What are the best PBIS school reward apps?

One of the most important aspects of a successful PBIS implementation is how you motivate your students to learn and demonstrate positive behavior. This is done with PBIS rewards, which students receive when meeting behavioral expectations. These rewards can take a lot of different forms, and each school or district will have their own methods for awarding them depending on their needs and resources.

However, at the most basic level, all initatives should equip educators to accomplish the following things as efficiently and effectively as possible:

• Award tokens or points to students for their positive behavior
• Track the number of tokens or points that a given student has
• Allow students to redeem their points or tokens for specific items or advantages

Rewards are the tangible benefits of a PBIS program, and when used properly, they’re highly effective at motivating students to behave well in the classroom and beyond. Despite how important they are, it’s rarely easy for educators to balance their existing workload with all of the tasks needed to carry out a successful PBIS rewards system. Fortunately, there are PBIS apps that can help make things easier for you. Not only is this important for getting your students invested in learning the right behaviors, but it’s also less work overall for you and your colleagues.

With that in mind, here are five of the best school reward apps, in no particular order.

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5 best PBIS reward apps

1. Classcraft

Classcraft uses game-inspired elements and motivation theory to teach positive behavior, foster collaboration, support students academically, and more.

As a classroom management tool, Classcraft comes with a series of customized behavior settings that allow you to easily award a set number of Experience Points (XP) for good behavior, like:

• Maintaining focus
• Working quietly
• Answering a challenging question 

This tool also allows you to deduct Health Points (HP) for negative behavior. These behavior expectation settings make it easier for administrators to roll out and support a consistent and successful PBIS initiative.

At its core, Classcraft combines PBIS with content that is culturally relevant and genuinely enjoyable for students. This increases engagement, creativity, and the motivation to carry out the necessary tasks and learn the desired behaviors.

What makes Classcraft so unique is its emphasis on relationships. Because students work in teams and earn individual rewards as well as collective ones, it teaches them how their behavior affects others. In the end, this makes them more accountable for their own actions.

For instance, when students lose HP for negative behavior, they can be “healed” by one of their teammates.  Dynamics like this can guide students to think more carefully about their behavior in the future because they know that their friends and peers are counting on them.

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2. RedCritter

Like ClassDojo, RedCritter boasts an array of classroom management apps and tools, including a feature-rich school PBIS reward system. As opposed to recognizing good or bad behavior, RedCritter focuses on praising effort displayed by students as well as any achievements they make. Because of this effort-focused approach to encouragement, RedCritter motivates students to seek out greater challenges without putting too much emphasis on the need for excellence.

In addition to reward points that students can collect to win prizes, RedCritter allows you to award digital badges and skill points, which you can hand out when you’re teaching your students specific skills.

3. LiveSchool

LiveSchool is a platform for efficiently tracking, rewarding, and improving student behavior.

For starters, it lets you customize the behavior expectations in your classroom and set the number of points students can earn for each one. They can then use their points to buy rewards from an online store that you control. Like Classcraft, LiveSchool lets you reward both individual and collective efforts, using a House Points system for specific teams, classes, grades, and more.

To show students what they have to look forward to, you can issue them a weekly “paycheck.” This is a report that summarizes:

• The points they earned over the week
• Any improvements they made
• Behaviors they need to work on
• Feedback from teachers

This gives students an opportunity to reflect on and learn from their behavior — not just in the moment, but after the fact, too.

LiveSchool also does a good job of collecting data and makes it simple to access it through a series of comprehensive dashboards. You can look at the data from a schoolwide PBIS perspective or look more closely at a certain student’s behavioral stats, including any specific incidents that were noted in the past.

4. Hero

Hero, created by enrollment software developer SchoolMint, is a customizable platform for schoolwide behavior management. It’s designed to streamline and optimize the various tasks required for reinforcing positive behavior, improving attendance, and more.

Hero uses a virtual points system that can be used to give students real-life rewards for their positive behavior and other improvements. It’s also built to enable more equitable enforcement of rules by standardizing expectations and applying them fairly according to the school’s needs.

In addition to its focus on behavior and attendance, Hero enables educators to engage students’ families in their educational and behavioral progress. Separate versions of the app for students and parents/guardians makes it easy to keep everyone updated on how a student is doing. 

Hero doesn’t allow you to create an online store like Classcraft or LiveSchool, but you can still use it with your own self-defined rewards scheme or store.

5. ClassDojo

ClassDojo is a web-based suite of useful teaching tools designed to help educators with different aspects of classroom management. It allows students to create profiles where they can share work with their parents and teachers. It also offers tools that parents can use to track their childrens’ progress and includes the following handy tools for teachers: 

• Random student ID selector
• Random group generator
• Noise level monitor

ClassDojo also has a behavior tracking app that allows you to award points for good actions and flag behavior that “needs work.” ClassDojo is one of the simpler options on this list because you can only manage points for a limited number of predesigned positive and negative behaviors out of the box. This includes constructive behaviors such as:

• Helping others
• Showing perseverance
• Engaging in teamwork

ClassDojo also includes negative behaviors like:

• Showing disrespect
• Not completing homework
• Talking out of turn

Unfortunately, ClassDojo doesn’t allow you to set up your own rewards shop like some of the other options do, which means you’ll have to get creative. This has led some schools to create a physical store, as opposed to a digital one. In this case, ClassDojo is used to keep track of the students’ running totals.

Photo credit : Google for Education