and dive right in. Now the best thing about Classroom Dojo is that it's free. To sign up simply go to classdojo.com as I've done here in my web browser.
You can click the Sign up button and choose to Sign up as a teacher. Parents can also have access to your class and students even have a portal where they can track their own behavior. I already have an account created, so I'm just going to click on the Login button. And go ahead and log in as a teacher. I'll enter my user name and password real quick, and here we have our Classroom Dojo layout. Now for this particular video, we're going to go ahead and create a new class, in this new class, we'll add students and then we'll explore how we can use Classroom Dojo, to drastically change the management of our classroom. To create a new class from your main home screen I'm just going to click on the Create a class button on the upper right hand corner.
For this video, I'm going to create an eighth grade class which is actually my Chemistry. So, I'm going to go ahead and choose Science. And for the class name, I'll call it Chemistry. The icon, you can click through, and there's a variety of options you can choose your class. One of them here has an atom, there it is. Let's go ahead and select that icon, and I am going to click the Next button. Now the first thing we need to do with any new class is add our students to it. Now Classroom Dojo has a very intuitive way to do this. You could either A, sit here and type in every single student name and then, enter them one by one. Or you can choose to copy an paste from a list.
If you have an electronic gradebook already, such as PowerTeacher Gradebook. Or Engrade you can simply run a report from your grade book to get your student names into a list. Here in Microsoft Word, I already have a typed up list of fake student names. Now notice how this is formatted. Students need to be on individual lines. If you have a report that runs, that has a comma, between each set of students, that will not work for Classroom Dojo. So please make sure your students are on individual lines, and once you have that, I can simply copy by using the keyboard shortcut of Cmd+C or Ctrl+C on the PC.
And I'll head back to Classroom Dojo, and now I can just paste in using the keyboard shortcut of Cmd+V or Ctrl+V on the PC. And now I have my list pasted in. I'll click the Save button and Classroom Dojo will automatically separate my students out and create icons for them. Now you can see the format of Classroom Dojo. They use these small monster icons. And students get very, very interested in terms of what icon they get. Typically, if you'd like to just use the preselected ones, you can just scroll down to the bottom and click Next. As a quick tip for teachers, I would start every class using the default icons, I actually in my own classroom have a system that when students receive a certain number of points or a certain behavioral grade.
They are then allowed to choose their own icon. However, if you'd like to go ahead and replace some icons. You can do this by clicking Choose Avatar in the upper left hand corner of the dialog box. This will open up a sidebox where you can choose an avatar and drag it to a student's name. Besides the monster icons, Classroom Dojo also has critter icons that you can choose and you can even upload your icons to replace for students. In my own class, I usually allow students to eat monsters and they have to earn the right to become a critter based on certain behavioral expectations. To replace an icon, you simply click on it, once you have the icon over top of your students.
I'm going to release my mouse. And you'll notice that they're still the icon attached to my cursor. I can now place that on top of any other icon and click. And you'll notice the icons automatically replaced. I'm going to go ahead and just replace Scott's icon for right now. I'm going to scroll to the very bottom and I'm going to click the Next button. When setting up your class, you have the opportunity to award students positive as well as negative actions. Here we have the basic positive actions that ClassDojo automatically builds into each class. We're going to go ahead and change this list a little bit.
In fact, I'm going to add some additional positive rewards, I would like to be able to give out in my own class. To do this I'll click the Add button, I'll go and type in a behavior such as Creativity. I'm going to change this to the painting palette and I'll click Save. Let's add another one that's going to have the puzzle piece. And we'll call this, Finding Solutions. And we'll click Save. And I'm going to add a third one, that's going to have the magnifying glass. I'm going to call this, Analyzing Information.
Some of you might have already picked up on this. But what I just did, is I built in three positive awards that I can give out during my class session, that are directly aligned to the top Bloom's taxonomies. We have creativity. Evaluation and analyzing. I'm going to go ahead and and click Save and Close. Now at this point, if you'd like your students to have access to Classroom Dojo, you can simply download a list of codes that you can pass out to your students. They can go to a computer, log on with the code and be able to view their behavior inside of Classroom Dojo. However, if you're not ready to do this at this point, that's okay.
You can click Not right now. And at any time, you can go in and create these codes. So there we have it. We have our eighth grade, Chemistry class set up. We have our atom icon on it. And now what we can do, is actually start class. So the beginning of the period when students start coming in, I'm going to go ahead and click the Start button. Classroom Dojo is reminding us that one way to use this, is to actually project this image through our projector. So students can both have a visual, as well as the auditorial indicator when they do positive and negative things. I'm going to just click Okay, got it.
