Names and identifying details of every student here are changed, as they are everywhere on the blog.
Okay so Tuesday, Yana in my chair, and the first thing out of her is that the phone went off 14 times before lunch, school every time, and she cannot tell which of the 14 wanted anything from her. Second grade, first year in an American school, and nobody warned her about the app part.
We got it sorted between the soak and the file. The whole thing turns on knowing which box you are looking at.
Two boxes, one of them talking
That wall of photos, class story, sunflowers, somebody’s science fair project, all of it is broadcast. It goes to every family in the class and it wants nothing from you. A heart, if you feel like it.
Messages with the teacher’s name on them are the other box, and that one is a conversation. Whatever lands there, landed for you.
She had been replying to the broadcasts and skipping past the thread, and that is how a note about a field trip form lay there unread for five days.
Photos and class news want nothing back from you. Questions live in the thread with the teacher’s name on it.
About those points
Little dots, dojos, stars, whatever name the app puts on them, belong to a classroom system, and the teacher is the one who sets what earns them, not the state. A bad afternoon, then, stays a bad afternoon.
My own plan with them would be nothing at all, except asking the teacher, once, what she actually tracks with them. That answer costs her one line and spares a family a month of guessing.
Back home it was a paper notebook, el cuaderno de comunicaciones, the teacher wrote a line in it and a parent signed underneath by Friday. My mother read that notebook at the kitchen table the way you read a court document, and it held maybe two entries a month. Fourteen notifications before lunch would have finished her.
Language settings, done in advance
ClassDojo does translate posts and messages, and its help pages are blunt about the condition, the feature turns up only where both sides have set a language preference. Which is an evening job, done calmly. Not something to discover at the moment a message lands that you cannot read.
Seesaw does it a little differently, with a See Translation line that appears by itself when the text is in a language different from the one your device is set to, on the web and in the app on iOS, Android, and Kindle.
Yana set hers in about a minute, standing at my station, and then read three weeks of class news in Russian with an expression I recognized from my own first year here.
Answering, and how fast
A question about a form, a date, a pickup, an absence, that gets an answer the same evening, short. A photo of the class planting something gets a heart, or nothing, whichever.
Anything that needs an actual conversation belongs in the thread, in writing, where it stays. That is the part that leaves you a record of who said what, which counts a year later when somebody asks when exactly the reading level came up.
As for the paid family extras, the read receipts and urgent messages that ClassDojo sells, the school requires none of it. Yana asked me if not paying would look bad. It does not.
When a message is about behavior, two lines do the job. Thank you for telling me, and could you write what exactly happened and what you want us to do at home. Long explanations about the child, the move, the grandmother, the sleep, none of that helps at that hour, and the teacher is working through everybody else’s messages at the same time.
Notifications are where the panic comes from, so in Seesaw switch them to one summary a day, and in either app let the story wait until the evening.
Her phone, two weeks later, was down to three notifications a day. The field trip form got signed, late, and nobody said a word about it.
Courses at Palme School
Russian for bilingual children
When a kid understands Russian and answers in English
School of reading
Reading and writing for kids who already speak Russian
Free materials
Things to print and do at the kitchen table
The thing no app is going to flag for you is what happens to Russian at home while all of this is running in English. Palme School takes children from four years old, online, in small groups, 40 minutes to a lesson. A family starts with two sessions at no cost, a conversation with a methodologist and then a trial lesson inside a group. A child who understands Russian and answers in English wants Russian for bilingual children, and a child who speaks it but stalls over a page wants the reading school.
Frequently asked questions
No. Class and school stories are broadcasts to all families and do not expect a reply. Questions addressed to you arrive in the message thread with the teacher.
In ClassDojo, posts and messages can be translated, and the help center notes that the translation option appears when both accounts have their language preferences set. In Seesaw, a See Translation option appears automatically when the content is in a different language from yours, on the web and in the app.
They belong to the classroom system the teacher runs, and she decides what earns them. Grades they are not, so the useful move is to ask her what she tracks with them.
No. ClassDojo’s read receipts and urgent messages are paid extras the app sells to families, and the school asks for none of that to communicate with you.
Palme School: Russian for bilingual children · School of reading · Free materials for families
Monica Perez moved to Los Angeles from Rosario, Argentina. She interacts a lot with Russian-speaking women at her nail salon, so she has a wealth of knowledge about Russian culture and the secrets that women from Russia keep to themselves.
