Kiddom Review

Great experience, extremely useful.

Allows me to personalize instruction fairly easily.

Pros

The flexibility of assigning different tasks to different students, as well as the deep resource pool. It's a great way to personalize learning in a fairly simple manner. Works great for projects, as well.

Cons

Can be a bit buggy when logging students in (sometimes the app freezes). There are also some linked resources (primarily from CK-12) that don't work well. Could use a way to integrate questions/responses, grading, and link embedding directly into assignments.

Helping us through a difficult Fall

Pros

Hi, I am a 4th grade teacher who started using Kiddom this fall in full distance learning. It has been an great decision overall (although I do not really know about how much it costs). Here are the things that make it strong: 1. It is a good mix of versatile vs easy to use for kids- meaning, I can largely change it for what I want, but it functions pretty easily for student. 2. Grading is really easy- you can input MC and have them graded for you, or put grading notes for other teachers.

Cons

1. My school bought Kiddom to use for its partnership with EL (a Lit curriculum). Although we do use Kiddom successfully for Lit, the EL resources are difficult to navigate. Honestly, this is probably more of a problem with EL than it is with Kiddom. 2. Creating your own activities/lessons is time consuming. It takes a while to input each question individually and does not have a copy/past feature. This would be really helpful as many of the questions that I ask follow a similar format, and I need to input them manually each time. 3. My students largely are all on Chromebooks (and therefore the same type of device), but the interface on their screens occasionally looks different (due to sizing, etc). this has caused some confusion with kids. 4. We tried to write an essay on Kiddom this week and it was a struggle. Navigating between different assignments is not really possible for many of our kids and navigating within an assignment is fairly awkward as the questions can stretch or shrink if you click on them. We are opting to using Googledocs for any larger writing assignments, but still love Kiddom for daily work.

Kiddom Could be Great

I have been learning and showing teachers how to use it since May of last year, and although it is becoming a more fluid experience it still has many opportunities for improvement. I still use it for exit slips and some tests, but I prefer Google Forms and Khan Academy for immediate feedback for practice, Desmos for exploration and synchronous lessons and Google Docs for tests allowing students to draw on the tests.

Pros

OUR are available, aligned to stds, and can be edited. Easy to submit a grade per student per activity. Feedback allows for audio and images and arrives in email account. The Done and Late links are helpful in finding work to grade. The assignments are broken into weeks.

Cons

Students need to be able to draw a number line a shape on the grid, show their work with a tape diagram and plot coordinate pairs. Kiddom does not have these tools everything is text or students write in their notebook and upload images. Late work is only mentioned as a notification ex. 3 days ago, but should be tagged on the assignment. Students that join with two different accounts does not show the email used, so a teacher cannot determine which account to delete. Difficult to use distantly synchronous, since there is not a way to see what the student is working on in a specific moment. Ex Desmos and Nearpod show you the students’ work on a summary page “live”. Reports are not helpful. If I want only the Unit Test to show me the standards’ aligned with student proficiency, I can’t. It includes the exit slips and other assignments. Glitches are common for example 1) students go i to the account and the see that 30 assignments are late (I have to tell them don’t worry, it is a glitch) 2) I drag an assignment and it doesn’t drag to the week assignments so I try a couple more times and next thing I know I have assigned the same assignment 10 times. Many of the library’s resources are not linked correctly. If I link Khan Academy, the scores are not included in Kiddom. I also have to assign in Khan Academy and find the scores there. Google Docs cannot be assigned making a copy for each student in Kiddom. Self grading with auto feedback options would be great.

Distance Learners

Overall, once I figured out how to use the program it has really been a great tool for me; especially as a first time distance learning educator.

Pros

The thing I like most about Kiddom is the ease of use for my students. They got the hang of this program quickly. I also like the fact that I can send them a private message after grading a lesson with specific details for them. In addition, I can post a message for the entire classroom for all of my classes.

Cons

This program has a lot of bells and whistles; which made it somewhat challenging to get use to and learn at the beginning of the school year.