Welcome back to the Product Spotlight series in the Beanstack Blog! Here, you’ll find news about our latest features 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.
Introducing: New School Admin Experience for Teachers and Media Specialists
This winter, we’re unveiling a brand-new admin experience to make it easier than ever for you to grow your school’s culture of reading. Teachers and media specialists can easily monitor weekly reading progress, log for classes, access student information, and create classroom challenges in our revamped admin dashboard. With this suite of updates, you can target reading recognition or support for individual students and provide curriculum-aligned reading motivation to your classes.
To develop these improvements, we worked closely with teachers, librarians, and media specialists at our partner schools and school districts. We heard that media specialists needed a better tool for identifying succeeding and struggling readers; that teachers wanted to offer reading challenges to accompany classroom lessons; and that all school staff needed a more intuitive flow for logging reading and accessing information for their classes. And now we’re delivering a robust and user-friendly experience to make Beanstack an even more valuable tool for district-wide reading tracking and motivation.
How It Works
The new and improved Beanstack school admin experience greets you right at login. The refreshed home dashboard displays key reading engagement metrics for the current week, so that you can easily monitor students and classes’ reading progress. Media specialists can dive into statistics for all students and classes at the school, as well as for staff. Teachers’ dashboards show targeted data for just their classes and students.
This immediate overview serves as a thermometer for assessing students’ reading health. You can easily sort your view to show the least active readers and classes instead of the most, and then direct intervention efforts toward struggling or reluctant readers. The dashboard is also the perfect tool for identifying top readers and classes. Students’ reading motivation skyrockets with positive reinforcement like rewards and recognition. A simple shoutout on school-wide announcements or social media can galvanize the whole student body to up their reading game. Teachers love recognition and competition too; calling out top classes or staff readers in staff newsletters and meetings can go a long way in creating an all-encompassing culture of reading at your school.
Beyond improved data visibility, the new dashboard design also streamlines and simplifies staff actions and site navigation. Atop the homepage, a “Log For My Classes” button displays for all teachers and media specialists with rostered classes. With just a few clicks, you can swiftly select and input reading sessions for any of your classes and students. The new dashboard also includes quick and easy access to the most-used administrative sections of school Beanstack sites, including our robust data reporting tools.
We also overhauled our student and class information interface. The new Classes and Readers section clearly displays all of a teacher’s students and classes, and all the students and classes at a school for media specialists. Educators can effortlessly log reading for a whole class or view all the students within a certain class and their reading profiles. And the layout, search, and quick-action icons to find and take action for specific students are all freshly streamlined for much easier reading management.
Last but far from least, we’ve expanded the ability to create customizable reading challenges to all staff with rostered classes. Teachers as well as media specialists can now create reading challenges for specific classes to provide curriculum-aligned reading motivation. You can view and reuse fellow teachers’ reading challenges within your school, as well as access our extensive library of reading challenge templates and materials. Our readymade challenges align with common curriculum goals—as seen in our AP English or Short Stacks reading list challenges—promote independent reading, and explore different popular genres like graphic novels and spooky stories.
Get Started
All existing Beanstack for Schools partners have instant access to the powerful new admin experience. Not a client, but looking to consolidate your school district’s reading motivation and tracking tools into one easy and quiz-free platform? Get in touch today for a demo and pricing information!