This school year has not been the easiest for me. I am a self-declared workaholic and every year I take on more and more tasks in an effort to make the learning experience better for my students. At the beginning of this year, I rolled out a new class website that allowed my students to complete badges associated with assignments and earn points based on those badges. They were then able to trade in their points for various rewards.
Unfortunately, the system that I setup on the website ended up being too time consuming and before long, I was struggling to keep up with awarding the badges along with all my other responsibilities.
These days, I am all for anything that will preserve my sanity as a teacher while at the same time offering my students the positive experience I want them to have. That is when I realized, I need to start thinking outside the box.
Last year, I used an online program called Class Charts to assist with classroom management. I had debated between Class Charts and Class Dojo. Both were excellent programs, but I found that Class Charts had more opportunities for the type of customization I wanted.
If you are unfamiliar with these two platforms, here are a few videos to introduce them to you.
ClassDojo
Class Charts
Over the course of the next few weeks, I am going to be experimenting with my classes and trying to incorporate Class Charts into my program again. However, this time I will be using it for reward points along with behaviour management.
One of the features I like about Class Charts is that I can assign a point value to each behaviour so I’m not limited to each behaviour simply being a point or two. The reporting features in Class Charts are quite extensive as well and will help to reduce the amount of time I spend making the class leaderboard.
Keep an eye out for Part 2 of this post where I will include a short tutorial along with a report on how my students respond to this format.
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