Show your APPreciation! Come Link Up With Me!

If you know me in real life, you know that I love all things techy.  I spend a lot of time…WAY too much time…trying out new technology, creating resources to use on the Smartboard, and trying new apps.  I’m ALWAYS on the lookout for new and useful apps (education or otherwise). Recently I’ve found a few apps that I love and thought other people might love them too.

I would love to hear about what apps you APPreciate!  This linky will be up for the rest of August and you can link up as often as you like!  Link up with a blog post about your favorite apps and how you use them.  They can be education related or not! I love me some apps! Remember to grab the linky button and link back to this blog so other people can read about all the great apps we’ve discovered!

Here are my current favourites:

I’m so excited to be trying a new classroom management tool out this year! Many of you have already heard of Class Dojo but there might also be a lot of people like me who have just heard about it.  I almost can’t wait for school to start so I can start using it….almost. If you haven’t heard of Class Dojo you really should check it out!

It’s basically like an online behaviour clip chart but with sounds and cute avatars.  I used a clip chart last year which worked really well but I have one of the same students again and I feel like he’s going to need something different to keep him on track and I think this is going to be the key!

If you have a Smartboard or even a projector and laptop you can display the Class Dojo all day long and just keep clicking away as students earn points.  It displays the number of points each student has earned.  I’m thinking of creating a reward system to go along with it…say for every 15 points a student earns they get to pick a prize out of my prize bin or some other type of reward.  I’ve seen some different reward coupons floating around in bloggyland so I might check some of those out.

Here is what the class screen looks like (this is obviously the sample class):

Then you just click on the individual student names and up pops a screen with the desired (or undesired) behaviours on it. You then click on the behaviour you want to record and it adds a point to that student.

I think I am going to start with only using the positive behaviours, I try not to focus on the negative ones. I’ll see how that goes and then reevaluate after a while to see if I need to utilize the negative behaviour feature.

You can produce a report for your whole class to display so the class can see how they are doing overall. I can see myself doing a whole class reward when we reach a certain number of points. You can also just bring up one student at a time.

What about when you’re in the gym, or on a field trip etc. There’s an app for that! That’s right, you can get the Class Dojo app on your ipad, iphone or other devices! I carry my ipad around with me most of the day because I take a lot of student pictures in order to document their learning.

In this digital age we live in I think this will be just what my students will buy into!

I would love to hear from others who have used Class Dojo to see how it went in your classrooms or if you have any tips to offer that would be great! Leave me a comment!

The next app I want to talk about is iDoceo.  I found this app when I was checking out other education apps in the app store (how many times can I say app in one sentence??)

I played around with it last year but didn’t use it on a regular basis because it was near the end of the year.  I really like this app a lot. iDoceo is an online gradebook with all of the bells and whistles.  You can attach photos, videos, PDFs etc. to each student’s profile.

You can also tailor the grading style to whatever you use.  For example, we use a grading system based on 4 levels.  I can use that with this app or use percentages, letter grades…anything I want.

I also like that I can assign the cute little symbols that they have like Thumbs up or a happy face etc. If I’m doing an activity that I just want to know if they got or didn’t get it I can use one of those symbols.

I also love all of the tabs along the side that you can customize with whatever you want. I chose to do subjects but if you teach multiple classes you could add it by class well.

There is also a seating plan feature and you can see from the picture below that you can add avatars or real pictures of your students.

There is a calendar feature too and the part that I like about it is that I don’t have to go adding everything manually from my other calendars.  It synced perfectly with my Google calendar!

You can view the calendar by day, week or month!

When you click on each student’s name it brings up a box that looks like this:

This is essentially the student’s file.  You can add notes to it, attach files, pictures, videos etc.  You can also email parents directly from iDoceo.  I plan to use the student file feature during parent interviews.  It will be so handy to have photos and videos on hand to show parents first hand how their child is doing!

There are so many other neat features but I really think you should check it out yourself.  This is not a free app, it was $5.99 but in my opinion it was worth it!

If you have some apps that you love feel free to link up to your blog post below!

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