Class Dojo and making it to the end of the year!

I am winding down the school year, trying to get in everything I want to and constantly getting interrupted! You would think I would get used to this since every year it is the same. What is the phrase? Crazy is when you keep doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results? Yeah, that's me.

At the end of the year I sometimes find myself having to remind students about the procedures we have been following since August. You would think I had changed them or something! So I have to step up the discipline monitoring and keep on top of those that would like the last day of school to have been yesterday. I started using Class Dojo a few months back to help with classroom management. I was introduced to over a year ago but didn't put it into action. I now use it with my K-1-2-3-4 classes (should have included 5th too!) Class Dojo, open the app, and as class is moving forward if I see good behavior I can immediately award a point or if needed add a negative. You can also set up parent and student access so they can monitor the behavior away from class. I only use this in class since I see my classes once a week. Attendance can also be taken on Class Dojo and for me this is perfect. I had a colleague who used it with a 7th grade class that was having a lot of trouble staying focused and even at this "old" age, they loved it! Whatever will motivate them to want to do better is always a plus.
Class Dojo

Class Dojo is a creative and fun visual way to manage and track class behavior. You create your class lists, assign positive and negative behaviors (there are default ones but you can create your own too), and the cute part is the avatars for each students are these great little monsters! My kids always want to see the class page at the start and end of class, I think just to see their monster. There is an app for Apple and Android also so I can open the web page for

Even though you are probably at the end of the school year, if you need something new to help make it, check out Class Dojo. Once you play with it this year perhaps you will find it fits your needs for the coming school year.

Hang in there fellow teachers!

Stop the World I want to get off! NCEA

Apparently I just let 3 months go by without a single post. Yeah I am getting really good at this.

Back to it-
This week is NCEA in Pittsburgh. My partner in educational pursuits, Carol Mayo, and I are presenting on Tuesday on the topic of "Extending the classroom with Edmodo". One of my very favorite classroom tools is Edmodo. I use it on a regular basis and find it so user friendly I cannot imagine why any teacher would be opposed to trying it out.

One of the things we will look at besides the usual uses for Edmodo are now the "apps" that are available within #Edmodo. I also recommend that teachers take a closer look at the communities where you can connect to teachers from around the world.

If you are in Pittsburgh and attending #NCEA please join us on Tuesday.

New Year and Back to the Race

Happy New Year!
The first week back to school. Mostly smooth. Can't complain. And I see January already zipping by!

One cool item to share and I know I am behind the time on this one. I heard about this tool but was too busy at the time to check it out. Now I wish I had slowed down and looked at it months ago! I am talking about Blendspace. Very easy and cool way to bring different parts of a lesson together and share with your students. It is a drag and drop construction that also has some really easy search tools already built in. You can share it easily, there are privacy setting so if you include documents you don't want to share with the world you don't have to.  I had heard teachers get all excited about Blendspace but thought "how can it be any cooler?". Well I'm not saying it is any better than some other web tools that let you bring videos, web pages, documents, whatever, together in one place but it sure is slick. There are some who will still prefer the other formats but take a look at Blendspace. I have accessed Blendspace through my Edmodo account. It is a free app inside of Edmodo. I do a quick lesson on hearing loss with my middle school students and this would have been handy to use. Here is the Blendspace that I just created for a hearing loss lesson. It includes videos, web image, and 2 web links. Mine is pretty simple but it is just what I need for this lesson.