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Updates From ClassDojo

Announcing: ClassDojo goes school-wide :)

ClassDojo

2014-07-23

Hello, folks 🙂

Since ClassDojo’s beginnings, millions of teachers have signed up to use ClassDojo in their classrooms. Over time, we’ve been excited to hear those teachers spread it to other teachers in their schools and grade-levels – creating entire ‘ClassDojo schools’ where every teacher uses ClassDojo, or whole grade-level teams using ClassDojo to help students develop the behaviors and skills they need for success.

Today, we’re thrilled to announce two features that make using ClassDojo across an entire grade-level or school – or even with just a few other teachers – a lot easier! Now, for the first time, you’ll be able to connect with other teachers in your school to teach classes together, share student rosters, and track your students’ progress across all their different classes. These features have been the most popular requests from teachers everywhere over the last few years – we hope you like them 🙂

There are two ways to work together with other ClassDojo teachers, Shared Students and Shared Classes:

  • With Shared Students, teachers can connect with each other and share individual students to fill each other’s classes. Setting up your classes will be faster by pulling from the school roster, and you can also view students’ reports from their other teachers’ classes.

  • With Shared Classes, you and your colleagues can teach the same class, awarding feedback points in each others’ classes, and instantly messaging parents! This feature is great for teaching assistants and also classes that move together during the school day.

Read more details on the ClassDojo Community Forum!

We’ve been hard at work building these features to help you use ClassDojo across your whole school or grade level – and this is just the first step! We hope you love what we’re launching today, and we’d love your feedback – let us know what you think in the comments below, or by emailing us at hello@classdojo.com 🙂

  • Updates From ClassDojo

We’re really proud that ClassDojo will work in any classroom environment and on any device. Android is certainly one platform that is always top of mind as we create new features and launch new apps!

We recently sat down with our friends at Google for Education to share our Developer story. Take a quick watch to hear from Sam, Liam, and Kalen 🙂

Our teacher community continues to highlight many new potential features that can improve classrooms everywhere. We just launched one of those recently! With ’Shared Classes,’ teachers can connect other teachers in their school to their ClassDojo classes. This means that multiple teachers can give feedback points to the same class and send messages to the same parents with their own logins. Teachers can now easily partner with their grade-level team, specialist teachers, TAs, and substitute teachers WITHOUT sharing a log in 🙂

Visit ClassDojo.com to try Shared Classes out today!

ClassDojo works well across all grade levels, including high school. For example, it can help facilitate group work in a multi-lingual setting where students speak a myriad of native languages. Managing group work in her highly heterogeneous classroom was tricky, says Tara Hobson of SF International High School. She uses ClassDojo to encourage group lab work in her 11th grade chemistry class. Points are awarded to students asking good questions, speaking in English, and following their roles during lab time. As Hobson moves around the classroom, she uses the ClassDojo app on her smart phone to track these behaviors, reinforcing them and bringing classroom expectations to a higher level. The dynamic of group interaction during lab assignments has since really improved she says. Hear more from Tara in the video below!

Hear how other teachers like Tara have used ClassDojo in their classrooms.

One of the best parts of working at ClassDojo is hearing directly from teachers how ClassDojo has been helpful for them and their students.

Every now and again, we hear some stories that we can’t help but want to write them down, and share with others. We’ve been lucky enough to chat with about 30 of these teachers, take some great photographs of them, and post them on our Stories page.

Take a look at ClassDojo.com/Stories, and if you’d like to share your own personal impact story, email us at Hello@ClassDojo.com 🙂

Photograph shown of Phylecia Palmer, a middle school special educator.

Our team really enjoys attending and participating in education technology conferences. The presentations on new tools/technologies and the platform to share ideas are wonderful. But, our favorite part is spending time with all the wonderful faces behind those ‘edufamous’ Twitter handles (thanks, Bill Selak!), WordPress blogs, and classroom desks from around the country 🙂 And #CUE14 was no exception! More pictures after the break


We wanted to bring together as many teachers as possible at a special ClassDojo event at the Tropicale in Palm Springs, CA to thank them for doing so much for the Education community. Liam (co-founder of ClassDojo) and Ben C hosted the event and were so grateful to all our friends for spending a few hours with us.

Cheers!

Liam, Ben and the ClassDojo team 🙂

Just last week, we announced that teachers have given over 1 billion pieces of feedback to students on ClassDojo. Even more exciting, over 80% of that feedback was positive: millions of teachers are using ClassDojo to encourage great behaviors like curiosity, grit, and helping others.

Our mission has always been to help students learn and grow by developing these types of “soft skills.” We’re excited that so many teachers are using ClassDojo for this purpose, and that we’re lucky enough to be part of their classrooms in such an impactful way.

Read more about this milestone!

Today, we’re incredibly excited to announce a new feature: ClassDojo Messaging. ClassDojo Messaging – available on the ClassDojo iOS and Android apps – is the simplest, easiest way for teachers and parents to meaningfully communicate about students. Visit the ClassDojo Messaging page!

There are a number of carefully designed features we’ve built into ClassDojo Messaging, but after having tested it with about 40 beta testers, we think there are three elements in particular that you’ll love.

Firstly, there are two types of messages: ‘Broadcasts’ and ‘Direct Messages’. ‘Broadcast’ messages enable a teacher to quickly and easily send a message to all parents for any class. ‘Direct Messages’ allow teachers and parents to message privately, keeping parents engaged and in the know on student progress.

Second, we’ve included “Read Receipts” for all messages. These are essentially acknowledgements to teachers, that let them know when parents have seen or read a message. For teachers currently using emails, SMS, or even handwritten notes to communicate with parents, this should be really useful: no more wondering who’s received your message – you can now see that at a glance!

Finally, we know that teachers and parents sometimes prefer not to share their contact details, like cell phone numbers and email addresses; with ClassDojo Messaging, teachers and parents don’t need to! Teachers simply provide parents with a unique parent code, and then they can easily begin to communicate via ClassDojo Messaging.

We’re really thrilled to be sharing this feature with you, as we think it will enable impactful, meaningful conversations to take place between teachers and parents with ease. As always, we want to hear what you think. Tweet @ClassDojo or email us (Hello@ClassDojo.com). We always listen and try our best to respond quickly!

Happy Messaging!

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