Podcasts about classdojo

Send us a textJoin hosts Alex Sarlin and Ben Kornell as they explore the latest developments in education technology, from AI in classrooms to workforce shifts and EdTech innovation across the globe.✨ Episode Highlights:[00:03:16] Ezra Klein podcast brings AI and education to mainstream conversation[00:07:20] Alex and Ben compare and critique GPT-4, Claude, Gemini, and other AI tools[00:09:28] Utah emerges as a leading hub for EdTech startups and innovation[00:12:21] New AI bundles help educators explore tools like Superhuman and Perplexity[00:13:19] Surge in media coverage on cheating, lawsuits, and educator use of AI[00:16:17] Lawsuit filed against professor for using AI-generated content in class[00:18:00] Concerns grow about students using AI tools to bypass cognitive learning[00:23:10] Direct-to-student AI sparks debate about academic integrity and design[00:25:20] Google plans to roll out Gemini to students under 13[00:29:41] AI enables hands-on science learning like virtual frog dissections[00:33:43] AI compared to electricity as foundational infrastructure for the future[00:36:09] Rising youth unemployment signals early impact of AI-driven disruption[00:38:57] Major firms lay off workers while shifting strategy toward AI adoption[00:40:34] EdTech must define and prepare students for new AI-native job rolesPlus, special guest:[00:41:22] Sam Chaudhary, Co-founder & CEO of ClassDojo on tutoring, gamified learning, and community building

This edWeb podcast is sponsored by ClassDojo. You can access the webinar recording here.This edWeb podcast focuses on fostering a culture of caring that strengthens family engagement and improves attendance through a simple, effective five-step process of caring conversation.Listeners discover how to strategically use the free ClassDojo platform to facilitate meaningful interactions with families, address attendance challenges, and collaboratively develop solutions. Emphasis is placed on making every phrase count, using concise and impactful communication to build trust and support student success.Gain practical strategies, real-world examples, and actionable tools to transform ClassDojo into a platform for positive change. Together, we create a supportive environment that enhances family connections and promotes regular attendance.This edWeb podcast is of interest to K-12 school leaders, district leaders, and education technology leaders.ClassDojoWhere classrooms become communitiesDisclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.Learn more about viewing live edWeb presentations and on-demand recordings, earning CE certificates, and using accessibility features.

Rahul Vohra is the founder and CEO of Superhuman. Prior to Superhuman, Rahul founded Rapportive, the first Gmail plug-in to scale to millions of users, which he sold to LinkedIn in 2012. He is also a prominent angel investor, and his fund has invested $50 million in over 120 companies, including Placer, Supabase, Mercury, Zip, ClassDojo, and Writer.What you'll learn:• The unexpected insight about virality Rahul gained from LinkedIn's head of growth.• Why Rahul restructured his entire executive team to spend 60% to 70% of his time on product, design, and marketing instead of the typical CEO responsibilities.• The counterintuitive approach to finding product-market fit using a methodical system inspired by Sean Ellis, and how this algorithmically determines your roadmap.• How manually onboarding every user (Superhuman had 20 full-time people doing this at peak) created superfans and allowed engineers to focus on product rather than onboarding flows.• The “Single Decisive Reason” framework for making better decisions by avoiding collections of weak justifications.• How Superhuman's AI features have evolved to create a truly intelligent email experience that works while you sleep.—Brought to you by:• Eppo—Run reliable, impactful experiments• Fundrise Flagship Fund—Invest in $1.1 billion of real estate• OneSchema—Import CSV data 10x faster—Find the transcript at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/superhumans-secret-to-success-rahul-vohra—Where to find Rahul Vohra:• X: https://x.com/rahulvohra• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rahulvohra/• Email: Rahul@superhuman.com—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Introduction to Rahul and Superhuman(05:00) The most pivotal moment in Rahul's career(07:01) The secret to virality(11:02) Superhuman's product evolution and core values(13:32) Overcoming slowdowns at scale(18:06) Time management and meditation(27:35) The role of a president(30:56) Attention to detail(43:00) Finding your unique position(47:32) The power of manual onboarding(52:37) Mastering product-market fit(59:33) Game design in business software(01:05:35) Contrarian pricing strategies(01:09:29) Leveraging AI(01:15:40) Transitioning to enterprise solutions(01:19:08) The Single Decisive Reason framework(01:22:32) Conclusion and final thoughts—Referenced:• Superhuman: https://superhuman.com/• Rapportive: https://techcrunch.com/2012/02/22/rapportive-linkedin-acquisition/• Elliot Shmukler on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eshmu/• What Are ‘Whales' in Video Games: https://gamerant.com/video-games-whales-concept-term-explained/• Figma: https://www.figma.com/• Notion: https://www.notion.com/• Loom: https://www.loom.com/• How to use Team Comments to reimagine email collaboration: https://blog.superhuman.com/how-to-use-team-comments-to-reimagine-email-collaboration/• Rajiv Ayyangar's post on X about Superhuman: https://x.com/rajivayyangar/status/1816176308130570385• Transcendental Meditation: https://www.tm.org/• Laurent Valosek on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurent-valosek-18708b5a/• Peak Leadership Institute: https://www.peakleadershipinstitute.com/• Ed Sim's website: https://edsim.net/• Adelle Sans: https://fonts.adobe.com/fonts/adelle-sans• Comic Sans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comic_Sans• Greenfield project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenfield_project• Why Mailbox died: https://www.theverge.com/2015/12/8/9873268/why-dropbox-mailbox-shutdown• Bill Trenchard on X: https://x.com/btrenchard• How Superhuman Built an Engine to Find Product-Market Fit: https://review.firstround.com/how-superhuman-built-an-engine-to-find-product-market-fit/• Using the Sean Ellis Test for Measuring Your Product-Market Fit: https://medium.productcoalition.com/using-sean-ellis-test-for-measuring-your-product-market-fit-c8ac98053c2c• Sean Ellis on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/seanellis/• The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-original-growth-hacker-sean-ellis• The Trouble with Rewards: https://www.kornferry.com/insights/briefings-magazine/issue-13/519-the-trouble-with-rewards• The art and science of pricing | Madhavan Ramanujam (Monetizing Innovation, Simon-Kucher): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-art-and-science-of-pricing-madhavan•  Van Westendorp Price Sensitivity Meter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Westendorp%27s_Price_Sensitivity_Meter• AI-powered email for high-performing teams: https://superhuman.com/ai• Linear's secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/linears-secret-to-building-beloved-b2b-products-nan-yu• Single Decisive Reason: decision-making for fast-scaling startups: https://blog.superhuman.com/single-decisive-reason-decision-making-for-fast-scaling-startups/• Reid Hoffman on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/reidhoffman/—Recommended books:• Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind: https://www.amazon.com/Positioning-Battle-Your-Al-Ries/dp/0071373586• Monetizing Innovation: How Smart Companies Design the Product Around the Price: https://www.amazon.com/Monetizing-Innovation-Companies-Design-Product/dp/1119240867—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.—Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed. Get full access to Lenny's Newsletter at www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe

In this episode, we sit down with Principal Jon Arens, a special education teacher and dad to 3 little ones in the learning to read stages! We dive into the realities of education, parenting, and navigating the school system. This is part 1 of 2.We cover a wide range of topics, including: Why Bluey beats Daniel Tiger as a favorite and how that choice says a lot about what we value in children's content. How failing in front of your kids (like taking them to a restaurant where you can't read the menu) is actually the best thing for their growth. The role language plays in learning to read and why "don't be an expert" is actually great advice for parenting. The importance of representation in schools and why behavior charts should be banned—Jon would be shocked to see them in public schools today and didn't believe that teachers and parents reported their school uses them! What's really happening in classrooms: Class Dojo, EBD, and even padded walls (as investigated by the Chicago Tribune). The big question: Is it more valuable to train teachers or invest in new curriculum? Spoiler: Curriculum often sits in a box. Why teachers might be too nice to speak up and how school boards may not fully understand what's happening in schools. Practical advice on how to support your kids at home, from asking the right questions to staying informed on curriculum decisions.We also tackle red flag/green flag questions for schools, check-in check-out forms, equity audits, and how creating a safe environment for children enables them to take more risks and learn. Plus, why you should always watch school board meetings and who you should really email when you need answers.Visit bigcityreaders.com for more on these topics!If you have more questions after this episode, stay tuned for part 2 where we dig even deeper!

