Classroom behavior can be one of the biggest challenges for a teacher, especially at earlier levels of education. That’s the time when a teacher has to not only teach a class but teach students the fundamentals of behaving properly in a class setting, one of the earliest group settings a child will ever experience. As students get older, behavior and classroom management are still very important factors in education.

One of the tools used for behavior and classroom management is the clip chart. The Clip Chart has been implemented as early as pre-k for some teachers and it’s a system that seems to work through middle school in some cases. The Clip Chart is a fairly simple concept, the chart is divided into 7 colors with green being in the middle.  When the school day begins all of the students clothes pins (clips) are fastened to green or “Ready to learn” as a student makes good or bad choices throughout the day the teacher tells the students to move their clips up or down.

As the parent of a six year old the first thing we ask our daughter after the school day is what color she ended up on at the end of the day. We personally incentivize good colors and have some restrictions we enforce for bad colors. While some parents oppose the clip chart because it shows the entire class the well behaved and not so well behaved students, it’s actually a great primer for any age where it’s still relevant. The problem is the clip chart dates back a few decades and outside of a few good templates on Pinterest, it really hasn’t been innovated.

Enter ClassDoJo

ClassDoJo is an education technology company founded by two brilliant twenty somethings, Sam Chaudhary and Laim Don. Chaudhary is a former teacher while Don spent the early parts of his career working as a game developer and studying as an education technology PhD. The duo entered Imagine K12 an EdTech accelerator and the idea for their company began.

ClassDojo focuses on behavior and class room management, one of the biggest reasons good teachers leave their schools.

“It’s what new teachers struggle most with, and it’s one of the biggest reasons they leave teaching” says Chaudhary.“ More concerning, studies show it’s one of the largest uses of instructional time in the classroom, with more than 50% of U.S. class time spent on addressing behavior issues rather than teaching and learning,”

ClassDojo is an interactive system that takes the fairly basic clip chart system and puts it onto whiteboards and mobile devices. Of course with technology the ClassDojo system has lots of features that teachers love.

When a teacher starts their day and fires up the ClassDojo system every student in their class has an avatar. Throughout the day the teacher can give students points for a variety of reasons (which can be customized) and they can also take away points for a variety of reasons as well. Every student sees the ClassDojo on the white board or mobile screen.

Bringing a behavior modification and classroom management system into the 21st century also means that data is stored for the teacher. At the end of the day, week, month, reporting period or year a teacher can elect to export the classes data as a whole or each individual students data as a PDF. This means that at the end of the school day the teacher can send home the behavior sheet for parents or use it as a point of reference in parent teacher conferences.

Like the Clip Chart, ClassDojo focuses on both positive and negative behaviors and with the ability to show the class the entire classes dojo they can drive competition to inspire good behavior and use peer reinforcement to combat bad behavior.

Both Chaudhary and Don continue to innovate ClassDojo with more useful features. The system allows teachers to easily communicate with the parent in regards to how their student is behaving. It also eliminates those days when kids may not be so forthcoming about how they behaved in school.  All the while its’ done in a UI that’s colorful and fun for the students.

If you’d like to know more, or if you’re a teacher ready to throw that old clip chart out the window, check out ClassDojo.com for more information.