Digital Platforms have become a permanent part of K-12 learning, shaping how students communicate. how families stay informed, and how teachers deliver instruction. My own journey as a special education preschool teacher along with my combined experience supporting my children during COVID has shown me how these tools can either strengthen school-home partnerships or create new barriers. For this blog, I will discuss two platforms that influenced my work: ClassDojo and Google Classroom. Both tools have changed the literacy demands placed on students, parents, and teachers, and they highlight exactly what Wargo (2021) calls "Personal digital inquiry" where everyday tools become learning spaces.
ClassDojo
ClassDojo is a classroom communication app used widely in early childhood and K-12 setting. It allows teachers to message families, share photos/videos of learning, post reminders, track behaviors, and build a class story. In a preschool special education classroom, it becomes more than a communication tool. The platform is a great connector between the school day and the child's home life.
(Figure 1: a snapshot of my class dojo post for my own class)User Engagement:
Teachers: Share announcements, visuals, pictures of student work, behavior updates, attendance reminders, and event notifications.
Parents: View updates in real time, send quick messages, ask questions, receive photos of their child engaged in activities. This is especially important for parents of non-verbal or minimally verbal students.
Students: Younger children do not use the app directly, but their learning is shown through photos, videos, and portfolios I create.
ClassDojo supports what Mirra et al. (2021) call participatory communication because parents become active partners rather than passive recipients. ClassDojo shifts communication to a quick good tool, it allows short messages, which replace phone calls Photos and videos replace long explanations about a child's progress. A really great feature that I use with my bilingual parents is the translation features support multilingual families, which is crucial in the Bronx. The other part is the parents access daily updates the help them understand what work I am doing and type of behavior notes and school or class announcements. I don't use this option too much but the behavior system in the app can have a negative by misuse and does not allow for trauma informed or developmentally appropriate practice. The over reliance on photos may oversimplify complex learning moments. Although there is privacy some concerns may be the photos of children stores in a third-party server. As a teachers must be careful not to post personally identifying information, sensitive behaviors, or medical/IEP details publicly on the class story. To use ClassDojo responsibly, families and teachers need understanding tone, privacy and boundaries in messages this is a form of digital communication literacy. Visual literacy is shown by interpreting photos and videos as instructional documentation. ClassDojo aligns well with early childhood goals of family partnerships. Teachers can use it to document learning and support communication between home and school.
Google Classroom
Google Classroom is a learning management system (LMS) used to school settings to post assignments, organize content, collect student work, and deliver instruction. During Covid, many families including my own relies on google classroom, google meets and zoom meetings which became what we call the virtual classroom.
(Figure 2: Google Classroom example)User Engagement
Teachers: Assign work, organize modules, post materials, provide feedback, differentiate tasks.
Students: Submit assignments, respond to questions, access resources, join live sessions.
Parents: Monitor through guardian summaries, help children navigate assignments, and attend virtual meetings through meet and others set up through zoom.
Influence on Communication
Google classroom changed communication in several ways:
Written comments became the default feedback tool. Teachers used multimodal posts (PDF's, videos, links, images). Zoom also turned teaching into synchronous digital space, where communications were tied to screens, microphones, and virtual etiquette. This shift aligns with Doerr-stevens (2021) argument that digital spaces create embodied forms of literacy, because students were expected to communicate, move, and learn through a screen.
Information in Google Classroom comes at students in so many different ways, and I saw this clearly when my own kids were using it every day. Everything is organized in streams or topics, and each assignment can have links, videos, PDF's, or extra resources layered right underneath it. Students end up consuming information on their own, sometimes going back to reread or rewatch something when they need it, which is actually a powerful skill. But it also depends a lot on having stable internet, a device that works and an adult nearby who can help if they get stuck. Watching my children navigate all these multimodal pieces of content made me realize that this is now a permanent part of schooling. Kids are expected to move between videos, text, images, and instructions almost naturally, and that kind of digital literacy is becoming just as important as traditional reading and writing.
Impact Learning
Positive: Flexible access to assignments, built on tools for students with disabilities (text to speech, enlarges text, audio comments), Families could rewatch lessons, clear organizations of class materials.
Negative: Requires high parent involvement for young students, screen fatigue, digital divide issues (wi-fi, devices, housing instability), harder to observe social-emotional cues through zoom.
Privacy and safety were some of the biggest concerns I had when using Google Classroom and Zoom, both as a parent and as a teacher. Students were suddenly on camera inside their homes, and that opened the door to a level of exposure none of us were fully prepared for. Even though Zoom bombing is not as common now, the risk reminded us how quickly outside interruptions could happen if links weren’t protected. With Google accounts, there are also real questions about how student data is stored and who has access to it. Even something as simple as emails being visible in Classroom can make families uneasy. All of these factors pushed schools, teachers, and parents to think more carefully about how to protect children online, it is something we have to do not just academically, but in a way that honors their privacy and keeps them safe.
These platforms reveal how digital tools shape modern K-12 learning. ClassDojo strengthens family engagement and helps teachers document learning in real time. Google Classroom and Zoom transform how content is delivered and accessed. Together, they demand new literacies, not only reading and writing.
References
Doerr-Stevens, C. (2021). Embracing the messiness of research: Documentary video composing as embodied critical media literacy.
Mirra, N., Garcia, A., & Morrell, E. (2021). Revolutionizing inquiry in urban English classrooms: Pursuing voice and justice through youth participatory action research.
Wargo, J. (2021). Sounding the garden, voicing a problem: Mobilizing critical literacy through personal digital inquiry with young children.
William T. Grant Foundation. (n.d.). Networks, knowledge brokers, and the potential to impact the use of research evidence.