Rounding Up Season 3 | Episode 1 – Grouping Practices That Promote Efficacy and Knowledge Transfer Guest: Dr. Peter Liljedahl Mike Wallus: We know from research that student collaboration can have a powerful impact on learning. That said, how we group students for collaboration matters—a lot. Today we're talking with Dr. Peter Liljedahl, author of “Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics,” about how educators can form productive, collaborative groups in their classrooms. Mike: Hello, Peter. Welcome to the podcast. Peter Liljedahl: Thanks for having me. Mike: So, to offer our listeners some background, you've written a book, called “Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics,” and I think it's fair to say that it's had a pretty profound impact on many educators. In the book, you address 14 different practices. And I'm wondering if you could weigh in on how you weigh the importance of the different practices that you addressed? Peter: Well, OK, so, first of all, 14 is a big number that publishers don't necessarily like. When we first started talking with Corwin about this, they were very open. But I know if you think about books, if there's going to be a number in the title, the number is usually three, five or seven. It's sometimes eight—but 14 is a ridiculous number. They can't all be that valuable. What's important about the fact that it's 14, is that 14 is the number of core practices that every teacher does. That's not to say that there aren't more or less for some teachers, but these are core routines that we all do. We all use tasks. We all create groups for collaboration. We all have the students work somewhere. We all answer questions. We do homework, we assign notes, we do formative, summative assessment. We do all of these things. We consolidate lessons. We launch lessons. Peter: These are sort of the building blocks of what makes our teaching. And through a lot of time in classrooms, I deduced this list of 14. Robert Kaplinsky, in one of his blog posts, actually said that he thinks that that list of 14 probably accounts for 95 percent of what happens in classrooms. And my research was specifically about, “How do we enact each of those 14 so that we can maximize student thinking? So, what kind of tasks get students to think, how can we create groups so that more thinking happens? How can we consolidate a lesson so we get more thinking? How can we do formative and summative assessments so the students are thinking more?” So, the book is about responding to those 14 core routines and the research around how to enact each of those to maximize thinking. Your question around which one is, “How do we put weight on each of these?” Peter: They're all important. But, of course, they're not all equally impactful. Building thinking classrooms is most often recognized visually as the thing where students are standing at whiteboards working. And, of course, that had a huge impact on student engagement and thinking in the classroom, getting them from sitting and working at desks to getting them working at whiteboards. But in my opinion, it's not the most impactful. It is hugely impactful, but the one that actually makes all of thinking classroom function is how we form collaborative groups, which is chapter two. And it seems like that is such an inconsequential thing. “We've been doing groups for forever, and we got this figured out. We know how to do this. But … do we really? Do we really have it figured out?” Because my research really showed that if we want to get students thinking, then the ways we've been doing it aren't working. Mike: I think that's a great segue. And I want to take a step back, Peter. Before we talk about grouping, I want to ask what might be an obvious question. But I wonder if we can talk about the “why” behind collaboration. How would you describe the value or the potential impact of collaboration on students' learning experiences? Peter: That's a great question. We've been doing collaborative work for decades. And by and large, we see that it is effective. We have data that shows that it's effective. And when I say “we,” I don't mean me or the people I work with. I mean “we, in education,” know that collaboration is important. But why? What is it about collaboration that makes it effective? There are a lot of different things. It could be as simple as it breaks the monotony of having to sit and listen. But let's get into some really powerful things that collaboration does. Number one, about 25 years ago, we all were talking about metacognition. We know that metacognition is so powerful and so effective, and if we get students thinking about their thinking, then their thinking actually improves. And metacognition has been shown time and time again to be impactful in learning. Some of the listeners might be old enough to remember the days where we were actually trying to teach students to be metacognitive, and the frustration that that created because it is virtually impossible. Peter: Being reflective about your thinking while you're thinking is incredibly hard to do because it requires you to be both present and reflective at the same time. We're pretty good at being present, and we're pretty good about reflecting on our experiences. But to do both simultaneously is incredibly hard to do. And to teach someone to do it is difficult. But I think we've also all had that experience where a student puts up their hand, and you start walking over to them, and just as you get there, they go, “Never mind.” Or they pick up their book, and they walk over to you, and just as they get to you, they just turn around and walk back. I used to tell my students that they're smarter when they're closer to me. But what's really going on there is, as they've got their hand up, or as they're walking across the room toward you as a teacher, they're starting to formulate their thoughts to ask a question. Peter: They're preparing to externalize their thinking. And that is an incredibly metacognitive process. One of the easiest forms of metacognition, and one of the easiest ways to access metacognition, is just to have students collaborate. Collaborating requires students to talk. It requires them to organize their thoughts. It requires them to prepare their thinking and to think about their thinking for the purposes of externalization. It is an incredibly accessible way of creating metacognition in your classroom, which we already know is effective. So, that's one reason I think collaboration is really, really vital. Peter: Another one comes from the work on register. So, register is the level of sophistication with which we speak about something. So, if I'm in a classroom, and I'm talking to kindergarten students, I set a register that is accessible to them. When I talk to my undergraduates, I use a different register. My master's students, my Ph.D. students, my colleagues, I'm using different registers. I can be talking about the same thing, but the level of sophistication with which I'm going to talk about those things varies depending on the audience. And as much as possible, we try to vary our register to suit the audience we have. But I think we've also all had that instructor who's completely incapable of varying their register, the one who just talks at you as if you're a third-year undergraduate when you're really a Great Eight student. And the ability to vary our register to a huge degree is going to define what makes us successful as a teacher. Can we meet our learners where they're at? Can we talk to them from the perspective that they're at? Now we can work at it, and very adept teachers are good at it. But even the best teachers are not as good at getting their register to be the same as students. Peter: So, this is another reason collaboration is so effective. It allows students to talk and be talked to at their register, which is the most accessible form of communication for them. And I think the third reason that collaboration is so important is the difference between what I talk in my book about the difference between absolute and tentative knowledge. So, I'm going to make two statements. You tell me which one is more inviting to add a comment to. So, statement number one is, “This is how to do it, or this is what I did.” That's statement number one. Statement number two is, “I think that one of the ways that we may want to try, I'm wondering if this might work.” Which one is more inviting for you to contribute to? Mike: Yes, statement number two, for many, many reasons, as I'm sitting here thinking about the impact of those two different language structures. Peter: So, as teachers, we tend to talk in absolutes. The absolute communication doesn't give us anything to hold onto. It's not engaging. It's not inviting. It doesn't bring us into the conversation. It's got no rough patches—it's just smooth. But when that other statement is full of hedging, it's tentative. It's got so many rough patches, so many things to contribute to, things I want to add to, maybe push back at or push further onto. And that's how students talk to each other. When you put them in collaborative groups, they talk in tentative discourse, whereas teachers, we tend to talk in absolutes. So, students are always talking to each other like that. When we put them in collaborative groups, they're like, “Well, maybe we should try this. I'm wondering if this'll work. Hey, have we thought about this? I wonder if?” And it's so inviting to contribute to. Mike: That's fascinating. I'm going to move a little bit and start to focus on grouping. So, in the book, you looked really closely at the way that we group students for collaborative problem-solving and how that impacts the way students engage in a collaborative effort. And I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about the type of things that you were examining. Peter: OK. So, you don't have to spend a lot of time in classrooms before you see the two dominant paradigms for grouping. So, the first one we tend to see a lot at elementary school. So, that one is called “strategic grouping.” Strategic grouping is where the teacher has a goal, and then they're going to group their students to satisfy that goal. So, maybe my goal is to differentiate, so I'm going to make ability groups. Or maybe my goal is to increase productivity, so I'm going to make mixed-ability groups. Or maybe my goal is to just have peace and quiet, so I'm going to keep those certain students apart. Whatever my goal is, I'm going to create the groups to try to achieve that goal, recognizing that how students behave in the classroom has a lot to do with who they're partnered with. So that's strategic grouping. It is the dominant grouping paradigm we see in elementary school. Peter: By the time we get to high school, we tend to see more of teachers going, “Work with who you want.” This is called “self-selected groupings.” And this is when students are given the option to group themselves any way they want. And alert: They don't group themselves for academic reasons, they group themselves for social reasons. And I think every listener can relate to both of those forms of grouping. It turns out that both of those are highly ineffective at getting students to think. And ironically, for the exact same reason. We surveyed hundreds of students who were in these types of grouping settings: strategic grouping or self-selected groupings. We asked one question, “If you knew you were going to work in groups today, what is the likelihood you would offer an idea?” That was it. And 80 percent of students said that they were unlikely or highly unlikely to offer an idea, and that was the exact same, whether they were in strategic groupings or self-selected groupings. The data cut the same. Mike: That's amazing, Peter. Peter: Yeah, and it's for the same reason it turns out; that whether students were being grouped strategically or self-selected, they already knew what their role was that day. They knew what was expected of them. And for 80 percent of the students, their role is not to think. It's not to lead. Their role is to follow, right? And that's true whether they're grouping themselves socially, where they already know the social hierarchy of this group, or they're being grouped strategically. We interviewed hundreds of students. And after grade 3, every single student could tell us why they were in the group this teacher placed them in. They know. They know what you think of them. You're communicating very clearly what you think their abilities are through the way you group them, and then they live down to that expectation. So, that's what we were seeing in classrooms was that strategic grouping may be great at keeping the peace. And self-selected grouping may be fabulous for getting students to stop whining about collaboration. But neither of them was effective for getting students to think. In fact, they were quite the opposite. They were highly ineffective for getting students to think. Mike: So, I want to keep going with this. And I think one of the things that stood out for me as I was reading is, this notion that regardless of the rationale that a teacher might have for grouping, there's almost always a mismatch between what the teacher's goals are and what the student's goals are. I wonder if you could just unpack this and maybe explain this a bit more. Peter: So, when you do strategic grouping, do you really think the students are with the students that they want to be with? One of the things that we saw happening in elementary school was that strategic grouping is difficult. It takes a lot of effort to try to get the balance right. So, what we saw was teachers largely doing strategic grouping once a month. They would put students into a strategic group, and they would keep them in that group for the entire month. And the kids care a lot about who they're with, when you're going to be in a group for a month. And do you think they were happy with everybody that was in that group? If I'm going to be with a group of students for a month, I'd rather pick those students myself. So, they're not happy. You've created strategic groupings. And, by definition, a huge part of strategic grouping is keeping kids who want to be together away from each other. Peter: They're not happy with that. Self-selected groupings, the students are not grouping themselves for academic reasons. They're just grouping themselves for social reasons so that they can socialize, so they talk, so they can be off topic, and all of these things. And yes, they're not complaining about group work, but they're also not being productive. So, the students are happy. But do you think the teacher's happy? Do you think the teacher looks out across that room and goes, “Yeah, there were some good choices made there.” No, nobody's happy, right? If I'm grouping them strategically, that's not matching their goals. That's not matching their social goals. When they're grouping themselves in self-selected ways, that's matching their social goals but not matching my academic goals for them. So, there's always going to be this mismatch. The teacher, more often than not, has academic goals. The students, more often than not, have social goals. There are some overlaps, right? There are students who are like, “I'm not happy with this group. I know I'm not going to do well in this group. I'm not going to be productive.” And there are some teachers who are going, “I really need this student to come out of the shell, so I need to get them to socialize more.” But other than that, by and large, our goals as teachers are academic in nature. The goals as students are social in nature. Mike: I think one of the biggest takeaways from your work on grouping, for me at least, was the importance of using random groups. And I have to admit, when I read that there was a part of me thinking back to my days as a first-grade teacher that felt a little hesitant. As I read, I came to think about that differently. But I'm wondering if you can talk about why random groups matter, the kind of impact that they have on the collaborative experience and the learning experience for kids. Peter: Alright, so going back to the previous question. So, we have this mismatch. And we have also that 80 percent of students are not thinking; 80 percent of students are entering into that group, not prepared to offer an idea. So those are the two problems that we're trying to address here. So, random groups … random wasn't good enough. It had to be visibly random. The students had to see the randomness because when we first tried it, we said, “Here's your random groups.” They didn't believe we were being random. They just thought we were being strategic. So, it has to be visibly random, and it turns out it has to be frequent as well. About once every 45 to 75 minutes. See, when students are put into random groups, they don't know what their role is. So, we're solving this problem. They don't know what their role is. When we started doing visibly random groups frequently, within three weeks we were running that same survey. Peter: “If you know you're going to work in groups today, what is the likelihood you would offer an idea?” Remember the baseline data was that 80 percent of students said that they were unlikely or highly unlikely, and, all of a sudden, we have a hundred percent of students saying that they're likely or highly likely. That was one thing that it solved. It shifted this idea that students were now entering groups willing to offer an idea, and that's despite 50 percent of them saying, “It probably won't lead to a solution, but I'm going to offer an idea.” Now why is that? Because they don't know what their role is. So, right on the surface, what random groups does, is it shatters this idea of preconceived roles and then preconceived behaviors. So, now they enter the groups willing to offer an idea, willing to be a contributor, not thinking that their role is just to follow. But there's a time limit to this because within 45 to 75 minutes, they're going to start to fall into roles. Peter: In that first 45 minutes, the roles are constantly negotiated. They're dynamic. So, one student is being the leader, and the others are being the follower. And now, someone else is a leader, the others are following. Now everyone is following. They need some help from some external source. Now everyone is leading. We've got to resolve that. But there is all of this dynamicism and negotiation going on around the roles. But after 45 to 75 minutes, this sort of stabilizes and now you have sort of a leader and followers, and that's when we need to randomize again so that the roles are dynamic and that the students aren't falling into sort of predefined patterns of non-thinking behavior. Mike: I think this is fascinating because we've been doing some work internally at MLC around this idea of status or the way that … the stories that kids tell about one another or the labels that kids carry either from school systems or from the community that they come from, and how those things are subtle. They're unspoken, but they often play a role in classroom dynamics in who gets called on. What value kids place on a peer's idea if it is shared. What you're making me think is there's a direct line between this thing that we've been thinking about and what happens in small groups as well. Peter: Yeah, for sure. So, you mentioned status. I want to add to that identity and self-efficacy and so on and so forth. One of the interesting pieces of data that came out of the research into random groups was, we were interviewing students several weeks into this. And we were asking them questions around this, and the students were saying things like, “Oh, the teacher thinks we're all the same, otherwise they wouldn't do random groups. The teacher thinks we're all capable, otherwise they wouldn't do random groups.” So, what we're actually talking about here is that we're starting—just simply through random groups—to have a positive impact on student self-efficacy. One of the things that came out of this work, that I wrote about in a separate paper, was that we've known for a long time that student self-efficacy has a huge impact on student performance. But how do we increase, how do we improve student self-efficacy? Peter: There are a whole bunch of different ways. The work of Bandura on this is absolutely instrumental. But it comes down to a couple of things. From a classroom teacher perspective, the first thing, in order for a student to start on this journey from low self-efficacy to high self-efficacy, they have to encounter a teacher who believes in them. Except students don't listen to what we say. They listen to what we do. So, simply telling our students that we have confidence in them doesn't actually have much impact. It's how we show them that we have confidence in them. And it turns out that random groups actually have a huge impact on that. By doing the random groups, we're actually showing the kids that we believe in them and then they start to internalize this. So that's one thing. The work of Bandura about how we can start to shift student self-efficacy through mastery experiences, where they start to, for example, be successful at something. And that starts to have an impact that is amplified when students start to be successful in front of others, when they are the ones who are contributing in a small group. And that group is now successful. And that success is linked in some small or great part to your contributions; that self-efficacy is amplified because not only am I being successful, I'm being successful in a safe environment, but in front of others. Peter: Now, self-efficacy contributes to identity, and identity has an interesting relationship with status. And you mentioned status. So, self-efficacy is what I think of myself. Status is what others think of me. I can't control my status. I can't shift my status. Status is something that is bestowed on me by others. And, of course, it's affected by their interactions with me in collaborative spaces. So, how they get to see me operate is going to create a status for me, on me, by others. But the status gets to be really nicely evenly distributed in thinking classrooms when we're doing these random groups because everybody gets to be seen as capable. They all get to be someone who can be mathematical and someone who can contribute mathematically. Mike: I want to shift back for a moment to this idea of visibly random groups. This idea that for kids, they need to