I was reading "Teach Like a Champion" by Doug Lemov (its actually very good if you can get your school to order it or buy it for yourself) and one thing it mentions is adding "sparkle" or "vegas" to your classroom.

I used "cheers" when I taught the 4th grade in the USA, and while I thought the kids would think all the cheers were really stupid, they actually loved them!  There are tons of these out on the internet (SFA, or Success For All is a reading program that promotes their use, so many teachers have made them.)

Here is a site with little cards that explain how to do the cheer, some will have to be modified or not work well with ESL students, but other ones are great!

http://drjean.org/html/monthly_act/act_2004/06_june/06_2004_pdf.html

Enjoy!

I like that bathroom poster idea. Never occurred to me oddly and I've yet to see it on any of the purchased ones.

A tip on your reward scheme that I've seen work: make it more granular. 20 stickers is a lot. One of my colleagues has a system where you essentially need 10 tokens, but instead of 10, they collect 5, trade them for a super-sized token, and then trade 2 super-sized tokens for the prize (50c socks from the stationfront).

Furthermore, and another idea I can't take credit for, to get them to listen intently, the tokens are only issued if explicitly stated (or the students do something amazing). Otherwise prizes are the secondary ones of plain ol' stickers with no reward scheme attached. Although they're custom stickers so they go down a treat too.

You might think 5+5 and 10 are the same, potato/potahto, but there's been numerous studies on this that regular rewards and meters of one's progress will spur them to do amazing things. World of Warcrack and Farmville are masters at this shit (and employ psychs to ensure it). Progress Quest quite literally is a joke "game" involving staring at progress bars and no user input (apart from daily manual startup/maintainence and some initial tweaks) yet it has competitive leaderboards as a direct result of this psychology in action.

Another possibility are two reward schemes, an individual one PLUS a second class one where they get to like, watch Mr Bean for half an hour when the class reaches a milestone. This type doesn't benefit quite so much (all things benefit) from any form of clear granular progression as long as there is some meter of progression as it only takes one student to spread word to the class when the reward is coming up real soon.

Further reading:
There's a tonne of online material on this and similar ideas in Game Theory including essays, papers and a whole bunch of TED talks, mostly from one lady who pretty much makes this her thing... but I think this guy sums it up a heck of a lot better than any of her works:
http://blog.ted.com/2010/08/20/building-the-game-layer-on-top-of-the-world-seth-priebatsch-on-ted-com/

Thank-you Paul!  I enjoyed the video you posted.  Since we NETs do not give out grades anyways, I think giving experience points and leveling up sounds like a great ideas for classrooms.  My reward system last year of giving stamps, and then giving them candy when they got five stamps, did not seem to influence students at all.  I am definitely going to try this!  Now, I just have to figure out the best way to apply this in my classes.

Some great ideas guys and girls. What I will be doing, and this is an idea I picked up from another teacher, is to use fake play money made-up of $1, $5 and $10.

Last semester, I used a sticker chart, it worked well but I am hoping the money idea will work even better. The money will be used for to purchase candies and other such rewards.

Good luck to all........

Here's the name tag I made for the students. I collect it each class and award stickers and what not accordingly. It may seem like a pain to collect and re distribute each class, but I've learned my lesson that kids will never bring anything back to class that you tell them too.

I only give them maybe 1 or 2 a class, or none if they sucked. Prizes to be decided at the end of the semester.

***Looks like crap if your not using Office 2007. Sorry.

Is use this chant to get there attention and it works brilliantly

I say
Class Class Class

Students respond
YES YES YES

Do that 2 or 3 times then end with

3 2 1 Zip for zip your lips shut...

Good luck

(but they do not like cinnamon).

Hehehe, I learned this the hard way during camp. Just to be fun, I brought atomic fireballs back from home! I'll give them this option when giving out prizes for different things. I can't wait to see their faces!!

I co-worker of mine who is doing her masters online mentioned a great technique she read about from her course.
Basically, you tell the students at the start of class that you will pick 3 students secretly to watch for the class and that those three student's behavior will determine whether the class gets their reward that day (sticker, free time whatever you use) If the 3 students are successful, you reveal them at the end of the class so they get the back pats, but if they are not successful, you keep it secret so they aren't vilified

If you want to be a good presenter, you can follow these expression rules.^^