If you have not heard or checked out a wonderful behavior site called ClassDojo, you need to! Having trouble figuring out how to motivate your class to do the right thing? Or not sure how to recognize the students who are always doing the right thing? Well this site gives you that opportunity! You can customize it to fit your classroom and your students.
I started out using the usual green, yellow, and red card system. I knew that I waned to be able to recognize the students that were always doing the right thing. So I added my own orange color to the other three. I called it the Rock Star space. When I first introduced it to my class, they were so excited and worked very hard in order to get on that Rock Star spot. I would give those students who made it to that spot at the end of the day a special award that they could take home and share. This worked for the first few years of teaching and then one of my teacher friends told me about the clip chart system. I read more into this and found that it was even better than what I was already doing and jumped right into that system. My kids loved it, it recognized the kids that were always doing the right thing and motivated the other students who sometimes struggled to get up to the top spot. This was great but I was noticing this year that it was always the same students who were getting to the top spot and the other students weren't being as recognized for their efforts. So I was looking around the web for a reward menu for one of my students on a behavior chart and that is when I kept seeing things for ClassDojo. 
I looked into it and found that THIS is what I really wanted to use. It doesn't take a lot of my time at the end of the day (I'm not putting gems on clips and moving clips back to the start color), and I think my favorite thing (well things) is that it gives parents specific feedback on what their child is doing well and what they need to work on, plus the system will automatically send reports to parents on Fridays. If parents do not have an e-mail, these reports are easy to print out for certain students so they can be sent home. Comments can't be seen on these reports though. Instead of just going home and parents asking "What color did you land on" and not really knowing what it meant when they said, blue, orange, purple, pink, etc. with ClassDojo they can tell their parents how many points they earned (I focus on the positive points with my kids but let parents know about negatives so they can help their child work on those behaviors).
The other thing that is great is that students get to customize their avatar. My students are motivated to get points and love to hear the beep and see if it's their name that has popped up. We started off just earning points and not worrying about individual awards. We came up with a list of class rewards that we wanted to earn so they knew that they had to work together to get points if they were to meet their goals.
One of the other things that I really like about ClassDojo are all the changes that they keep making to make the program work better as a whole and for the teacher. The whole staff is very open to questions and suggestions on what teachers would like to see on the site and how to make things work better for us. You can award points from your computer, iPad, Antroid, or iPhone.
Here is the link: ClassDojo
There are stories on there from other teachers that are using it. I would highly recommend it, it's been a wonderful addition to our classroom.
Check it out if you haven't already, oh and did I mention that it's FREE??
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