Keeping it positive, digital style

 My school has an adopted Positive Behavior Support system called Trojan GOLD. GOLD is an acronym for Give respect, Own your behavior, Listen and learn, and Do your best. We have little paper tickets we give out when we see students demonstrating Trojan GOLD behavior. The data on discipline referrals shows this system is working well at my school, and it works very well in my classroom too.

I came across ClassDojo from Kleisnpiration and have been using for a few weeks now. My students love it! Check this out:

 

This are the student avatars. You can run the program from your computer, your interactive whiteboard, or even link up your phone. I found enough "monsters" to give each student their own monster. 

These are the behaviors you are tracking. As you can see, you decide what behaviors to track, and you choose an avatar to symbolize each behavior. You can track positive only, or positive and negative. When you award a student a point, you will hear a "ping", but only if you want. Sound is optional too.  

As far as the negative sound, I've seriously thought about creating an extra make believe student to give negative behaviors too on occasion, just so the kids can hear the "buzzer" sound. I gave a negative before a few times this year and every child in the class was frozen for a split second and then worked at a level of diligence I've never seen. It was amazing, and kinda funny.

 Another great aspect is the data break down. This is my class's weekly report card. It lets me and the students see where we are and what we need to work on. We looked at this yesterday and my students wanted to set a goal of having "more helping others' and no "talking". Me too kids, meeee tooooo! ;)

 You can also look at each individual student (and print for conferences).

If you aren't fond of the monsters, you can change the avatar. I changed mine Friday afternoon to our school mascot. I don't know how the students will react, but I just wanted to try something new.

 As I mentioned before, you can use your phone too. I do this...a lot. I have classdojo running, but minimized on my Promethean board. I give points on my phone, and the "ping" is heard through my classroom speakers and it's an audible reminder and helps students refocus. I give points in the hall, the cafeteria, etc. I still carry around the paper Trojan GOLD tickets to give out to other classes or if my battery is dead (it is a droid after all).  At the end of the day, we open up Classdojo and if a child has 2 points, they get 2 paper tickets to add to their "bank". They save them up and exchange them for tangible and intangible rewards. Up until this point it's kind of a mystery who has been getting the points, because they are only hearing the ping. This helps me so much! It helps me distribute more evenly, make sure those sweet little babies who never make a peep are never left out, and it helps me make sure I'm not over-rewarding my high flyers for every good decision they make, which was happening when I was just giving paper tickets.

I hope you try Class Dojo. I've gotten personal responses to emails from the owners and they are super guys who really "get" teachers and our needs. Let me know if you do, and how you are using it!