Digital Smarts - Classroom Tracking Apps Under Scrutiny

ClassDojo is a classroom management system designed to help teachers improve student behavior. Positive and negative feedback points can be awarded in real time for behavior in class and teachers can create reports using the data for parents and students to access. Classroom tracking apps have been praised as an innovative method to help teachers gain student attention and lessen discipline problems, but there are growing concerns about the negative implications such a system could have. Receiving negative points could possibly end up publicly shaming some students, and questions have been raised about what the use of the app does to student morale. The privacy concerns of what happens to data in the long term is also being questioned and, as Kahlia Barnes of the Electronic Privacy Information Center puts it, “If a student is afraid that every single thing she does is recorded and scaled and sent off to others who can make decisions about her life, then it can chill her speech.” It does seem to give a whole new meaning to the famous line “this could go on your permanent record.”