Welcome to the brand-new Product Spotlight series on the Beanstack Blog. Here, you’ll find news about new features and insights into how Beanstack’s tools can help you achieve your reading goals. Whether you’re a librarian, teacher, parent, student, or reader who already uses Beanstack, or you’re thinking about using Beanstack to grow a culture of reading in your home, school, or community: this series will have something for you.
What’s New: Groups for Schools
School Librarians and Media Specialists: Beanstack’s new School Groups feature is especially for you. We built Groups after hearing from many of our school clients that they form student reading groups outside of classrooms to help motivate students to participate in reading challenges.
Student reading groups that cut across grade levels and classrooms can be fantastic reading motivators. These groups might take the form of competing teams aiming to log the most reading. Or the groups might be more collaborative, with students logging together to achieve a shared goal.
Now, it’s easy for Librarians, Teachers and Media Specialists to create and log reading for these kinds of groups in Beanstack. In their administrative console, Librarians and Media Specialists can create Groups of up to 25 students from any classroom and any grade level. In the same place, Librarians and Media Specialists can log a reading session, by minutes or book, for an entire Group with just a few clicks.
Beanstack will automatically add reading logged in Groups to each student’s logs and award students any badges they earned.
Give Groups a Try!
We’re excited to add Groups to the Beanstack toolkit, and can’t wait to learn more about how Librarians and Media Specialists use Groups to foster and grow true cultures of reading in their schools and in their students’ lives.
If your school is using Groups, or is planning to, we’d love to hear from you. Drop us a note to let us know how Groups are working for you, your school, and your students.