The DreamBox educator newsletter: supporting elementary math education

Schools and districts across the country are leveraging DreamBox Learning to increase proficiency, improve competence, and boost student confidence in mathematics. Today DreamBox Learning is introducing one more tool to support educators help EVERY student achieve math proficiency.

The DreamBox Administrator Dashboard enables Principals, school math coaches, district curriculum leaders and administrators to understand student proficiency – at a concept, grade, or classroom level – track program utilization, and quantify student progress. Take a tour of the new Administrator reports!

The new DreamBox Learning Administrator Reports are straightforward, easy to use and customize – and available at no additional cost with any school or district purchase of DreamBox Learning.

• School Summary Report helps inform instructional practice with a window into classroom use of DreamBox and how progress varies.
• Concept Proficiency Report highlights proficiency by grade level, classroom and change over time.
• Usage Over Time Report reveals the time students spend on DreamBox during and outside of school hours.
• License Utilization Report tracks classroom and building utilization so meeting audit requirements and tracking expenses is made easy.

Sign up to attend an upcoming DreamBox webinar to learn more about the new Administrator Dashboard Reports.

Our new Administrator Dashboard Reports are available today to school and district customers with several classrooms or schools using DreamBox.

Download the Administrator Dashboard overview and share the details with your School and District leaders!

For more information, please visit our Administrator Dashboard page, email us at support@dreambox.com or call us at 877-451-7845 (weekdays, 7am to 5pm, Pacific Time).

Webinar: “How Formative Instruction Can Accelerate Student Learning”

Date: Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Time: 2:00 p.m. ET / 11:00 a.m. PT

The need to learn from the practices of highly effective teachers to help more students excel is one of the great challenges elementary educators face. In this webinar, presented by Dr. Margaret Jorgensen, a leading authority on assessment for K-12 education and the Managing Director at Battelle for Kids, you will:

• Learn what research tells us about the practices of highly effective teachers
• Find out how highly effective teachers differentiate instruction
• Understand how interactive learning and embedded assessments provide real time formative information to help elementary teachers effectively accelerate student learning

Click here to register for this timely webinar on Formative Instruction!

Did you know?

DreamBox is at ASCD 2011 in San Francisco this weekend!

Are you attending ASCD 2011 in San Francisco, CA? If so, make sure you visit DreamBox Learning in booth 2311! Join us in our booth for a daily schedule of presentations focusing on key educator challenges:

DreamBox will be at NCTM 2011 in Indianapolis, April 13-16th

In addition to our hourly presentations in booth 1428, stop by for our speaker session on Virtual Manipulatives: Tools for Scaffolding and Adaptations, at 9:30am on April 16th. If you’re attending NCTM, send us a mail at events@dreambox.com, and we’ll invite you to a special event DreamBox is hosting at the conference.

Tips for Teachers

Looking for a way to build number sense skills with your students? Try using one of our virtual manipulatives, Snap Blocks. Using this for 5-10 minutes can help get your students engaged in thinking mathematically before starting on a math lesson.

Invite one student up to the interactive whiteboard to move the Snap Blocks to the correct trays to prove if it’s a true or false equation. Blue blocks are moved to the blue tray and green blocks to the green tray. The student explains what their strategy was in solving the equation. For example, “I know that 5 + 5 = 10, which is one of the numbers on the other side of the equal sign. So then I know this is not a true equation, because 7 + 4 equals 11 and the only other number left on the other side is a 10.” When students are finished moving the cubes, ask them to read the final equation, “21 does not equal 20.”

For those students who are not ready to use mental math, when the problem is flashed on the board, have your students quickly write the equation in their notebook and let them solve it with paper and pencil. The ultimate goal is for them to develop the strategies to solve it mentally. For students who struggle with number sense or mental math, try to find time to work with them in small groups either on the interactive white board or at the teacher computer, so they can physically move the Snap Blocks for every equation.