When learning gaps go unrecognized and unaddressed, students fall farther and farther behind. Learning gaps create problems for teachers, too, because they can be so time consuming to identify, address, and fix.

Unless, of course, you’re using MobyMax. That’s what Jen Lindquist, a Moby Champion an outstanding 4^th grade teacher from Kane Area Elementary in Kane, PA, discovered. Here’s her inspiring story.

Fourth grade teacher Jen Lindquist started using MobyMax a few years ago while she was still teaching sixth grade. Even though she had to pay for it herself, she thought it would be a valuable tool to help teach her students English/ Language Arts. And it was, for a few key reasons.

MobyMax makes going back to school super fun, especially when kids have a cool bulletin board they can track their progress on. 

Thousands of teachers have already created boards to get their kids inspired, motivated, and excited starting on Day One. We've picked the top 15 to give you some ideas for a MobyMax bulletin board that will be perfect for your own classroom.

Contests are a fantastic way to motivate students; a little friendly competition can push students to learn more than they could even imagine! This week, we added new features to MobyMax Contests, including contests in multiple subjects and contests for time spent working in Moby. To give all students or groups a fair shot at winning, we added weighting points by fractions and equalizing points among groups with uneven numbers of people.
 

Once your contest is complete, print out certificates for your students to reward all of their hard work. You can also award them game time or even unlock a game for them!


We'd love to see these contests in action! Snap some photos of your students working on a MobyMax Contest and send them along to support@mobymax.com. You can also share photos of your contest with us on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.

The “learning gap.”

It may be the biggest hurdle you face on that first day you walk into your classroom.

In the “old days,” you probably would have used the same assessment tool to evaluate every student, then tried to find the time to analyze the results, figure out what a particular student did and didn’t know, and devise a plan to help that student get up to speed. All the while, you’d be trying to keep your entire class on track. Given the many other demands on your time and perhaps increasingly crowded classrooms, some students might never have had their learning gaps identified and filled.

Third-grade teacher Monica Contreras became a MobyMax advocate as soon as she saw it in action years ago. Many of her fellow educators at McKitrick Elementary School in Lutz, Fla., quickly followed suit when she began to introduce them to the leading e-learning platform for K-8 students.

The teachers and students at Sherman Elementary School in Comfort, W.Va., fell in love with the MobyMax e-learning platform during an extended period of snow days.

The personalized, blended curriculum worked so well outside of the classroom that Sherman students actually gained half a grade level of improvement in language and grammar, even though the school’s schedule was severely disrupted by weather-related closings.

Because of that success, assistant principal Jacob Messer said the educators at Sherman didn’t think twice about the best way to help students fight the annual summer learning loss known as summer slide.

More than 100 years of education research proves what K-8 teachers know from experience: When most students return to school in the fall, the knowledge they gained the prior school year has begun to fade.

This phenomenon is known as “summer slide”—learning loss that takes place when teaching stops during summer vacation. Summer slide can rob even the most adept students of the education basics they’ll need to excel at the next grade level and beyond. In fact, most students lose about two months of grade level equivalency in math computation skills during summer break.

We know how important it is for students to build their fact fluency. To help your students build fluency in even more facts, we've added numbers 11-15 to our Fact Fluency module. Once you adjust your settings to include these new facts, you'll see student progress reflected in our fluency tables.

Whether students are just learning their ABCs or diving into the world of linear equations, they deserve to be rewarded for their learning. Moby now offers contest and badge points for all curriculum areas so that all students will be motivated to learn.

We've also spruced up the Games screen a little bit so it's easier to interpret—take a peek!

You might have noticed a new button for "Curriculum Settings" on your home panel. Here, you'll be able to adjust the default settings for your entire class. Be sure to adjust these default settings before you register your students so that the settings stick for everybody!



If you click the "Modules" tab, you'll see a way to adjust settings for our Daily Challenges and Weekly Streaks. Hide them altogether, or just tweak them to include certain subjects.



