Welcome back to the Product Spotlight series in the Beanstack Blog! Here, you’ll find news about our latest features, product updates, and insights into how Beanstack’s tools can help you achieve your reading goals. Whether you’re already using Beanstack or you’re looking to build a culture of reading in your community, this series is for you.
Announcing: School Leaderboards!
It’s a snap to check out your school’s reading rankings with our new school leaderboards feature! Leaderboards empower teachers, school librarians, and media specialists to easily run meaningful reading competitions with up-to-date views of the top students, classes, and grades for a wide variety of reading statistics. It’s simple, customizable, and on-demand, so you can fire up friendly reading competition at your school in no time.
Many of our school partners already use competitions to ramp up their reading challenges and build healthy literacy habits. Competitions between homerooms galvanized student reading at Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools in Tennessee and Grafton School District in Wisconsin, while a “beat your teacher” contest raised reading engagement for both students and teachers at an Atlanta Public Schools high school.
“We’ve seen reading competitions take student reading to new heights,” says product manager Kelly Hiser, who interviewed nearly a dozen media specialists at school systems around the country to research and plan this new feature.
“Leaderboards make running contests and checking progress both at the individual and group level that much easier for busy educators.”
School Leaderboards in Detail
Viewable within each school site’s Insights dashboard, the leaderboard can sort and rank data within any timeframe you’d like. You can view top readers or groups for a specific week, month, challenge, quarter, year, or any other length of time you need.
You can also pick from a host of different reading metrics, like minutes read, badges earned, and reviews submitted, to recognize different types of engagement and progress. And you can choose to sort your rankings by individual readers if you want to call out students’ progress or by classroom or grade level if you’d rather give accolades to the groups with the highest average amount of reading per student.
The leaderboard data is updated each night, so you can know that you’re always using the most up-to-date statistics for your morning announcements and leaderboard updates. Plus, each set of rankings are downloadable for easy record-keeping and reference.
“Our media specialists are so creative and invested in their students’ success,” says school success manager Lauren Hantzes. “I can’t wait to see all the ways they use leaderboards this school year.”
Get Started!
Jump into your leaderboard today! All it takes is two clicks. From your admin dashboard, select Insights and then Leaderboard to get analyzing.
Not a Beanstack partner yet, but looking to level up your school’s reading competitions and reading challenges? Reach out today.