Kiddom Reviews

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.

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.

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.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to Kiddom

Pros

It is an easy way to share the curriculum with my distance learners.

Cons

Some parts are cumbersome. Some things aren’t easy to share with families, use.

Pros

The communication features work well, especially now that students may be grouped. Once that feature was added, I was able to group and teach both distance learning and in-person learning successfully, though things such as discussion boards still don't exist. Overall, the activity layout is functional and clear. Assigning activities is very easy and can be done in multiple ways, with various editable aspects (individually assign, adjust time and due date, etc). I appreciate these features.

Cons

The default settings cannot be adjusted, so for example every question is worth an arbitrary 4 points until it is manually changed. Therefore, I have to manually adjust so many features on every single activity. If I could just adjust the settings so that each assignment started the way I wanted (summative, with 10 point questions, NOT labeled participation, etc) that would save me several obnoxious clicks. Also, the help team response time has slowed considerably, and certain obvious fixes still haven't been made, such as the click-through glitch on multiple-part questions. I'm sure this is because we inundated them with needs, etc, but it's frustrating to have the same problems over and over. Also, the problem of not being able to duplicate and adjust assignments is frustrating. Every new assignment has to be created from scratch OR written over an old assignment so we can't have multiple versions or save copies of past assignments for remediation needs. This is a pretty serious issue as it adds time and work to teachers who are already overloaded. Finally, the fact that the elements (questions, text boxes, directions, etc) within an activity DON'T stay in the order we put them, but default to a specific order (questions always at the bottom, text boxes on top) at the moment they're assigned means that I can't space directions through the activity. All directions have to be at the top unless you cheat and put directions in a question box. It's frankly infuriating.

Pros

As a high school teacher, I use Kiddom by creating lessons daily. When assigning the lessons to a class timeline, students receive an email. In addition, any time there is a class announcement posted, students receive an email. Therefore, one of the best features of Kiddom is the ease of notifying students of lessons and announcements.

Cons

At the start of the school year, I tried to use Kiddom by replacing it with a system that I have used in previous years. However, Kiddom does not let you edit an assignment once it has been assigned to students. In addition, I am unable to collaborate in a Professional Learning Community using Kiddom (although Kiddom advertises this) because once sharing with other colleagues on Kiddom, they cannot modify the lesson or unit without changing my version of the lesson or unit.

Pros

Logging in was easy; honestly, that's where my positive feedback ends. Overall, the program was not user friendly for a high school setting where teachers have multiple sections of the same class or different subjects althogether.

Cons

Being able to copy an assignment from one class section to another would have been nice. Having to constantly maneuver the Timeline to grade/check late work is a HUGE hassle.

Pros

Posting assignments is easy. Also, login in to the platform is easy.

Cons

I do not like the visual appearance of the software. I do not like that you cannot customize the class names.
Everything is very separated i.e. grades, assignments, etc. I would like it all to be available on one screen when you click a student's name rather than toggling multiple screens.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to Kiddom

Pros

I liked how Kiddom helped me and my students turn in and grade work during the pandemia online learning. What I like the most is that the Open up resources are directly assigned to the students and sometimes apps like Geogebra are inserted to help students learn. I also like the fact that teachers can give comments to their students and how to improve their work. Even though I have not used much the data reviews, I think they are valuable resources to see how the students are growing.

Cons

I don't like that I have to assign as many times as classes I have the same work with different dates to my different class periods. This really consumes time. I don't like that in order to assign work I have to scroll down up the present unit I am which consumes time. I also don't like that I have to grade the assignments to be able to get data from the data. I wish some automatic features were there to provide with automatic data without me having to grade every single assignment my students take. I don't like that sometimes when students change device the system does not allow them to enter until they remove cookies in their devices. I also don't like that if I change something that change is reflected also to my colleague when we are sharing the same curriculum. Finally, I wish that when students did something in the apps, Kiddom could keep their work because if students do not take screenshots, their work is not saved. Uploading images takes a lot of time from them.

Pros

Being able to assign things to students is obviously beneficial. I like that we can reassign something to an individual kid too. I enjoy being able to communicate with them through the site as well. I also appreciate the updates as we requested them to make it run more smoothly overall. The way it links to our Clever accounts is also a great feature that saved us a lot of time in the midst of all the pandemic madness.

Cons

I wish we would have received training on this prior to when we did. We were thrown into it blindly and honestly, it was not easy to follow or understand at first. Having a training feature like new apps have would have been helpful that walks you through where everything is. It also took longer than we hoped for "multi-select" to be an option. It is now which is awesome though! At my school, we created "PLC classes" so that we could collaborate and share documents and assignments we had made with our grade level instead of each person doing that individually. Having a collaboration option would have been helpful.

Pros

The feature that I like the most is being able to give feedback on an assignment. I like that as my students are working on an assignment, I can see them working in real-time to give feedback/message with them.

Cons

One of the main reasons my school district chose Kiddom was because the EL Curriculum is attached and the idea was that we would be able to assign workbook pages to students digitally. I have yet to see a "chart" from a workbook page be easily accessible or editable for my students. I end up having to make them for myself and my students. I do not like the grading feature, that once I grade an assignment, neither me nor my students can go back and change them. Once assignments are assigned, there is no way to edit or add anything. My students have written and submitted assignments many times, and they continue to disappear on this platform. It is not conducive to digital learning.

