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Showing posts with label iPad. Show all posts
Showing posts with label iPad. Show all posts

Thursday, 2 August 2012

Classroom Dojo

A few weeks ago whilst I was tweeting, someone from "Classroom Dojo" got in contact with me and asked me to have a look at their website. Naturally intrigued, I had a quick looksie and quite frankly like what I saw. As a technologically minded person, I have been looking for a good program that allows me to keep an accurate track of my students' positive and negative behaviour, whilst also cataloguing their attendance. Classroom Dojo does exactly this. It's a great app that you can also use on your IWB as students can self assess, something that I feel needs greater input in Spanish schools as children often seem less independent. I've taken some screen shots so that you can see how the setup works.
                                                                                                                                                                         

This is a screen of the main page, here you can add and edit your class list and click on students to add information.

This is the attendance page, easy peasy lemon squeezy.

This is the positive feedback that you can assign each student after every class. 


This is the negative feedback that you can give each student.

                                             
                               This is the end result, an easy way of creating report cards and teacher-parent       conferences.

The best thing about this app is that it also available for iPad and iPhone so if you haven't got access to a computer, you can keep on top of it easily and readily. The only drawback is that it will become time consuming to use, as I personally have hardly any free time during the day, however I do believe it's worth the extra effort! Fantastic job!

Monday, 30 July 2012

Phonics are hot news....

At the moment in the UK, the teaching of phonics is big, big news. Here in Spain, as children learn Spanish technically before english, the use of phonics is not as necessary as you generally say what you see. However, now that the Spanish Government has implemented the importance of bilingualism in their primary schools, it is becoming increasingly more important the use of phonics within the primary classroom. I have seen that students who enter in Primary who have previously studied the "Jolly Phonics" structure have better pronunciation, and are more able to sight read. Instead of them memorising a word, they are more capable of breaking the sound down thus allowing them more freedom within their learning. Finding a good app that allows teaching phonics in a fun and dynamic manner is quite difficult, however Twinkl has designed an innovative new app for the iPad and Android devices (of which I have neither - YET) which allows teachers to bring more interactive ways of studying phonics back into the classroom. Here you can find the link to their sneak preview, and I for one am quite excited, and am putting away a few pennies, I think I may need an iPad!