believe that it's not just a strategic grouping that I've called random for the sake of the moment. What are some of the ways that you've seen teachers visibly randomize their groups so that kids really could see the proof was right out there in front of them? Peter: So, we first started with just cards. So, we got 27 kids. We're going to use playing cards, we're going to have three aces, three 2S, three 3s, three 4s, and so on. We would just shuffle the deck, and the kids would come and take a card. And if you're a 4, you would go to the board that has a 4 on it. Or maybe that fourth 4 is there, so to speak. We learned a whole bunch of things. It has to be visible. And however way we do it, the randomization doesn't just tell them what group they're in, it tells them where to go. That's an efficiency thing. You don't want kids walking around the classroom looking for their partners and then spending 5 minutes deciding where they want to work. Take a card, you got a 7, you go to the 7 board. You got an ace, you go to the ace board. Peter: And that worked incredibly well. Some teachers already had Popsicle sticks in their classroom, so they started using those: Popsicle sticks with students' names. So, they would pull three Popsicle sticks and they would say, “OK, these students are together. These students are together.” At first, we didn't see any problems with that. That seemed to be pretty isomorphic … to using a playing card. Some teachers got frustrated with the cards because with a card, sometimes what happens is that they get ripped or torn or they don't come back. Or they come back, and they're sweaty or they're hot. And it's like, “OK, where were you keeping this card? I don't want to know. It's hot, it's dirty.” They got ink on it. The cards don't come back. The kids are swapping cards. And teachers were frustrated by this. So, they started using digital randomizers, things like Flippity and ClassDojo and Picker Wheel and Team Shake and Team Maker. Peter: There were tons of these digital randomizers, and they all work pretty much the same. But there was a bit of a concern that the students may not perceive the randomness as much in these methods. And you can amplify that by, for example, bringing in a fuzzy [die], a big one, and somebody gets to roll it. And if a 5 comes up, they get to come up and hit the randomized button five times. And now there's a greater perception of randomness that's happening. With Flippity, that turns out actually it'd be true. Turns out that the first randomization is not purely random, and the kids spot that pattern. And we thought, “OK, perfect. That's fine. As long as the students perceive it's random, that it is truly random, that the teacher isn't somehow hacking this so that they are able to impose their own bias into this space.” So, it's seemingly random, but not purely random. And everything was running fine until about six to eight months ago. I was spending a lot of time in classrooms. I think in the last 14 months I've been in 144 different classrooms, co-teaching or teaching. So, I was spending a lot of time in classrooms, and for efficiency's sake, a lot of these teachers were using digital randomizers. And then I noticed something. It had always been there, but I hadn't noticed it. This is the nature of research. It's also the nature of just being a fly on the wall, or someone who's observing a classroom or a teacher. There's so much to notice we can't notice it all. So, we notice the things that are obvious. The more time we spend in spaces, the more nuanced things we're able to notice. And about six to eight months ago, I noticed something that, like I said, has always been there, but I had never really noticed it. Peter: Teacher hits a randomized button, and all the students are standing there watching, waiting for the randomized groups to appear on the screen. And then somebody goes, “Ugh.” It's so small. Or somebody laughs. Or somebody's like, “Nooo.” And it's gone. It's in a moment, it's gone. Sometimes others snicker about it, but it's gone. It's a flash. And it's always been there, and you think it's not a big deal. Turns out it's a huge deal because this is a form of micro-bullying. This is what I call it, “micro-bullying.” Because when somebody goes, “Ugh,” everybody in the room knows who said it. And looking at the screen, they know who they said it about. And this student, themself, knows who said it, and they know that they're saying it about them. And what makes this so much worse than other overt forms of bullying is that they also are keenly aware that everybody in the room just witnessed and saw this happen, including the teacher. Peter: And it cuts deeply. And the only thing that makes bullying worse is when bullying happens in front of someone who's supposed to protect you, and they don't; not because we're evil, but because it's so short, it's so small, it's over in a flash. We don't really see the magnitude of this. But this has deep psychological effects and emotional effects on these students. Not just that they know that this person doesn't like them. But they know that everybody knows that they don't like them. And then what happens on the second day? The second day, whoever's got that student, that victimized student in their group, when the randomization happens, they also go, “Ugh,” because this has become acceptable now. This is normative. Within a week, this student might be completely ostracized. And it's just absolutely normal to sort of hate on this one student. Peter: It's just not worth it. It cuts too deeply. Now you can try to stop it. You can try to control it, but good luck, right? I've seen teachers try to say, “OK, that's it. You're not allowed to say anything when the randomization happens. You're not allowed to cheer, you're not allowed to grunt, you're not allowed to groan, you're not allowed to laugh. All you can do is go to your boards.” Then they hit the random, and immediately you hear someone go, “Ugh.” And they'll look at them, and the student will go, “What? That's how I breathe.” Or “I stubbed my toe where I thought of something funny.” It's virtually impossible to shut it down because it's such a minor thing. But seemingly minor. In about 50 percent of elementary classrooms that I'm in, where a teacher uses that digital randomizer, you don't hear it. But 50 percent you do. Almost 100 percent of high school classrooms I'm in you hear some sort of grunt or groan or complaint. Peter: It's not worth it. Just buy more cards. Go to the casino, get free cards. Go to the dollar store, get them cheap. It's just not worth it. Now, let's get back to the Popsicle stick one. It actually has the same effect. “I'm going to pull three names. I'm going to read out which three names there are, and I'm going to drop them there.” And somebody goes, “Ugh.” But why does this not happen with cards? It doesn't happen with cards because when you take that card, you don't know what group you're in. You don't know who else is in your group. All you know is where to go. You take that card, you don't know who else is in your group. There's no grunting, groaning, laughing, snickering. And then when you do get to the group, there might be someone there that you don't like working with. So, the student might go, “Ugh.” But now there's no audience to amplify this effect. And because there's no audience, more often than not, they don't bother going, “Ugh.” Go back to the cards, people. The digital randomizers are fast and efficient, but they're emotionally really traumatizing. Mike: I think that's a really subtle but important piece for people who are thinking about doing this for the first time. And I appreciate the way that you described the psychological impact on students and the way that using the cards engineers less of the audience than the randomizer [do]. Peter: Yeah, for sure. Mike: Well, let's shift a little bit and just talk about your recommendations for group size, particularly students in kindergarten through second grade as opposed to students in third grade through fifth grade. Can you talk about your recommendations and what are the things that led you to them? Peter: First of all, what led to it? It was just so clear, so obvious. The result was that groups of three were optimal. And that turned out to be true every setting, every grade. There are some caveats to that, and I'll talk about that in a minute. But groups of three were obvious. We saw this in the data almost immediately. Every time we had groups of three, we heard three voices. Every time we heard groups of four, we heard three voices. When we had groups of five, we heard two voices on task, two voices off task, and one voice was silent. Groups of three were just that sort of perfect, perfect group size. It took a long time to understand why. And the reason why comes from something called “complexity theory.” Complexity theory tells us that in order for a group to be productive, it has to have a balance between diversity and redundancy. Peter: So, redundancy is the things that are the same. We need redundancy. We need things like common language, common notation, common vocabulary, common knowledge. We need to have things in common in order for the collaboration to even start. But if all we have is redundancy, then the group is no better than the individual. We also have to have diversity. Diversity is what every individual brings to the group that's different. And the thing that happens is, when the group sizes get larger, the diversity goes up, but redundancy goes down. And that's bad. And when the group sizes get smaller, the redundancy goes up, but the diversity goes down. And that's bad. Groups of three seem to have this perfect balance of redundancy and diversity. It was just the perfect group size. And if you reflect on groups that you've done in your settings, whatever that setting was, you'll probably start to recognize that groups of three were always more effective than groups of four. Peter: But we learned some other things. We learned that in K–2, for example, groups of three were still optimal, but we had to start with groups of two. Why? Because very young children don't know how to collaborate yet. They come to school in kindergarten, they're still working in what we call “parallel,” which means that they'll happily stand side by side at a whiteboard with their own marker and work on their own things side by side. They're working in parallel. Eventually, we move them to a state that we call “polite turn-taking.” Polite turn-taking is we can have two students working at a whiteboard sharing one marker, but they're still working independently. So, “It's now your turn and you're working on your thing, and now it's my turn, I'm working on my thing.” Eventually, we get them to a state of collaboration. And collaboration is defined as “when what one student says or does affects what the other student says or does.” Peter: And now we have collaboration happening. Very young kids don't come to school naturally able to collaborate. I've been in kindergarten classrooms in October where half the groups are polite turn-taking, and half the groups are collaborating. It is possible to accelerate them toward that state. But I've also been in grade 2 classrooms in March where the students are still working in parallel or turn-taking. We need to work actively at improving the collaboration that's actually happening. Once collaboration starts to happen in those settings, we nurtured for a while and then we move to groups of three. So, I can have kindergartens by the end of the year working in groups of three, but I can't assume that grade 2s can do it at the beginning of the year. It has a lot to do with the explicit efforts that have been made to foster collaboration in the classroom. And having students sit side by side and pair desks does not foster collaboration. It fosters parallel play. Peter: So, we always say that “K–2, start with groups of two, see where their level of collaboration is, nurture that work on it, move toward groups of three.” The other setting that we had to start in groups of two were alternate ed settings. Not because the kids can't collaborate, but because they don't trust yet. They don't trust in the process in the educational setting. We have to nurture that. Once they start to trust in working in groups of two, we can move to groups of three. But the data was clear on this. So, if you have a classroom, and let's say you're teaching grade 6, and you don't have a perfect multiple of three, what do you do? You make some groups of two. So, rather than groups of four, make some groups of two. Keep those groups of two close to each other so that they may start to collaborate together. Peter: And that was one of the ironies of the research: If I make a group of four, it's a Dumpster fire. If I make two groups of two and put them close to each other, and they start to talk to each other, it works great. You start with groups of two. So, having some extra groups of two is handy if you're teaching in high school or any grade, to be honest. But let's say you have 27 students on your roster, but only 24 are there. There's going to be this temptation to make eight groups of three. Don't do it. Make nine groups, have a couple of groups of two. Because the minute you get up and running, someone's going to walk in late. And then when they walk in late, it's so much easier to plug them into a group of two than to have them waiting for another person to come along so that they can pair them or to make a group of four. Mike: Yeah, that makes sense. Before we close, Peter, I want to talk about two big ideas that I really wish I would've understood more clearly when I was still in the classroom. What I'm thinking about are the notion of crossing social boundaries and then also the concept of knowledge mobility. And I'm wondering if you could talk about each of them in turn and talk about how they relate to one another. Peter: Certainly. So, when we make our groups, when we make groups, groups are very discreet. I think this comes from that sort of strategic grouping, or even self-selected groupings where the groups are really separate from each other. There are very well-defined boundaries around this group, and everything that happens, happens inside that group, and nothing happens between groups. In fact, as teachers, we often encourage that, and we're like, “No, do your own work in your group. Don't be talking to the other groups.” Because the whole purpose of doing strategic groups is to keep certain kids away from each other, and that creates a very non-permeable boundary between the groups. But what if we can make these boundaries more porous, and so that knowledge actually starts to flow between the groups. This is what's called “knowledge mobility,” the idea that we don't actually want the knowledge to be fixed only inside of a group. Peter: The smartest person in the room is the room. We got to get that knowledge moving around the room. It's not groups, it's groups among groups. So, how can we get what one group is achieving and learning to move to another group that's maybe struggling? And this is called “knowledge mobility.” The easiest way to increase this is we have the students working at vertical whiteboards. Working at vertical whiteboards creates a space where passive knowledge mobility is really easy to do. It's really easy to look over your shoulder and see what another group is doing and go, “Oh, let's try that. They made a table of values. Let's make a table of values. Or they've done a graph, or they drew a picture” or whatever. “We'll steal an idea.” And that idea helps us move forward. And that passive can also lead to more active, where it's like, “I wonder what they're doing over there?” Peter: And then you go and talk to them, and the teacher can encourage this. And both of these things really help with mobilizing knowledge, and that's what we want. We don't want the only source of knowledge to be the teacher. Knowledge is everywhere. Let's get that moving around the room within groups, between groups, between students. And that's not to say that the students are copying. We're not encouraging copying. And if you set the environment up right, they don't copy. They're not going to copy. They'll steal an idea, “Oh, let's organize our stuff into a table of values,” and then it's back to their own board and working on that. And the other way that we help make these boundaries more porous is by breaking down the social barriers that exist within a classroom. All classrooms have social barriers. They could be gender, race. They could be status-based. Peter: There are so many things that make up the boundaries that exist within classrooms. There are these social structures that exist in schools. And one of the things that random groups does is it breaks down these social barriers because we're putting students together that wouldn't normally be together. And our data really reveals just how much that happens; that after three weeks, the students are coming in, they're socializing with different students, students that hadn't been part of their social structure before. They're sitting together outside of class. I see this at the university where students are coming in, they almost don't know each other at all. Or they're coming in small groups that are in the same class. They know each other from other courses, and within three, four weeks, I'm walking through the hallways at the university and I'm seeing them sitting together, working together, even having lunch together in structures that didn't exist on day one. There are so many social structures, social barriers in classrooms. And if we can just erode those barriers, those group structures are going to become more and more porous, and we're creating more community, and we're reducing the risk that exists within those classrooms. Mike: I think the other piece that jumps out for me is when I go back to this notion of one random grouping, a random grouping that shifts every 45 to 75 minutes. This idea of breaking those social boundaries—but also, really this idea that knowledge mobility is accelerated jumps out of those two practices. I can really see that in the structure and how that would encourage that kind of change. Peter: Yeah. And it encourages both passively and actively. Passive in the sense that students can look over the shoulder, active that they can talk to another group. But also passively from the teacher perspective, that random groups does a lot of that heavy lifting. But I can also encourage it actively when a group asks a question. Rather than answering their question, looking around the room going, “You should go talk to the sevens over there.” Or “We're done. What do we do next?” “Go talk to the fours. They know what's next.” That, sort of, “I as a teacher can be passive and let the random groups do a lot of the heavy lifting. But I can also be active and push knowledge around the room. By the way, I respond to students' questions.” Mike: Well, and I think what also strikes me is you're really distributing the authority mathematically to the kids as well. Peter: Yeah, so we're displacing status, we're increasing identity. We're doing all sorts of different things that are de-powering the classroom, decentralizing the classroom. Mike: Well, before we go, Peter, I'm wondering if there are any steps that you'd recommend to an educator who's listening. They want to start to dabble, or they want to take up some of the ideas that we've talked about. Where would you invite people to make a start? Peter: So, first of all, one of the things we found in our research was small change is no change. When you make small changes, the classroom as a system will resist that. So, go big. In building thinking classrooms, random groups is not a practice that gets enacted on its own. It's enacted with two other practices: thinking tasks, which is chapter one of my book, random groups, which is chapter two. And then, getting the students working at vertical whiteboards. These are transformational changes to the classroom. What we're doing in doing that is we're changing the environment in which we're asking students to behave differently. Asking students to behave differently in exactly the same environment that they behaved a certain way for five years already is almost impossible to do. If you want them to behave differently, if you want them to start to think, you're going to have to create an environment that is more conducive to thinking. Peter: So, that's part of it. The other thing is, don't do things by half measures. Don't start doing, “Well, we're going to do random groups on Mondays, but we're going to do strategic groups the rest of the days,” or something like this. Because what that communicates to students is that the randomness is something that you don't really value. Go big. We're doing random groups. We're always doing random groups. Have the courage. Yes, there's going to be some combinations that you're going to go, “Uh-oh.” And some of those are going to be really uh-oh combinations. But you're also going to have way more situations where you go and then it turns out to be amazing. So, have that courage. Go with the random groups and do it persistently and consistently. Because there is going to be resistance. The students are going to resist this thing because at least when you're being strategic, you're being thoughtful about it. Peter: But this feels like too much chance. And they start to attribute, they start to map their emotions around being placed in strategic groups, which were often for a month, into this setting. And what we need to do is, we need to show that this is not that by being consistent, doing it randomly, doing it frequently, so they start to realize that this is different. This is not the kind of grouping structures that have happened in the past. And do it. Do it consistently, persistently. Do it for at least 10 days before you start to really see and really reap those benefits. Mike: I think that's a really great place to stop. Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast, Peter. It really has been a pleasure chatting with you. Peter: Thanks so much. It's been a great conversation. Mike: This podcast is brought to you by The Math Learning Center and the Maier Math Foundation, dedicated to inspiring and enabling all individuals to discover and develop their mathematical confidence and ability. © 2024 The Math Learning Center | www.mathlearningcenter.org

