ClassDojo and Children's University

Have any of you heard of Children's University? It's a great organisation that schools can become involved with, providing extra-curricular activities to broaden students' learning experiences and inspire them to continue studying after school. This is our school's second year with the program, but my first year. Students can earn hours for activities they participate in, and once they have enough hours, they get to graduate! Proper ceremony with gowns and mortar boards. Pretty cool! Anyway, this post isn't really about Children's University (CU). It's more about how ClassDojo can help you with Children's University.

You might be thinking that it's not really any different to how you may already be using CD. And I suppose if you wanted to, you could use it for tracking behaviours and encouraging particular skill sets. But my "light bulb's" (anyone get that reference??) a little different... Inspired by school holiday activities organised by CU, I came up with an idea of how I could link the two. After all, as an Ambassador, isn't it kind of my job to do this? Have ideas and share them? If you know me at all, you'd realise how hard the first part of that job requirement is for me to do, haha. But I had one! And now I can share it :)

So by now, I've created a class called "Children's University". The names of all participating students are listed in there. This part is all the same, as if you were creating a new class. The only thing I might pick on (sorry, CD), is that there isn't a "multiple" option for selecting a grade. CU is open to kids aged 7-14, so you can imagine that there are many grades within this class. I just selected 7, as that's the highest our school goes to.

This is where things change a little. Instead of having behaviours and skills, my "Positives" became activities the students can participate in, each weighted at 1 point, to represent 1 hour. These are activities run at school by our lovely teachers (thanks!). I have also got one called "Holiday Program", which is for when students attend one of the activities organised by CU, obviously in the holidays. These are often held at the participating university, hence the mortar board icon. This is weighted at 4, again, to represent the number of hours students can earn. You may have noticed two other activities. These are called "Other" because students can also earn hours for participating in sports, and attending other CU certified events, not necessarily run by CU, or our school. These are weighted at 5 and 1, to help add on tonnes of hours! Very handy, as one particular child racks up at least 10 "Other" hours per week! In the comments, you can write what those activities were, which is very handy!

Now the whole reason I started a CD class for CU wasn't actually for recording their hours, because when signing up to CU, students are given a learning passport, which you stamp for their hours (how fun!). I created a class because I really wanted to use the messaging feature. Oh how I love this part of CD! Sometimes, students forget that they've returned forms to attend school holiday programs, and so I thought: "I wish I could remind them closer to the date, rather than continually pester them on the last day of school..." And that's when I had my light bulb moment. I CAN do that! Duh! Using ClassDojo. At the time, I thought I was rather clever for thinking of that, haha. All these students are already familiar with CD, as I use it in Science, and some of their parents have accounts, so it wouldn't really be that hard to introduce it to the rest of the CU cohort.

Now that I've done that, I can send reminders about activities and events, and students can also check how many hours they've got, if they ever forget to bring their passport to an activity. As I have CD on my phone, it's with me all the time, so even if we can't stamp their passports there and then, we can at least record the hour(s) on CD, and stamp it later. How ingenious! Perhaps I should talk to some CU people about this, hehehe.

So now, I shall write up some letters and attach each parent's code, and hopefully after the first few weeks of school returning (10 days of holidays left), we'll have everyone signed up and ready to be bombarded with reminder messages! And also photos of their kids participating in the activities. I am so excited to get this up and running!!! I only wish I had thought of it sooner.