New updates to help you boost student engagement this year
As the new school year begins, we’re excited to share our data-driven best practices and new features designed to help you and your team create a thriving reading culture. Here’s how you can make the most of Beanstack this year.
1. Set Reading Goals
Setting a reading goal for your community is a powerful way to drive engagement and build a reading culture in your school. Our new features make it easier than ever to set and track these goals.
The Community Goal Callout on the administrator dashboard provides daily updates on your school's progress, while the District Goal Tracker offers similar insights for district-wide objectives. Regularly celebrating these key milestones can help keep students motivated and ensure you reach your goals. For guidance on setting up a goal for your school, check out this detailed how-to article for schools and review our handy goal-setting formula.
2. Foster Friendly Competition
Friendly competition is a key strategy for boosting reading enthusiasm and engagement. With Beanstack’s new features, you can easily ignite this competitive spirit within your school or district.
Our updated Grade and School Leaderboards allow students to track their progress against other peer groups and fight to reach the top seat. Additionally, you can create the perfect reading challenge to excite your students and staff with our revamped Challenge Templates tab, which makes it simple to find and customize reading challenges that fit your needs. Don't forget to vary your competitions to ensure ongoing excitement and participation, and use our customizable leaderboard templates to maximize your competition!
3. Provide Recognition and Incentives
Beanstack uses gamification through badges, achievements, and rewards to motivate students. This year, we’re following our own best practices and providing more recognition for our outstanding readers in Beanstack.
Our new Achievement Badges will celebrate super-readers who read beyond with a 500-day streak, while our Reading Culture Awards will honor schools that achieve student participation milestones with digital badges, gift cards, and the ultimate bragging rights! Discover how you can use new incentives to further drive student engagement in your school.
Bonus: Create opportunities to connect with your students
Finally, building a strong reading culture involves more than just setting goals and fostering competition; it's about engaging directly with students. Frequently reviewing a student's logs to understand their reading behavior and preferences can help you connect with that student and inspire a deeper love for reading.
Explore how new features, like our updated Reader Logs and Lexile Insights, can enhance teacher-student interactions or parent-teacher conferences to support your students' reading journeys. Use the data from our enhanced reading logs to ensure that you and your students are on the same page.
Finally, we're honing in on reading integrity with our Flagged Entries page and Daily Logging Limits. These features allow administrators to monitor and prevent fraudulent logging activity more easily. Explore how you can utilize Beanstack's tools to promote honestly in your school's reading culture.
And that's not all! To learn more about our upcoming features, check back here for regular updates, and contact with your client success manager at schoolsuccess@zoobean.com with any questions or suggestions!