Welcome to the August segment of Ask Us Anything! In these fun episodes of the Special Education for Beginners podcast, Jennifer and her monthly co-host, Paul, answer the questions you ask. This episode is packed with practical wisdom and tips to help you handle the challenges of the special education classroom.Today's Questions:Maggie from Michigan: "What elements do I need to make sure I have before setting up my classroom this fall? I'm an over-planner and I don't want to forget anything."Tina from Illinois: "What are some organizational tools to help stay on top of beginning of the year to-dos?"Talking Points:Episode Highlights:Navigating Classroom Setup: Creating a classroom layout that caters to student needs.The importance of having designated student-centered areas, like a sensory or calm-down corner.The value of visual schedules and how to implement them effectively.Maximizing Resources and Funding: Paul shares alternative methods to fund classroom essentials without breaking the bank. From DonorsChoose projects to district grants, Paraprofessional Collaboration: Jennifer highlights the importance of working closely with paraprofessionals. Emergency Preparedness: The discussion also touches on having emergency plans in placeOrganizational Tools: The importance of having a reliable planner, whether digital or paper.Utilizing checklists for IEP preparation and other critical tasks.Innovative methods for progress monitoring and data collection.Effective communication strategies with parents using apps like ClassDojo or Seesaw.Time Management Tips: Use the Pomodoro Technique as a strategy for managing time effectively in the classroom. Importance of setting priorities and sticking to them to avoid the overwhelm that often accompanies the start of the school year.Jennifer and Paul remind listeners that while being a special education teacher is challenging, it's also rewarding. They encourage educators to take care of themselves, plan effectively, and use the resources available to them.Resources Mentioned:Special Education Teacher ChecklistBullet JournalDon't Forget!Send in your questions for the next Ask Us AnythingWriting individual impact statements based on a student's unique disability and needs can be a big struggle AND a big time suck.! And in case you haven't noticed...extra time is not something you have a lot of. My IEP Impact Statements Growing Bundle will give you the resources you need to make writing impact statements a breeze. Sign up to be notified each time a new episode airs and get access to all the discounts!Don't forget to leave a review of the show!Follow JenniferInstagramTPT