So this time because it's the first time we've entered a class, Clasroom Dojo is giving us some hinting, that's what these boxes are down here. They're trying to help us navigate the system. After you've come into a class the second time, these boxes will no longer be there. For example, with Alan here, if I click on the student, I now have the opportunity to award him any of these positive indicators that we had. I can also take a look at negative indicators. If he's being disrespectful or didn't turn in homework, if he has off-task behaviors or is unprepared, I can select these as well. Now when I select an indicator, such as unprepared you'll hear that sound.
Students will learn to recognize the sounds as either a positive or negative has been awarded. You'll also notice that on the screen their name pops up. A lot of students respond to their name being on the screen the same way you'd write it on the board. For example, let's say that Andy here did something positive. He was helping others durring an assignment. I can go ahead and give him a possitive. You'll notice too, that there's a small bubble that starts to appear next to a student's name. This is tracking the overall behavior. For example, I just gave Andy a positive. Let's say that later on in class he's been being disrespectful to one of his classmates, I could go ahead and add a disrespect And you'll notice that Andy does back to no bubble, meaning that he's now at par, he's at zero.
If Andy had another positive, such as hardworking. He's now back at a positive one. This becomes important because it's actually tracking individual student behavior. I'm just going to go ahead and award a few behaviors to students so we can see how this looks. Okay, so there I have gone through and added a variety of behaviors to my class. As you can see, you start to have a visual representation of how certain students are doing. Right away, I can notice that Matt is having a fantastic day, and I can probably praise him additional for all of the hard work that he's doing. I can also notice that something's going on with Doug.
Doug's not having his best day. So maybe this is a time to take him to the side, have a one-on-one conversation, and help bring Doug back into the game. Now besides being able to give individual awards, I can also give group awards. Let's say that Jolie, Kristen, and Marina are in a group together. I can come up and click Award Multiple Students. Here I can say Jolie, Kristen, and Marina, and then click on Give Award. So let's say they were very on-task as a group, so I will award all three of them in on task behavior.
And now besides the ability to give awards as well as consequences during the class time, Classroom Dojo also helps make it easy to keep the flow of your lesson going. Here I can click on timer and I can either just, start a basic counting timer, so I can say, students you have ten minutes to work on this assignment and just let the timer count up to ten or I can also chose a countdown timer. So if they had a ten minutes assignment, I could just type in 10. Click Set. An when I'm ready, I just click the Start button. So this way you can visually display for students the remaining time.
During an activity you can go through and give positive and negative, awards. And you can also choose to Pause the timer if for some reason announcements came on, or you wanted to rephrase or reintroduce a concept. In addition to the timer, Classroom Dojo also has the ability to take attendance. If I click on the Attendance button, I can simply go through, and I can make them as late. If I double-click on a student, I'm now marking them as absent. I can also select Mark as absent, which will mark every student absent. And then I can work backwards by clicking on the students that are present in class.
Once again, if, let's say, Mark came in late. I could click on Mark to show I'm present. I could then click on them a second time to indicate that he was late. I'm going to go ahead and mark all as present and we'll go and save our attendance for this particular class. So at this point we've gone through, we've taken attendance, we've given a variety of awards. It's time to take a look at what actually happened during this class. The real power of Classroom Dojo is not what you do during class, but what happens after class. I'm going to go and click on End Class. I love sharing this with my students, at the end of the class I can bring up our overall class on task and off task behaviors.
For this hypothetical class we were 73% positive, which means that 27% of the class time was not positive. I can go through and say that here we had 12 on-task awards given. I had two creativity awards given. I can also go through and sort the students, such as by most positives. So, at the end of the class, if I'd like to give award to the student that had the most positive behaviors overall, here I can see that Matt Simpson had four positive behaviors. Now, besides the class overall averages, I can also click on an individual student, and I can see what individual students did. Ash Poole was 100% positive.
Now, even though Andy has the same icon as two, I can see that he actually was 66% positive. He had a hard-working and helping others, that's his two positives, but he also had a disrespect. So what happens here is Andy's going to receive a report that says that he was 66% positive for this particular class. These individual student reports can be accessed by students if they use their logins, and I can also choose to email them to parents. Now there's two ways parents can interact with your Classroom Dojo. The first thing I can do, is just print parent codes.
If I'm going to set this class up as the first week of school, I can print these parent codes and send them home with students. If I don't think that the best way is to send the code home to the parent and ask the parents to log in. I can also get the parents email address an just type the email address in next to each student. When I do that it's going to send the parent an invitation for them to view their students performance. This way parents can log on, on a daily basis, an actually visually see how their student was doing in class. It's a great way to open conversations with parents. When they come into class, you can pull up their child and Classroom Dojo and say, I'd like to show you your student's behaviors over the last month of my class.
For the student log ins, if you did not choose to print them when you set your class up, you can also click on it at this point, and you can choose to Get invitations for your students. So this time, we've had the opportunity to look at Classroom Dojo. To see how it's going to be used during your actual lesson, and what you can do with the reports after they've been created. The next step is to talk about extending Classroom Dojo by using handheld electronic devices, to control your class.
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