Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine how higher education students think about educational technologies they have previously used – and the implications of this understanding for their awareness of datafication and privacy issues in a postsecondary context. Design/methodology/approach: The authors conducted two surveys about students’ experience with the ClassDojo platform during their secondary education. In both surveys, the authors included a question asking students to identify which ClassDojo-like platform they used in school. For this study, the authors examined responses to these screening questions, identifying the technologies that responses referred to and sorting technologies into categories. Findings: Students identified a wide range of technologies when prompted to identify a technology similar to ClassDojo. Many responses suggested students have a broad, monolithic understanding of educational technology. This suggests the prevalence of a utilitarian tool perspective (rather than a platform perspective) that may be entrenched by the time that students reach higher education, hampering efforts to inform and educate them in that context. Originality/value: To the best of the authors’ knowledge, there are few studies of students’ conflation of educational technologies in the extant literature. Furthermore, the platform perspective emphasized in this manuscript remains relatively rare in many fields associated with educational technology.

Scholars working in the area of children and youth services (CYS) have called for researchers and educators to look to disciplines outside of Library and Information Science (LIS) for inspiration in moving this area of the field forward. In this paper, we explore the opportunities provided by incorporating theoretical approaches and concepts from the fields of childhood studies, learning sciences, and educational technology in three separate special topics courses offered at the University of Kentucky. In these courses, we draw on our knowledge and expertise within fields external to LIS in order to encourage our students to think deeply and critically about how they think about, interact with, and provide services for children and youth. While two of the three courses are not solely focused on children and youth, all include content relevant to CYS professionals. In each section, we highlight the ways in which our different disciplinary expertise influences both the material we teach and the ways in which we teach. We then discuss the commonalities amongst our experiences and the potential that incorporating concepts and theories from these and other disciplines has for broadening CYS curricula more generally.

ClassDojo is a classroom communication and behavior management app intended to “bring every family into [the] classroom” (www.classdojo.com). The features of the platform include a points system to facilitate classroom management, instant teacher-parent communication (on the individual or class level), and student portfolios (among others). While ClassDojo claims to be used in over 95% of schools in the United States, there is little known about how students or principals interact with and understand the platform’s features and data. Drawing upon a mixed-methods study in a small state in the Southeastern United States, this article offers empirically driven insight into how students and principals perceive new digital education apps like ClassDojo. In particular, this analysis speaks to stakeholder attitudes toward the use of the app with regard to if and how it is mediating student-teacher and student-parent relationships. In so doing, this article offers early insights from a state-specific case into how the use of and experience of ClassDojo is situated within the broader educational experiences of students.