ClassDojo, helping schooling into the 21st century

One of the most frustrating things about communicating with our kids school is the haphazard way they use email. More often than not, we get email that simply says please see the attached letter (which is in PDF format). PDFs are not the best for reading on a mobile phone and invariably these always end up being sent at the wrong time of day for either of us to be anywhere near a computer. Talking to friends, we are far and away not alone in this, so I’m not singling out our kids school- honest!

It is also difficult to contact the teachers directly with any particular issue either- through no fault of theirs I should stress- as every morning there is a queue to see form teachers and they’re often busy after school and home by the time either of us finishes work.

it’s funny that in the work place we adopt lots of collaborative systems like Slack or Microsoft Teams to make our communication and workflow better but in other areas of life still have to rely on an email with a PDF attachment, or even in the case of the doctors, a letter that’s dictated and sent overseas for transcription.

Fortunately if you have a school that’s either onboard with the 21st century or open to suggestion, it doesn’t have to be this way because clever people out there have noticed that downloading and squinting at PDFs or leaving work early to have a five minute chat with a teacher isn’t really the most sensible thing to do and you know what? They’re right.

Enter ClassDojo, already used by a good 40% of primary school teachers in around 85% of primary schools, if your school hasn’t jumped on board, it’s time to ask them if they intend to. If it turns out your school actually does use ClassDojo and you just didn’t realise it, there are plenty of benefits to using it.

ClassDojo connects teachers with families so they can become a “teaching team.” Teachers can instantly share pictures, videos and messages with families about what’s happening throughout the school day.If, like me, you’re greeted with a “Not anything” when you ask how the day has gone or seem to spend half of your ten minutes at parents evening asking what you can specifically do to support your kid at home, this sounds like a godsend. I can still remember the day I asked our lad what happened at school (he was in reception at the time) and he said “nuffin” but the following week we saw a photo of him on the school website sitting in a big yellow digger.

ClassDojo is also an app that your kids can use, which helps to get them involved and develop both responsibility and accountability.

Kids can even use it to update you as parents to what they’re up to in the classroom. I know for a fact all our kids are brimming with pride when it comes to parent evening, how much more exciting would it be to let them share via ClassDojo as and when they do something cool, obviously once agreed by the teacher!

ClassDojo is available in primary schools so what are you waiting for? Check it out and if you like what you see, be sure to mention it to your school!

This post is advertorial content for ClassDojo

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