The benefits of ClassDojo for the reading skill development.

As it has been talked about in the previous blog entrances, ClassDojo is an app that serves as helpful feedback to the students. It allows them to track their progress, as well as get rewards for good behavior and hard work. In this post, we will talk about what benefits there are in ClassDojo for the reading skill development, but first, it will go over what reading is and the importance of this skill.

Reading is the ability to understand written or printed words by comprehending them with your brain. In other words, it means that you can decode a written text and make sense of what it means. This is an important skill because it helps you to understand the world around you. It helps your brain to learn from what you read. It is a very crucial skill that cannot be taken for granted. However, with the steady decline of reading skills as a global issue, many students do not know what this skill means and how important it is for their future development. One of ClassDojo's main goals is to change that and help students develop reading skills.

As this app offers personalized feedback on the student’s progress and can be accessed anywhere, it seems like a relevant tool for language learning, in this case, reading in particular. ClassDojo can also improve reading skills by offering the following:

1. Track & Motivation: ClassDojo offers students points after they answer a reading question correctly. After students reach a certain number of points, they can exchange their points for rewards (e.g., stickers or coins that are used in purchasing fun items in the ClassDojo shop). This way, students will be more enthusiastic about learning new vocabulary or tackling complex sentences instead of giving up easily.
   
   
2. Overcome Reading Comprehension Problems: Once students answer a question correctly, the app automatically generates feedback for the student. The feedback begins with the student's own words and does not include complex sentences. After understanding their own meaning for the first time, students can then use ClassDojo’s automatic translation tool to get a clearer idea of what exactly was written by the author of the text that they have just read.
   
   
3. Recognize Patterns in the Reading Practice: By giving the answer to a certain question and then translating it, ClassDojo can help students find patterns among different texts.

Aside from these benefits, ClassDojo might also help children with certain reading problems such as dyslexia. With the use of this app, children with dyslexia will be able to start learning in a more efficient manner.

To foster the reading learning specifically, I would personally use the ClassDojo app to encourage students to use specific reading strategies. The "Rate Your Reading Log" can be used to your students feedback on their daily readings and share it with others who are on their reading list. I also would plan specific lessons built around phonics, comprehension, vocabulary, and other topics.

A limitation of ClassDojo would be that is intended for students under 13, the design is made for kids and their interests, but what about students that are older than 13? The teacher should look for another platform to engage their older students to learn and get feedback.

Talking about feedback, the ClassDojo app is only capable (due to the age restrictions) to have communication between the teacher and a parent, which is not very helpful if you as a teacher are looking to give more detailed feedback about a specific topic/assignment to any of your students directly.

It is also a limitation that ClassDojo has no way to make "private" classes, which means that a teacher or student could not create a more personalized class and it is necessary to teach all the information in one big group, which can be a difficulty because not every student learn at the same pace and/or in the same style.

And lastly, ClassDojo cannot measure a student’s progress towards one specific goal, it is more of a general progress of a student towards general skills/tasks but it does not know where a certain student’s problem lies so it cannot focus on that problem if there are still others for them.

To summarize everything we talked about today, ClassDojo can be helpful for teachers on the reading skill specifically due to the multiple benefits it offers to the students in both form and function. We would also put our personal opinion on how it can help children with learning difficulties or dyslexia as well as what are some possible limitations. It will be interesting to observe in future studies how ClassDojo could be used to create more effective future strategies for language learning and teaching reading.

More information about ClassDojo: https://classdojo.com/