Pros

The customer service is extremely responsive. Features are being constantly upgraded in response to needs. It has great potential with the better features being added.

Cons

The rolling out of new features leads to surprises when accessing the platform. Changes are happening weekly and mostly result in improvement to user interface however its difficult to mediate student use as a teacher when the interface changes.
Material created in Kiddom has no use outside of the platform. As teachers develop material, creating in a proprietary platform, in which nothing can be used outside Kiddom is incredibly unattractive.

Pros

During covid, we have had to go paperless, and teach blended classes (online and in person). Have the OUR readily available to all students, with common naming has been HUGE. The support for learning and developing our classes has been great, [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN] is exceptional and accommodates our time difference, and everyone helps find solutions or provides instruction to meet our needs.

Cons

Since I am a first time user, and we are in the middle of the all the Covid Drama, I have not had adequate time to really embrace this, and making do as best I can. I also have found that many of the additional materials are "examples" that to use we need to join and pay a fee. I would rather not wasting my time looking at activites only to find out they are not available.

Pros

I like the fact that once an assignment is input, it can be automatically graded. I LOVE that we can now change the due dates for each assignment instead of everything being "due" Fridays.

Cons

Often when creating assignments, it lags. The system will kick you out of a question after you've begun typing it and erase what you have already put. Often the page will give you an error message and delete whatever you're working on. I'm not sure why it does this.
Also, I wish there was an option to make groups. Currently our entire class is listed, but I only have a group of 6 who consistently do work on Kiddom. I wish I was able to make a group of these students to select the "group" when assigning instead of unselecting all and then going through to add each DL student I have every time for every assignment.

Pros

Activity making is great, though sometimes glitchy

Cons

The interface is a bit of a mess. The students have to transverse a lot of steps to get to assignments and they have to check each individual class to see if they have assignments instead of one timeline for all of their assignment.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to Kiddom

Pros

I like that I simply drag the assignments onto the students` timelines and they can do them asynchronously. I also like that I can assign assignments to individuals in my class.

Cons

I do not like how difficult it is to access the assignments to edit them. It requires a lot of clicking. Our timelines also get very cluttered with all of the assignments that we assign. I wish there was a way to make it more organized.

Pros

I like the method that assignments are built, tests are built, the format options for tests, the ease at which you can insert links into assignments, and ease of which the assignments can be assigned to students in ONE class.

Cons

I can't assign things to more than one class and I wasn't able to get resolution to a question I had about grading tests, so I still don't use KIDDOM for my tests.

Pros

I love the different options teachers can use to create a variety of questions on each assignment or quiz. As a kindergarten teacher, I love that they can upload pictures of their work. I also love that you can attached standards to each assignment and grades can automatically hook up to our grading system on skyward. (I don't use this feature as a k teacher, but I think it's amazing for other grade levels to use!)

Cons

As a teacher, I wish when my student's upload a photo of their work, that the photo would automatically show when I am checking their work. Having to click on each individual photo take a lot of time when grading. (I teach kindergarten, so they upload pictures of all their work.)

Pros

The home page has a nice design where all the classes are stored in one place. This became a lot easier when we were able to name our classes.

Cons

The communication methods between teachers and students are terrible. There's no easy way to view a students comment. Depending on how you view the notification that someone has commented you can't get straight to the comment just by clicking on it and the website, app and email notifications are all different.

Pros

I like that I can set it up to grade quizzes/assessments quickly and automatically if using a Multiple-choice question format.

Cons

I wish it would communicate with our grading software so it would transfer the grades automatically.

Pros

Kiddom is user friendly, and their customer help team responds in a quickly manner.

Cons

I don't like that I have to upload material separately. Most of my classes use the same lessons.

Pros

It synched with Skyward to import all of my students by classes. Easy to create assignments.

Cons

Students could mark complete even if they did not submit any work, therefore their parents thought they were all caught up. In progress wording makes you think the student still working on it. Making changes was the WORST! If I needed to make a change to anything in that week's lesson, I would have to unassigned and then reassign. At times the work submitted and lesson plans would disappear. Students had difficulty using it on mobile devices and navigating it overall which then gave them the excuse just to not do the work. Also, to grade work that is attached, you have to download everything individually to grade instead of having it open into windows within the program.

Pros

Kiddom provides an easy way for me to create activities for my distance learners. It took me a while to get the hang of using Kiddom and navigating the ins and out of all things Kiddom. Four months in to the school year, I can now create the daily activities for my distance learners and grade them all in one place. The team at Kiddom also uses our feedback and will do what they can to improve the software for both the educators and students.

Cons

Kiddom is not as user friendly for our distance learners who use tablets instead of laptops.

Pros

Kiddom is easy to understand and intuitive for teachers and students to navigate.

Cons

It lacks a tremendous amount of basic functionality. It is impossible to copy assignments for sharing, editing, or differentiating between students. It is impossible to reorder assignments in student timelines. Less critical for my needs, built in curriculum is mostly links to demos of other software and is generally useless.

Pros

User-friendly, simple, sleek design that makes for a pleasant user experience.

Cons

A little click-intensive. Other than that, it checks all the boxes.