Last but not least, we’ve released Grade 4 Social Studies, which covers US geography, regions of the United States, US History, the US Economy, and the US Government. In addition, there are over 30 lessons on essential social studies skills and practices, such as reading maps, using longitude and latitude, identifying cause and effect relationships, interpreting a timeline, resolving a conflict, and creating a bar graph. Like all of our newest content, Grade 4 Social Studies takes full advantage of Moby’s Touch Curriculum™ technology, allowing students to interact with and manipulate the curriculum in a number of ways to increase both engagement and retention.

Literacy skills have an enormous impact on learning. It’s important for students to start building foundational pre-reading skills early in order to be prepared for literacy instruction later on. That’s why we created Moby Alphabet.

Moby’s newest module, Moby Alphabet, gives your students a head start on the path towards reading mastery. Using engaging, animated Teach Me lessons and interactive exercises, Moby Alphabet teaches students letter-name recognition for each uppercase and lowercase letter in the English alphabet.

Moby Alphabet uses pictures, words, and sounds to make sure students develop deep and flexible mental networks that allow them to recognize letters in any order or context.  To increase retention, Moby Alphabet utilizes spaced-interval learning. This research-based technique varies the order in which students practice their letters and the time between each practice session to ensure that students develop true fluency.

As with all Moby subjects, teachers can track progress towards alphabet fluency in real time through their teacher dashboard and share data with parents, administrators, and even students with the click of a button.

Moby Alphabet is the first step in your students’ journey towards reading mastery!


Want to tinker with the lessons your students are automatically assigned? With the new "Class Exclude" feature, you can keep your class from ever seeing a lesson or lesson topic. Just check the boxes of the lessons you want to exclude!


We've also spruced up lots of our motivational tools for you! Game time and goals are now available for all subjects, and badges can be printed in three fun new sizes: grid, trading card, and poster!

Meet Moby’s Whiteboard Activities and Student Response System, now live on your Moby Teacher Panel.  

No longer must you Google for hours to find materials!

Whiteboard Activities
What is it?
Every Moby lesson and problem can now be displayed on your whiteboard!  This is huge!  This means that within two clicks, you have access to hundreds of thousands of lessons and problems.

How does it work?
You can easily create whiteboard lessons by selecting any problem from MobyMax’s curriculum or creating your own problems. When your students arrive, simply click the lesson you created, and Moby will display it.  The curriculum is fully interactive, so teachers or students can answer problems on a Smart Board or a connected computer as they are displayed.


Why should I use Whiteboard Activities?
Students love using MobyMax on their own, but until now, teachers haven’t had a way to utilize Moby in a whole-class setting. With Whiteboard Activities, that all changes. Whiteboard Activities gives you a simple way to use the entire catalogue of MobyMax curriculum with your whole group. If you can’t find exactly what you’re looking for in Moby’s curriculum, you can create your own problems that perfectly pair with your lesson plan.

Student Response System
What is it?
Moby’s Student Response System allows you to queue up a series of problems for students to answer and provides real-time data to quickly assess student understanding. It’s a great tool for whole-class instruction, but you can also use it to create exit tickets or even homework assignments.

How does it work?
You can create lessons by selecting problems from Moby’s curriculum, or create your own. Once you enable access to a lesson, students can log in to their own MobyMax accounts via any internet-connected device (such as a laptop, tablet, or phone) to submit answers. You will get real-time data as students answer questions to quickly assess whether or not students understand the material.


Why should I use Student Response System?
Moby’s Student Response System is a fantastic way to engage every student. Students love answering questions on their devices and seeing the class data. In addition to increasing engagement, Student Response System also gives you an excellent tool for checking understanding and administering formative assessment throughout a lesson. The real-time data provided by Moby’s Student Response System allows you to see which concepts students have mastered and where they need further instruction.

Best,
Glynn and Wade
P.S.  We also just released Social Studies, Grade 3.