Education monitoring tech soars as result of Covid-19 | Surveillance - Coda Story

In January, Coda Story’s Africa Jackson wrote about the student performance monitoring app ClassDojo and concerns of racial inequity in the classroom.

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Rachel Sherman, reporting intern with Coda Story and master’s student at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY summarizes, The coronavirus pandemic and the closure of schools across the world has created a boom in education tech software. 

Photo: Coda Story

According to Crunchbase, a site that tracks startup industry trends, five times as many families joined ClassDojo in the last week of March than in any week in the company’s history. 

School closures in the U.S. have affected at least 55.1 million students in 124,000 public and private institutions. Now that most schools have moved to remote learning or a hybrid model of in-person classes and online education for the fall, concerns about discrimination and privacy have resurfaced as parents and teachers become more reliant on ClassDojo and similar platforms...

ClassDojo, which is used by at least one child in 95% of elementary schools, assigns colorful, kid-friendly monster avatars to each student. Teachers then award or deduct points based on behavior, which is shared with parents in real time and, typically, placed on display in the classroom for students to keep score. 
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Source: Coda Story