This edWeb podcast is sponsored by ClassDojo.The webinar recording can be accessed here.Multilingual students are the fastest-growing student population in the United States. Are your school and district creating a supportive environment where these students and their families have the best opportunity to succeed? Join this edWeb podcast to hear from expert David Nungaray, Bilingual Consulting Partner from TNTP.In this practical session, you learn strategies to better engage and support your multilingual student and family community. Key topics covered include:Creating a welcoming school climate for multilingual families during back-to-school timeEffective year-round family engagement strategies and common pitfalls to avoidHow to monitor what's working through various methodsLeadership strategies to train and coach teachers in multilingual supportYou gain a wealth of real-world examples and useful resources. All listeners also receive an exclusive toolkit with customizable templates, activities, and more to kickstart your multilingual family initiatives. Additionally, you learn how the free ClassDojo platform can engage families across 130+ languages with two-way instant language translation and other multilingual support.Don't miss this opportunity to set your multilingual students and families up for success! This edWeb podcast is of interest to PreK-8 school and district leaders focused on family engagement, student support, multilingual/English learner programs, and educational equity.ClassDojoWhere classrooms become communitiesDisclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.Learn more about viewing live edWeb presentations and on-demand recordings, earning CE certificates, and using accessibility features.

Tod Francis is the founder of the world-renowned investment firm Shasta Ventures. He made early investments in companies like Canva, Tonal, ClassDojo, LiquidSpace, Task Rabbit, Mint and more. About 15 years ago Tod started on a journey to understand why and how great memories and connections are formed between kids and their parents. He surveyed over one thousand young adults, analyzed that data, and developed a framework for memory making and building meaningful connections. He has presented his findings to standing-room-only conferences, parents groups, and more! We talk about his findings on today's episode and what you can do right away to build lasting memories with your kids. Tod is a husband and the father of two adult children. In today's conversation we discussed:  Growing up without a father How losing a child motivated him to focus on every moment The research behind building meaningful connections The Pyramid of Connection and its different stages Tear-jerking stories from Tod's research What parents can do right now to change their thinking on memory making and connection — Where to find Tod Francis - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/todfrancis/ - Shasta Ventures: https://www.shasta.vc/bio/tod-francis/   Where to find Adam Fishman - Newsletter: https://startupdadpod.substack.com/ - Newsletter: https://www.fishmanafnewsletter.com - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamjfishman/ - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/startupdadpod/ — In this episode, we cover [1:49] Welcome [2:28] Tod's childhood [3:52] Growing up without a Dad [4:47] What is life like now? [6:28] Did child loss change your priorities as a dad? [8:49] Why did memory making matter to you as a dad? [12:24] The research behind connection [18:51] The Pyramid of Connection [33:56] How do parents get out of the bottom layer? [39:44] Making memories with adult kids [42:36] Parting thoughts [44:12] How are his sons involved in this project? — Show references: Survey Monkey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/ Johnson & Johnson: https://www.jnj.com/ Mint: https://mint.intuit.com/ Shasta Ventures: https://www.shasta.vc/ Canva: https://www.canva.com/ Tonal: https://www.tonal.com/ Class Dojo: https://www.classdojo.com/ Liquid Space: https://liquidspace.com/ Task Rabbit: https://www.taskrabbit.com/ — For sponsorship inquiries email: podcast@fishmana.com. For Startup Dad Merch: www.startupdadshop.com  Production support for Startup Dad is provided by Tommy Harron at http://www.armaziproductions.com/

Tod Francis is the founder of the world-renowned investment firm Shasta Ventures. He has made early investments in companies like Canva, Tonal, ClassDojo, LiquidSpace, Task Rabbit, Mint and more. About 15 years ago Tod started on a journey to understand why and how great memories and connections are formed between kids and their parents. He surveyed over one thousand young adults, analyzed that data, and developed a framework for memory making and building meaningful connections. He has presented his findings to standing-room-only conferences, parents groups, and more! We talk about his findings on today's episode and what you can do right away to build lasting memories with your kids. Tod is a husband and the father of two adult children. In today's conversation we discussed: * Growing up without a father* How losing a child motivated him to focus on every moment* The research behind building meaningful connections* The Pyramid of Connection and its different stages* Tear-jerking stories from Tod's research* What parents can do right now to change their thinking on memory making and connectionListen now on Apple, Spotify, Overcast and YouTube. —Where to find Tod Francis- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/todfrancis/- Shasta Ventures: https://www.shasta.vc/bio/tod-francis/Where to find Adam Fishman- Startup Dad Newsletter: startupdadpod.substack.com- FishmanAF Newsletter: www.FishmanAFNewsletter.com- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamjfishman/- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/startupdadpod/—In this episode, we cover[1:49] Welcome[2:28] Tod's childhood[3:52] Growing up without a Dad[4:47] What is life like now?[6:28] Did child loss change your priorities as a dad?[8:49] Why did memory making matter to you as a dad?[12:24] The research behind connection[18:51] The Pyramid of Connection[33:56] How do parents get out of the bottom layer?[39:44] Making memories with adult kids[42:36] Parting thoughts[44:12] How are his sons involved in this project?—Show references:Survey Monkey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/Johnson & Johnson: https://www.jnj.com/Mint: https://mint.intuit.com/Shasta Ventures: https://www.shasta.vc/Canva: https://www.canva.com/Tonal: https://www.tonal.com/Class Dojo: https://www.classdojo.com/Liquid Space: https://liquidspace.com/Task Rabbit: https://www.taskrabbit.com/—For sponsorship inquiries email: podcast@fishmana.com.For Startup Dad Merch: www.startupdadshop.com Production support for Startup Dad is provided by Tommy Harron at http://www.armaziproductions.com/ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit startupdadpod.substack.com

Sam Chaudhary, Co founder and CEO of ClassDojo, joins the show to talk aboutWhere early stage education is falling short, and Sam's experience building the largest community for teachers, parents, and kids to thrive in the educational system. The process Sam and his co founder Liam went through to unlock PM fit for ClassDojo.The jobs left to be solved in education, reflecting on the COVID home school experience, and how ClassDojo is expanding into the Virtual Learning Experience to solve the jobs that the classroom won't (or can't do well).

Hey Teachers! Welcome back to another episode of the Teacher Cast! We start by catching up on our weeks, as Adam discusses his Masters graduation and Hayley surprised her mother for her birthday! This episode, Hayley is in the hotseat as Adam gets to know Hayley even more! We chat about Hayley's schooling, her life in Canada, overcoming adversity and her hopes for teaching going forward! Stay tuned to the end for an important announcement

OTMM: Class Dojo This podcast has been graciously sponsored by JewishPodcasts.fm. There is much overhead to maintain this service so please help us continue our goal of helping Jewish lecturers become podcasters and support us with a donation: https://thechesedfund.com/jewishpodcasts/donate

Unlocking Community Engagement: How Parental Involvement Platforms and AI Transform Digital EducationDiscover how Parental Involvement in Digital Education is revolutionizing the way schools operate. In this episode of "AI for Teachers," we delve into the power of Community Engagement Platforms for Schools, discussing their potential to enhance Collaborative Learning with AI. We also explore how AI in Educational Communication fosters more profound connections between teachers, parents, and students. From apps like Seesaw, ClassDojo, Remind, Microsoft 365, and Google Workspace to the future of Teachers and Digital Learning Platforms, find out how to make the most of tech-enabled education.

Welcome to this week's show, where I'm so excited to be talking, bringing back to the show my friend, colleague, and my most trusted mentor when it comes to all things kids and tech and screens, Dr. Devorah Heitner. Today, we're going to be talking about such a pressing consideration for anyone raising a kid these days — what it means for today's generation of kids to grow up with very public lives and coming of age in a digital world where so many aspects of their lives are online and available for public consumption, not to mention that much of their important work of identity formation is being shaped by the media and technology they interact with. Devorah gets into all of this in her brand new and essential book for any parent, Growing Up in Public: Coming of Age in a Digital World. For this conversation, I asked Devorah to talk us through what I see as some of the more pressing issues for parents like us, including how to balance a child's right to privacy in their texts and online lives with valid concerns about online influences and engagement when that child is dealing with anxiety, depression or other mental health disorder, the impact of social media on kids who may already be struggling to fit in and find their people, and how many homework and grading apps used by schools may actually be undermining our kids development of executive function skills and creating additional stress for parents.   About my guest Dr. Devorah Heitner is the author of Growing Up in Public: Coming of Age in a Digital World and Screenwise: Helping Kids Thrive (and Survive) in Their Digital World. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and CNN Opinion. She has a Ph.D. in Media/Technology & Society from Northwestern University and has taught at DePaul and Northwestern. You can follow her on Substack at Devorah Heitner dot Substack dot com and on Instagram @devorahheitnerphd.   Things you'll learn How to navigate the transition from being highly involved in a children's tech life to respecting their privacy Why violating our kids' trust by reading their texts will drive them further apart from us What to track or monitor when your child is dealing with anxiety, depression, or other mental health disorders How engaging in social media may impact kids who are struggling to fit in and find their people Why social media can act as an intensifier for whatever kids are experiencing and how it causes a dip in self-esteem What sharenting is and how to navigate permissions, cleaning up past shares, and more Why apps like ClassDojo are particularly challenging for families with differently-wired students How grading apps often work against differently wired students   Resources mentioned Devorah Heitner's website Growing Up in Public: Coming of Age in a Digital World by Dr. Devorah Heitner Screenwise: Helping Kids Thrive (and Survive) in Their Digital World by Dr. Devorah Heitner Deborah Heitner's Substack: Mentoring Kids in a Connected World Phonewise Boot Camp The Big Tech Reset Masterclass with Devorah Heitner (Tilt Parenting-partnered event) Devorah's TEDx Talk, The Challenges of Raising a Digital Native At Your Wit's End with a Screen-Obsessed Kid? Read This (Devorah Heitner's house visit on NPR Lifekit) Devorah on Twitter Devorah on Instagram Dr. Devorah Heitner on Online Safety, Internet “Rabbit Holes,” and Differently Wired Kids (Tilt Parenting Podcast) Dr. Devorah Heitner on the Pros & Cons of “Managing” Our Kids' Screen Time (Tilt Parenting Podcast) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Are you tired of using the same old classroom strategies with not so great results? Then, you've come to the right place, my friend. On this episode, you'll hear how I use class dojo to level up my classroom management. You'll learn about how to use the Class Dojo point system to bring some refresh and life back into your classroom management plan. So, if you're like me and always up to try something new then this episode is for you. Put on those headphones, rest your feet and take a listen; you wont regret it.Show your support for the podcast:1. Signing up for our newsletter/Classroom Management Template Letter at https://teachersimpact.net2. Follow us on Instagram or Threads: @teachersimpactpodcast

Nikhil Basu Trivedi is Co-Founder & General Partner at Footwork, an early-stage focused venture firm investing its first fund. In his venture career, he has invested in the early rounds of several companies that have exited or are currently valued at over $1B, including Athelas, Canva, ClassDojo, Color Health, Frame.io, Imperfect Foods, Lattice, and The Farmer's Dog. Prior to Footwork, Nikhil was a Managing Director at Shasta Ventures, on the investment team at Insight Partners, and on the founding team at Artsy. In Today's Episode with Nikhil Basu Trivedi We Discuss: 1. From Summer Intern to Founding a Firm: The 13 Year Journey: How did Nikhil first make his way into venture as an intern at Insight Partners in NYC? What does Nikhil know now that he wishes he had known on his first day in venture? Why does Nikhil advise all young VCs to "not look at their business card"? Why does title not matter in venture? Should founders meet with Juniors as well as GPs and more senior people? 2. Small Funds Outperform Large Funds: Why does Nikhil believe that small funds outperform large funds? Why is AUM the biggest bullshit metric in VC? How does Nikhil advise seed stage founders who have offers from seed firms for smaller rounds at lower valuations and are weighing them against larger rounds with higher valuations from multi-stage funds? Does Nikhil believe that platform value-added services really provide any value? 3. The Art of Investing: What has been Nikhil's biggest investing win? How has it changed his approach to investing? How does Nikhil prioritize between people, traction, and market? What is most important? What has been Nikhil's biggest investing miss? How has that changed his approach? Does Nikhil believe the great founders are immediately obvious? Why is market size the single question that keeps Nikhil up the most? 4. The Dysfunctions of Venture Capital: What are the single biggest areas of misalignment between GP and LP? What do many GPs see and know well that LPs should know and see more of? What are the biggest ways that decision-making breaks down in a venture fund? Why does Nikhil believe that so much of the investment in AI is going to go up in flames?

