Hi Kalen from ClassDojo here! Thought I’d write a quick blog post highlighting a cool idea I have noticed a lot of teachers using lately: tying the students’ “Dojo points” to the privilege of customizing their avatars!

With only a couple minutes of setup time, this is a quick, fun way to get your students more excited about working on their learning habits! Allowing students to set up their own avatars also creates a deeper connection between the student and their avatar, making ClassDojo an even more effective tool for skill building and goal setting in the long-term! Let me show you how it works…

As you already know, when you create a class in ClassDojo, we auto-populate random avatars for each student.

This works great, but if you want to have students “earn” their avatars, it’s probably best to start each student off with the same avatar. This only takes about one minute to do! If you need help, check out our video on how to change avatars here.

I am going to change each student’s avatars to the plainest looking monster possible…

Now that all students are starting off with the same avatar, I am going to set the criteria for how students can earn the privilege to change their avatar. I’ve set the following criteria for my class:

10 points: Can change the avatar to any “Monster”
20 points: Can change the avatar to any “Critter”
30 points: Can change the avatar to any appropriate picture they find online
50 points: Can use computer time to make their own avatar using www.faceyourmanga.com!

After my criteria are set, my next goal is to publicize to my students. Obviously this is going to involve telling them about it during class one day, but I also like to make posters and hang them around the classroom to get them excited. You can see an example of a poster I made by clicking here. Feel free to download, customize, and use it if you like (I can almost guarantee you have better design skills than me!).

Here’s what my class looks like after 3 weeks!:

Hope this post was helpful! You can sign up for ClassDojo here!

Have another good idea for a blog post or video that might help other teachers? Shoot us an email at hello@classdojo.com!