How many EdTech tools do you really know? If the first things that come to mind are Google Classroom and Class Dojo… this episode of the educators 2 educators podcast is for you. Tune in for a quick quiz with host Carrie Conover to test your EdTech knowledge. In anticipation of the release of Carrie's latest course, EdTech School, get a sneak peek into the new resource helping teachers help students with new tools they've never heard of. Can you answer all of the questions in the EdTech quiz correctly?   Join EdTech School: https://www.carrieconover.com/learnwithcarrie educators 2 educators blog: https://www.educators2educators.com/

Lubo Smid je spoluzakladatel a CEO technologické společnosti STRV, která vyvíjí významné mobilní a webové aplikace pro klienty po celém světě, mezi něž patří Tinder, Microsoft, ClassDojo a Hallmark. Narozen 1. července 1988 v Dvoře Králové nad Labem, Smid má impozantní vzdělávací pozadí, včetně inženýrského titulu z Univerzity Hradec Králové a bakalářského titulu z Coventry University. Připojil se k STRV v roce 2012 jako COO, kde hrál klíčovou roli v expanzi společnosti na americký trh. V roce 2018 se stal CEO společnosti a od té doby je zodpovědný za růst klientského byznysu a prohlubování vztahů s klíčovými klienty. Kromě své profesní kariéry, Smid také organizuje akci Silicon Valley Insights, která vzdělává místní technologickou komunitu. Ačkoli žije v Praze, většinu času tráví cestováním mezi kancelářemi STRV v San Franciscu, Los Angeles a New Yorku. S Lubem jsme probrali networking, crossfit, budování brandu, hodnoty byznysu, STRV, vision pro a taky třeba tvorbu aplikace pro Arnolad Schwarzeneggera. Odkazy Luba:

How many EdTech tools do you really know? If the first things that come to mind are Google Classroom and Class Dojo… this episode of the educators 2 educators podcast is for you. Tune in for a quick quiz with host Carrie Conover to test your EdTech knowledge. In anticipation of the release of Carrie's latest course, EdTech School, get a sneak peek into the new resource helping teachers help students with new tools they've never heard of. Can you answer all of the questions in the EdTech quiz correctly?   Join EdTech School: https://www.carrieconover.com/learnwithcarrie educators 2 educators blog: https://www.educators2educators.com/

Follow me @samirkaji for my thoughts on the venture market, with a focus on the continued evolution of the VC landscape.We're joined by Stephanie Palmeri and Melody Koh, Partners at NextView Ventures. Nextview was founded in 2010 and recently raised $200MM for their new set of funds. Located in SF, NY, and Boston, the firm invests all across the US and has invested in over 170 companies at the seed-stage since its founding, including Devoted Health, Thread up, and Attentive. We had a great conversation about how NextView thinks about firm partnerships, what seed and pre-seed investing look like today, and what they believe it means to successfully work with founders. About Stephanie Palmeri:Stephanie is a Partner at NextView Ventures and is based in San Francisco. She focuses on the power of technology to positively transform how we live, work, learn, play, and care for our planet and each other. Her investments in the “Everyday Economy” have spanned many industries, including social commerce, circular retail, education, digital health, marketplaces, transportation, and finance. Previously, Stephanie was a partner at Uncork Capital, where she spent a decade investing in dozens of seed stage companies, including Poshmark ($POSH), Clever (aqu. by Kahoot!), Chariot (acq. by Ford), ClassDojo, Carrot Fertility, Hallow, Panorama Education, Phil, Wrapbook, and Wonderschool. Before venture investing, Stephanie worked as a technology consultant and marketer at Accenture, Estee Lauder, and several startups.Stephanie holds an MBA from Columbia Business School and a BS in Marketing and Management Information Systems, magna cum laude, from Villanova University.About Melody Koh:Melody is a Partner at NextView Ventures, based in its New York office. Prior to joining NextView, Melody was Head of Product at Blue Apron (NYSE: APRN). Melody joined Blue Apron as the first product hire when the company was 18 months old with 20 HQ employees. She helped scale the business through hyper-growth (25x in 3.5 years) and to its IPO.Previously, Melody was a Product Manager at Fab.com leading marketing & analytics products and the founder/CEO of a seed-funded wine subscription e-commerce service. Melody was also a venture investor at Time Warner's strategic VC group and was one of six inaugural members of First Round Capital's Product Co-op initiative. Melody began her career as a tech/media M&A investment banking analyst at Evercore Partners.Melody holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School and the University of Virginia.In this episode. we discuss:(01:54) Why NextView strives to not be a pack of lone wolves(03:35) How the carry economics of the firm drives a deeper partnership(06:57) Building firm culture with so many locations(11:21) How NextView uses strategic in-person time to remain connected(13:42) The benefits to founders by being more strategic in their investments(16:33) How the NextView model performed in the different market conditions over the last few years(21:04) What the moving goalposts of the market has meant to founders and investors(25:27) The advice they are giving founders to get through this difficult funding cycle(29:18) Why NextView sees themselves as invited guests and why that translates to happy founders(34:31) How they think about the growth and evolution of NextViewI'd love to know what you took away from this conversation with Stephanie and Melody. Follow me @SamirKaji and give me your insights and questions with the hashtag #ventureunlocked. If you'd like to be considered as a guest or have someone you'd like to hear from (GP or LP), drop me a direct message on Twitter.Podcast Production support provided by Agent Bee This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ventureunlocked.substack.com

This week, Natasha Mascarenhas interviewed Sam Chaudhary, the founder of ClassDojo, and Chris Farmer, the founder and CEO of SignalFire, a venture firm that recently announced a $900 million fund to back tech startups. This interview is structured a bit differently as it was actually recorded as a TechCrunch Live session, our weekly show that focuses on helping people start better venture backed businesses.We'll hear from the trio about:What an outsider advantage looks like in startups, per a top investorWhy ClassDojo doesn't see itself as an edtech companyHow Sam landed early traction with a difficult-to-capture consumerHow both Sam and Chris are thinking through the AI question brewing in every officeIf you want to check out the full video of today's conversation, including a round of Pitch Practice hosted by Matt Burns, head to our YouTube channel and stay tuned for more TechCrunch Live!As always, the full Equity crew will be back on Friday, but you can keep up with us in the meantime @EquityPod.For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity's Simplecast website. Equity drops at 7:00 a.m. PT every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotifyand all the casts. TechCrunch also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews founders, one that details how our stories come together and more!

Today's interview was led by TechCrunch Senior Reporter and edtech expert, Natasha Mascarenhas. Natasha spoke to Sam Chaudhary, the founder of ClassDojo, who spent eight years building the edtech consumer app that focuses on student classrooms, before introducing a formal revenue model. Joining Sam is his investor Chris Farmer, the founder and CEO of SignalFire, a seed-stage venture firm that recently raised $900 million across four new funds.Sam and Chris spoke to us about:How Sam played the long-game in edtech and what he'd do differently if he had to do it all over againWhy SignalFire chose to navigate the edtech space, specifically the connection between kids and consumersHow Chris sees investing in companies that aren't rushing to monetizeThe "outsider advantage" and its tension with insider knowledgeWe closed out the show with a new batch of founders for Pitch Practice. And as always, if you want to check out the full video of today's conversation, head to our YouTube channel and stay tuned for more TechCrunch Live!The TechCrunch Live Podcast drops at 6:00 a.m. PT every Monday, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast,Spotify and all the casts.

Finding founders with true visions that have a real plan to execute those visions is rare. So rare that those founders are actually called unicorns. But finding and supporting those founders takes a lot of patience and skill. Today's guest has both of those traits, Stephanie Palmeri, Partner at NextView Ventures, has been working at the top of the venture industry for more than a decade and has backed impressive founders.About Stephanie Palmeri:Stephanie Palmeri is a Partner at NextView Ventures and is based in San Francisco. She loves supporting founders who share a North Star of building exceptional user-centric experiences for individuals, families, workers, and communities. Her investments in the Everyday Economy have spanned many industries, including social commerce, circular retail, education, digital health, marketplaces, transportation, and finance. Previously, Stephanie was a partner at Uncork Capital, where she spent a decade investing in dozens of seed-stage companies, including Poshmark ($POSH), Clever (acq. by Kahoot!), Chariot (acq. by Ford), ClassDojo, Carrot Fertility, Hallow, Panorama Education, Phil, Wrapbook, and Wonderschool. Before venture investing, Stephanie worked as a technology consultant and marketer at Accenture, Estee Lauder, and several startups.Stephanie holds an MBA from Columbia Business School and a BS from Villanova University.In this episode we discuss:(0:01:15) News roundup with John Ruffolo(0:22:44) How Stephanie ended up in the venture and startup world(0:27:32) Why she chose NextView instead of creating a new fund(0:29:36) What appeals to Stephanie about investing in Canadian Startups(0:32:17) Becoming comfortable investing in the Canadian ecosystem(0:33:28) The biggest changes to early-stage investing in the last decade(0:36:29) The process of joining NextView(0:41:22) NextView's current focus and plans for its new $200M fund(0:44:18) Starting NextView's accelerator program(0:47:29) Founders deciding to have an early exit(0:50:08) Deciding to become a certified coach to help her founders(0:53:50) What makes a great board member(0:58:39) How she advises as an LP and angel investor(1:00:09) Who should contact her and what she invest inFast Favorites:*

Learn more in our full resource: https://smartsocial.com/post/classdojoLearn from more SmartSocial resources: Join our free newsletter for parents and educators: https://smartsocial.com/newsletter/Register for a free online Parent Night to learn the hidden safety features on popular apps: https://smartsocial.com/social-media-webinar/Become a Smart Social VIP (Very Informed Parents) Member and unlock 30+ workshops (learn online safety and how to Shine Online™): https://learn.smartsocial.com/Download the free Smart Social app: https://smartsocial.com/appLearn the top 150 popular teen apps: https://smartsocial.com/app-guide-parents-teachers/View the top parental control software: https://smartsocial.com/parental-control-software/Learn the latest Teen Slang, Emojis & Hashtags: https://smartsocial.com/teen-slang-emojis-hashtags-list/Get ideas for offline activities for your students: https://smartsocial.com/offline-activities-reduce-screentime/Get Educational Online Activity ideas for your students: https://smartsocial.com/online-activitiesUltimate Guide To Child Sex Trafficking, Human Trafficking, Sextortion, & Online Enticement

En este episodio me tomo un café con Álvaro Campoy, miembro del equipo de Class Dojo, plataforma de gestión escolar para motivar al alumnado y contactar con las familias #especialEdTech

Niko Bonatsos is a Managing Director at General Catalyst where he invests in early-stage companies. Niko focuses his investment strategy on finding first-time technology founders with strong product instincts, a robust appetite for learning, and a desire to create innovations with the potential to benefit millions. Some of his portfolio companies include Discord, Snap (NYSE: SNAP), Wag! (NASDAQ: PET), Audius, ClassDojo, Dubsmash (Acquired by Reddit), Remote, and more.   You can learn more about:  1. What to look for when investing in Gen Z founders  2. VC career journey from joining a fund to becoming the Managing Director  3. How to invest in unicorns like Discord and Snap  ===================== YouTube: @GraceGongCEO Newsletter: @SmartVenture LinkedIn: @GraceGong TikTok: @GraceGongCEO IG: @GraceGongCEO Twitter: @GraceGongGG Join the SVP fam with your host Grace Gong. In each episode, we are going to have conversations with some of the top investors, super star founders, as well as well known tech executives in the silicon valley. We will have a coffee chat with them to learn their ways of thinking and actionable tips on how to build or invest in a successful company. ===================== Brought to you by: https://momentonft.com  

What tools are available to parents and caregivers who do not speak the same language as their child's teacher? Ernesto Zepeda shares resources that your school can provide to facilitate better communication, tips and tricks for using technology to help translate important messages, and more. Series: "Education Channel" [Education] [Show ID: 38113]

What tools are available to parents and caregivers who do not speak the same language as their child's teacher? Ernesto Zepeda shares resources that your school can provide to facilitate better communication, tips and tricks for using technology to help translate important messages, and more. Series: "Education Channel" [Education] [Show ID: 38113]

What tools are available to parents and caregivers who do not speak the same language as their child's teacher? Ernesto Zepeda shares resources that your school can provide to facilitate better communication, tips and tricks for using technology to help translate important messages, and more. Series: "Education Channel" [Education] [Show ID: 38113]

What tools are available to parents and caregivers who do not speak the same language as their child's teacher? Ernesto Zepeda shares resources that your school can provide to facilitate better communication, tips and tricks for using technology to help translate important messages, and more. Series: "Education Channel" [Education] [Show ID: 38113]

Toni Rose is joined by Olivia Hotchkin to talk about how she implements MCP in her Kindergarten (and now 1st grade) classes, diving deep on the routines and procedures she uses to model and scaffold for students. Show Notes Edpuzzle (https://edpuzzle.com/) (and MCP's Edpuzzle Tutorial (https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1z8sWGDotmEoG82ZK_5alaANSDutj0dxJ6Bf2zAfnqSw/edit#slide=id.gedfc626ab8_0_167)) Michael Heggerty Phonemic Awareness (https://heggerty.org/curriculum/kindergarten/) Hubbard's Cupboard (http://www.hubbardscupboard.org/) Class Dojo (https://www.classdojo.com/) Plicker (https://get.plickers.com/) Email Olivia at olivia.hotchkin@concordschools.net (mailto:olivia.hotchkin@concordschools.net) Contact us, follow us online, and learn more: Email us questions and feedback at: podcast@modernclassrooms.org (mailto:podcast@modernclassrooms.org) Send us an audio note (https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSffmqSsaaU7M0MTXowApIOt-wace2tD6LPct73oEQOlaFp4vQ/viewform?usp=sf_link) and we'll include it on a future episode! Modern Classrooms: @modernclassproj (https://twitter.com/modernclassproj) on Twitter and facebook.com/modernclassproj (https://www.facebook.com/modernclassproj) (remember you can tweet us questions by using the hashtag #askMCP) Kareem: @kareemfarah23 (https://twitter.com/kareemfarah23) on Twitter Toni Rose: @classroomflex (https://twitter.com/classroomflex) on Twitter and Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/classroomflex/?hl=en) The Modern Classroom Project (https://www.modernclassrooms.org) Modern Classrooms Online Course (https://learn.modernclassrooms.org) Take our free online course, or sign up for our mentorship program to receive personalized guidance from a Modern Classrooms mentor as you implement your own modern classroom! The Modern Classrooms Podcast is edited by Zach Diamond: @zpdiamond (https://twitter.com/zpdiamond) on Twitter and Learning to Teach (https://www.learningtoteach.co/)

ClassDojo quietly became the world's biggest edtech company, now in 95% of US K-8 schools and with a billion-dollar+ valuation. Now it's building an educational metaverse where teachers and developers can turn lesson plans into games. ClassDojo's co-founders CEO Sam Chaudhary and President Liam Don join PressClub to discuss what schools can learn from gaming, the future of remote learning, and how not to turn kids into robots.Listen in to learn about:What Minecraft and Roblox get wrongHow play lets kids fail safely The need for a new third-space since kids aren't allowed to roamHow to distinguish good and bad screentimeWhy bureaucratic schools have broken incentive systemsHow to inspire uniqueness in children instead of conformityWhy the classroom must become a developer platformThis PressClub will make you want to go back to schoolSubscribe to PressClub at http://constine.club/. This podcast is recorded live on Josh Constine's PressClub on Clubhouse, Thursdays at 4pm PT. PressClub is Clubhouse's first show, where the big names in tech discuss the big ideas. It's hosted by Josh Constine, an investor at early-stage venture fund SignalFire and the former Editor-At-Large of TechCrunch. PressClub is a relaxed venue where luminaries can share their stories, passions, thoughts on trends, and visions of the future. Past guests on PressClub include the founders of Facebook, Instagram, Slack, Shopify, Spotify, Substack, WordPress, Patreon, and more. Thanks for being part of our futurist community!

On this edition of Parallax Views, Project Censored' Nolan Hidon returns to the program alongside the Media Freedom Foundation's Allison Butler to discuss their recent USA Today article "Strangers are spying on your child. And schools are paying them to do it". Since the pandemic, big tech hardware and software has become even more ubiquitous in schools across the United States. Is there a downside to this alliance between the American education system and big tech companies? Nolan Higdon and Allison Butler argue that big tech's latest ventures in the classroom violate students' right to privacy and stifle their learning environments. In fact, they go so far as to invoke George Orwell's 1984 in addressing the issues of big tech in the classroom. Among the topics we'll be discussing are: companies and software such as  Turnitin, ClassDojo, Illuminate Education and G Suite for Education; the effects of big tech surveillance and the potential for student self-censorship in the classroom; data breaches in schools; big tech surveillance in the classroom's growth and its coinciding with the renewed issues around book banning; the difficult in measuring what the possible negative impacts of big tech's influence in the classroom will be going forward; and much, much more!

Nikhil Basu Trivedi is the Co-Founder & General Partner at Footwork, an early-stage focused venture capital firm investing its first $175M fund. Footwork leads and co-leads Series A and Seed rounds, in companies with early signs of product-market fit, focusing on consumer technology and the consumerization of enterprise technology. Before Footwork, Nikhil was Managing Director at Shasta Ventures, a boutique, early-stage venture capital firm in Silicon Valley investing in consumer and enterprise technology startups. Nikhil invested in the likes of Canva, Hinge and ClassDojo. Download the Callin app for iOS and Android to listen to this podcast live, call in, and more! Also available at callin.com

On the podcast we talk with Mike about building a principled, mission driven app, keeping product development focused on the right customers, and how ClassDojo scaled to tens of millions of downloads without a marketing budget.Our guest today is Mike Overell, Revenue Lead at ClassDojo. Having founded his own company as well as working at McKinsey and Lyft, Mike is now using that experience to help every kid on earth get an education they love with ClassDojo. Mike also invests in and helps foreign founders crack the US as co-founder of investment collective Antipodes.In this episode, you'll learn: How ClassDojo reached 50M users with zero marketing spend Tips for setting up the right paywall for your app How to monetize your app without impeding growth ClassDojo's user-led growth strategy Mike Overell's Links Follow Mike on Twitter ClassDojo's website Follow ClassDojo on Twitter ClassDojo's jobs page Mike's LinkedIn page Follow us on Twitter: David Barnard Jacob Eiting RevenueCat Sub Club

In this episode, Tabreez and Jeffrey discuss mission driven tech, the entrepreneurial journey, how people interact with money, and much more… Watch this episode on YouTube Learn more: Tabreez Instagram, Twitter Devoted Health Long-Term Stock Echange (LTSE) Kiva.org Watsi.org Tabreez: Greetings everyone! I'm ethnically Indian with a family from east Africa and a Persian name. I grew up first in Brazil and then moved around various cities in the Midwest before settling in the San Francisco bay area before college at Berkeley. I've always seen money and business as energy to create and serve a future where all beings can thrive and be fulfilled. I love having the backs of amazing humans who are master artisans and builders of this kind of future. In the last decade, I've become increasingly fascinated with the relationship between our inner world and what we manifest in the world around us. Amongst many identities, I am also a three-time entrepreneur and technology start-up investor. We co-founded Uprising to invest in and radically support gifted technology entrepreneurs who see their companies as vehicles to serve the whole. I'm particularly drawn to heart centered, embodied teams with “goosebumpy” missions that not only address big problems and the systems that created them, but who also understand the significance of simultaneously transmuting the stories, culture, and consciousness from which those systems arise. Some of the many real life superheroes we have backed include the teams behind Devoted Health, Long Term Stock Exchange (LTSE), Lyft, Calm, Braintrust, ClassDojo, Virta Health, Good Eggs, Landit, SV Academy, and Change.org.I was also lucky to be a founding board member and funder at Kiva.org where I served for 11 years. The Uprising Crew has also helped catalyze a number of other initiatives including breakthrough treatments for Autism and Type I Diabetes, the Palo Alto Longevity Prize, and funding for several ground breaking non-profits like Watsi.org and CareMessage.

Roger Dickey is the Co-Founder of MADE. Roger is a serial entrepreneur & active angel investor based in San Francisco. Roger's first company was an AirBnB for tutoring started in Austin in 2006.He entered the games industry in 2007 with a Facebook app startup, launching 19 apps with the largest generating 300M+ page views per month. After an acquisition by Zynga, Roger went on to found Mafia Wars (100M users), FishVille (35M users), and 5 other titles in his 3 years there. Roger served as an international product team advisor for Zynga helping the company grow its games in India, Japan, and China. Since leaving Zynga, Roger has launched Gigster, a marketplace for software development services. Alongside his work at Zynga, Roger began advising & investing in bay-area startups in 2010. His investments include Docker, Addepar, iCracked, OpenGov, ClassDojo, and Wanelo. Advisory roles include Formation 8, Nest, OpenDoor, and The Thiel Fellowship. In this episode, we talked about: Made Renovation and how it serves people Made Renovation's satisfied customers Roger's team and system Their all-in-one renovation system Overcoming market risks His career as a CEO and Co-founder in Gigster What drove Roger to start Gigster Founding Mafia Wars

On this episode of the EdTech Startup Show, my guest is Chrisman Frank, CEO and co-founder of Synthesis School. Synthesis is an enrichment club that teaches complex problem-solving and decision-making for kids 7 to 14 through online team games. Chrisman's cofounder Josh Dahn developed the Synthesis concept while running Ad Astra, a small lab school he built for Elon Musk on the SpaceX campus. Before Synthesis, Chrisman was engineer #1 at ClassDojo, a K-12 network that reaches ~30 million teachers, students, and families every month. Connect with Chrisman on Twitter @chrismanfrank and read his essays at www.ChrismanFrank.com. Learn more about EdTech Startup Show host Gerard Dawson at www.GerardDawson.com, or find the podcast on your favorite podcast player here: https://linktr.ee/gerarddawson.

In this episode: Chrisman Frank, cofounder and CEO of Synthesis, formerly engineer #1 at ClassDojo, and pushing the boundary with Josh Dahn and Elon Musk to push education into solving for the unknown join the Teacher's Lounge to discuss gamification in education, the Synthesis school, and the next steps American education needs to take to move past the factory model. Visit Synthesis.is to learn more about their program. For the full video interview and other great education content, head over to www.TheChalkboardReview.com! Chalkboard Review, 2021.

Chrisman Frank is the co-founder and CEO of Synthesis, an enrichment club that teaches complex problem-solving and decision-making for kids 7 to 14 through online team games. His co-founder Josh Dahn developed the Synthesis concept while running Ad Astra, a small lab school he built for Elon Musk on the SpaceX campus. Before Synthesis, Chrisman was engineer #1 at ClassDojo, a K-12 network that reaches ~30 million teachers, students, and families every month. Key Takeaways: 00:18 Why Children are the BEST 03:21 Elevator Pitch for Synthesis School 15:29 The Impact of Covid in Online Learning 20:13 Learning Through a Game Design 33:25 Synthesis and Jiu Jitsu Quotes: “Kids crave complexity.” “Complex problems don't have right or wrong answers.” “Continue innovating. Give kids these unbounded complex problems, let them practice solving that and you learn the kind of meta skill of solving problems.” “The motto at Synthesis is Embrace the Chaos.” “I don't think the world is going to change less for our kids, when they grow up. I think it's going to change faster. The future will belong to people who are most rapidly able to adapt to change.” Social Links: Website - https://chrismanfrank.com/ Twitter - https://twitter.com/chrismanfrank LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-frank-41b0743a/ Synthesis School: Website - https://www.synthesis.is/

May 7 2021 - Episode 48The Ignite EdTech Podcast with @mrkempnz1. Introduction2. Question for you - Getting back to face to face consistency - what excites you?3. EdTech Tool of the Week - Class Dojo4. EdTech Tip of the Week - On-going and Sustained Educator Professional Learning5. Interview with Will Deyamport6. Win this weeks prize (BeeBot Robot) by going to bit.ly/edtechwin and completing the short form (Competition ends 9am SGT on Wednesday 12 May).7. Subscribe, Rate and ShareIf you have a question that you want answered on the podcast please emailinfo@igniteedtech.comConnect with Mark Quinn here or via email markquinn9129@gmail.com - Make a Difference Podcast (Mark Quinn)Links from PodcastWill Deyamport on TwitterWill's PodcastThe EduPreneur DocumentaryDr Catlin Tucker's Books

Schools are doing their best all over the nation to open safely and responsibly for their students. Some schools are opening entirely in person, while others are opening using distance learning. Distance learning is the use of technology, such as Google Classroom, Seesaw, Schoology, Class Dojo, Zoom, and many more platforms to teach students remotely. Another model is the hybrid model, where schools combine these two methods in a unique way. Today we're going to be focusing on distance learning, and ways to encourage best practices for all involved. How can teachers make their workload easier? How can teachers attract more engagement from their students? How can teachers make things easier for parents or guardians trying to help their students or students who are trying to do it alone? --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/highedpod/support

New Episode — In the final installment of the How the Pandemic Impacts K-12 Education series, I am joined by Charmae Damper, a 2nd grade educator in Washington, D.C. On this episode, we discuss urban education, charter schools, ClassDojo, teacher burnout, employee morale, CDC school recommendations, and much more. ————————————————— The Black Scholars Podcast has a new Instagram page (@blackscholarspodcast) and a new Facebook page. Please follow and like.    Shop Black Scholars Clothing™ with promo code SCHOLARS for 15 percent off. Thank you for your support. ___________________________ The Black Scholars Podcast is now available on YouTube. Please subscribe. Also, join The Black Scholars community on Facebook where you can join the private "The Black Scholars Tribe." My book, Becoming an Effective Black Educator: A Manifesto is available as an e-book or paperback via Kindle and Amazon. Thank you for being a part of the community. Please tell your colleagues about the show, subscribe to the show, and leave a review. ————————————————— All e-mail inquiries should be sent to theblackscholarspodcast@gmail.com. 1. Subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Google Play, or Spotify. 2. Leave a review via Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Google Play, or Spotify. 3. Share the podcast with social media, friends, and colleagues. 4. Subscribe to the YouTube channel. Turn on notifications. 5. Support the show via Patreon (donate anywhere from $1 to $100). To help the growth of the show, develop future professional development events, a nationwide conference, seminars and more, please support us. Your contribution will be rewarded with early access to new content, free merchandise, exclusive promo codes to Black Scholars Clothing™, consulting services, advertisement spots, and more. Thank you for being a part of the tribe. You are appreciated. ————————————————

It's June, and schools across the country have dismissed kids from their Zoom-fueled trances for a summer of bothering parents trying to work from home. Given the prominent (and unexpected) role tech played in school this year for millions of kids, what better time for The Dream Job Podcast to focus on education, and the promises (and perils) of EdTech?After tackling how tech failed Kent and Onnie's youth, Kent's rough-and-tumble education in Oklahoma, and whether Oregon Trail was actually a good game (or just better than the other available activities at school), Kent and Onnie are joined by the one-and-only Tom Pryor, Head of Product at Class Dojo, an EdTech startup that connects teachers with students and parents to build amazing classroom communities. This conversation was recorded prior to COVID, before companies like Tom's grew 100s of percent to help schools adapt to a new normal of remote learning. Join us as we talk about Tom's affinity for clever Halloween costumes, his role as Head of Product and what that actually means, how to think about balancing impact and scale, how to maintain optimism even in challenging sectors like education, and the importance of balancing community, especially when you have your dream job. #backtoworkLinks:Tom's InstagramClass DojoMavis BeaconKhan AcademyHarvard's Grant StudyMillennials are lonelyPlay Oregon Trail

In this episode of the PE Geek podcast we speak with Kyle Bragg about his journey to technology in the classroom. Topics covered include: https://www.thepespecialist.com/tv/  (Ben Landers)https://www.cbhpe.org/ (Projector ideas/GIFs from Becky and Mark Foellmer)https://www.physeddepot.com/plickers-magnets-plagnets.html  (Plickers or Plicker Magnets for assessments) from Mike Ginicolahttps://www.classdojo.com/  (Class Dojo, app to keep parents informed, share videos with them)https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bam-video-delay/id517673842  (Bam Video Delay for an iPad/iPhone allowing students to observe themselves performing a skill

When is the last time you witnessed something so random and delightful in a product that you had to tell someone about it? Think back to a time you shared that kind of excitement with your colleague over a software product. This week on Product Love, I talked to Niels Hoven about those moments. Previously, Niels did Product at ClassDojo, and was the VP of Product Development at Pocket Gems. Currently, he's a product manager at Cloudflare. On this week's episode, Niels shares his experiences as a pro

While getting students interested in math can be a challenge for teachers, TenMarks has found a fun – and timely – way to get kids buzzing about numbers. Drawing on students' interest in sports and the excitement of the annual March Madness basketball tournament, the Math Madness contest is a great way to get kids genuinely excited about math! Through a little friendly competition, students have fun, win prizes and gain mastery in math. However, it's not just about the cool prizes. Participating in Math Madness will spur student motivation and engagement like never before, resulting in significantly improved math confidence. Best of all, there's no reason to worry about students struggling while competing on their own during Math Madness. TenMarks assignments provide individualized practice through a variety of tools such as hints and videos, all of which are designed to help students persevere and ultimately master challenging math problems. The Math Madness contest, now in its fifth year, has helped thousands of students strengthen their math skills. In 2015, students answered millions of questions with over 84 percent accuracy! Math Madness has amazing prizes such as Amazon Gift Cards and Amazon Fire Tablets that'll help motivate students in the beginning. However, a week into the madness and you'll see an enthusiasm for math you never saw coming! About TenMarks and “With Math I Can”Developed under the leadership of Amazon Education and TenMarks, “With Math I Can” challenges the nation's more than three million teachers and their students to take the pledge to replace the notion of “I'm not good at math” with “I am working to get better at math” by embracing a “growth mindset,” the belief that abilities and intelligence can be developed, which leads to an increased focus on the process of learning rather than the outcome. Supporters of the “With Math I Can” movement include Stanford University Professor of Mathematics Education Jo Boaler, Character Lab, Common Sense Education, National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM), Stanford University's Project for Education Research that Scales (PERTS), ClassDoJo, ASCD, and Teaching Channel. Teachers and students can learn more, watch a video, access resources, and take the pledge at http://www.withmathican.org/ (www.withmathican.org). Links of interesthttps://www.tenmarks.com/math-madness (https://www.tenmarks.com/math-madness) http://blog.tenmarks.com/2016/03/its-not-just-about-winning-prizes-unexpected-benefits-of-math-madness.html ( http://blog.tenmarks.com/2016/03/its-not-just-about-winning-prizes-unexpected-benefits-of-math-madness.html) Twitter (@WithMathICan) – https://twitter.com/WithMathICan (https://twitter.com/WithMathICan) Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/WithMathICan (https://www.facebook.com/WithMathICan) Teacher Resourceshttps://www.tenmarks.com/prepare-instruct (https://www.tenmarks.com/prepare-instruct) About Our GuestMeera Vaidyanathan is an education leader who is passionate about integrating technology into education to bring innovation to the student learning experience. At TenMarks, Meera oversees the development of curriculum products and leads the effort to ensure that TenMarks delivers solutions that place the teacher at the center of instruction and provide students with work that is personalized to their individual learning pathways. Throughout her career in the education industry, Meera has held several leadership roles in content and product management, business development, and marketing. Prior to TenMarks, Meera served as the VP of Content and Product Management at HotChalk where she led HotChalk's growth and development strategy for K-12. In her roles at CK-12, McGraw-Hill Education, Oxford University Press, and Princeton University Press, Meera spearheaded the acquisition and creation of content for a wide range of K-12 educational materials and encyclopedias (online and print). She has an MBA from...

In this episode, Mindy and Jonathan review a number of online sites that are aimed at helping improve classroom communication with parents. Remind, Class Dojo, Fresh Grade, Bloomz and more were discussed. The new Google Sites is here and there is some new follow up for Skype & YouTube. This week's spicy tech nuggets include asessment apps, a book, and an educational YouTube channel for elementary kids. Email the show, or send a voice memo to podcast@gwaea.org, and see show notes with all the links from this episode at www.dlgwaea.org/podcast. You can follow Jonathan (@jonathanwylie) and Mindy (@TeamCairney) on Twitter, and see all the tweets from the Grant Wood AEA Digital Learning Team at @DLGWAEA. If you enjoy the show and would like to leave us a review on iTunes or Google Play, we would very much appreciate that!

This story is part of New Tech City's series on education and technology. Do you remember how many gold stars you got in second grade? Can you recall how many times you were sent to the principal's office, how many times you handed in your homework late, how many days passed between getting called out for talking in class?  Today, one out of every two U.S. schools has a teacher tracking that kind of data with one extremely popular app, ClassDojo, the company says. It's got points, demerits, and cute avatars at least one seven-year-old we know can't get enough of: Manoush's son Kai had a good day, according to ClassDojo. (Screenshot/Manoush Zomorodi) It's really, really popular — so popular that a late 2014 article by Natasha Singer in the New York Times took a whole lot of people aback: She reported that school districts were facing data breaches, and privacy policies were all over the place. The article specifically quoted critics of ClassDojo who had problems with the carrot-and stick approach to digital discipline and the idea of a behavior database being created without parental permission. Then, there were the unknowns: What happens when future employers find out little Johnny was flagged as a difficult kid? How might that sort of digital-paper-trail change the college application process? As a free service, what were the app developers receiving in return? ClassDojo has since been thrust to the front of a conversation about student data and privacy stretching far beyond their little monster avatars. They've rewritten their privacy policies, started deleting data after a year passes, and even created a special "privacy center" for parents. Is it enough? And what about the thousands of other apps in our kids' classrooms, measuring and documenting everything from their heart rate during gym class to academic performance to what they choose to eat for lunch? On this week's episode, Sam Chaudhary, co-founder of ClassDojo, tells us flatly "we are not a data company." He explains how he plans to grow a tech company without harnessing user data. We also hear from Jim Steyer, CEO of Common Sense Media, and a community of parents and teachers about the obligations — legal and otherwise — techies have to today's kids.  Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, or on Stitcher, TuneIn, I Heart Radio, or anywhere else using our RSS feed.