Math + Pizza = Fun

MobyMax is looking for the most dedicated math class in America. Could it be yours? Join our nationwide Math Challenge starting this week and see if your class ranks as the best in the country!

Here’s how the Challenge works.

We know that students and teachers love using MobyMax because it’s such a fun way to boost math skills. So, it just makes good sense that more Moby Math means more fun!

That’s why this end-of-year nationwide Moby Math Challenge puts the focus on how much time your class actually spends using Moby to do math. Participating teachers and classrooms will race against each other Monday (Dec 4) – Thursday (Dec 7) to see who racks up the highest average time spent in Moby Math.

The more minutes your class accumulates, the more improvements you’ll see in students’ abilities to understand place value, operations, proportional relationships, expressions and equations and probability – all of which align with Common Core standards and fit seamlessly into your schools’ educational objectives and requirements.

MobyMax, innovator of the nationally applauded personalized and blended learning curriculum for K-8 students, has won two 2017 THE Journal Readers’ Choice Awards. Known for helping students learn twice as fast, MobyMax garnered a Silver Medal in the Favorite Interventions & Remediation Software category and a Platinum Medal in the Favorite Adaptive/ Personalized Learning Tool category. Winners of the awards, which honor outstanding contributions in education, were determined via an online poll of over 1,000 education professionals.

“We are gratified that those on the frontlines of addressing our biggest instruction and motivation challenges have found MobyMax to be such a worthwhile partner,” said company co-founder Glynn Willett. “Thanks to their feedback and our own commitment to results-driven innovation, we’ve been able to create the most comprehensive all-in-one K-8 offering on the market. Our model enables students to consistently gain more than one full grade level after just 40 hours of work – and at a fraction of the cost of other products.

It's September, so it's time to fix those skill gaps before students start to fall behind.

If you'd like some tips on how to get your roster up and running in MobyMax, you'll find this quick video helpful.

Once you have your new students registered, you can let them pick up where they left off in MobyMax last year (by default) or restart them in any particular subject. 

In addition to our Personalized Learning, which has made MobyMax the most widely used curriculum in the United States, be sure to check out our new Pinpoint Assessments for Math and Language.  

Here's how to access Pinpoint Assessments:

MobyMax’s Pinpoint Assessments -- as the name implies -- lets you pinpoint the specific skills that each student is missing or has mastered.  This is done using two advanced modules: Skill Checker and Benchmarker.  

You'll want to use Skill Checker daily, not only because the tests take seconds to create, but because you can easily assign lessons to fix missing skills.

Benchmarker accurately measures student progress within a grade level in just 45 minutes. It also allows you to assign lessons that keep your students moving forward.

Skill Checker and Benchmarker are just the first elements in a comprehensive new approach that's soon to be indispensable in your classroom.  We will be adding more subjects, features, and modules throughout the school year. 

Motivating bored-but-gifted students using some fiery competition – and technology.

GUEST COLUMN | by Christopher Godshall 

There’s a lot of both media and academic attention paid to students with learning difficulties acting as barriers to acquiring knowledge, and rightly so. But teaching gifted and talented students poses its own set of challenges. Higher-achieving students can get bored easily or become impatient if they’re not given material that engages them academically. They can get frustrated if they find the pace in the classroom too slow. They also might yearn for a classroom that is more competitive than the one they’re in. Plus, not meeting these students’ needs for more challenging studies could squander the opportunity to push those students to new, exceptional heights.

As someone who has taught gifted and talented students for 16 years, I’m constantly on the lookout for ways to meet the needs of these pupils in a way that keeps them engaged, their parents informed, and me, as their teacher, at least a few steps ahead of them!

This summer, I turned to an edtech platform for the solution. The lessons I learned from our successes seemed worth sharing as a new school year gets underway.

There’s an old African proverb that says, “If you want to go fast, go alone. But if you want to go far, go together.” Deciding they wanted to go far, the teachers at McKitrick Elementary in Florida have banded together to ensure they meet perhaps the most ambitious goal they’ve ever set: answer two million MobyMax problems correctly in one school year. 

Why MobyMax?

MobyMax has been a big hit at McKitrick since teachers first started using it almost four years ago. Third Grade teacher, Monica Contreras, and her fellow teachers particularly appreciated how the curriculum empowers students to advance at their own pace and level, often fulfilling Moby’s promise to help kids learn twice as fast. They progressed dramatically with Moby, embracing both school-year and summer learning contests (read more here).

“I love this program because it is a safe, reliable, beneficial, and fun option for students to use in the classroom and at home,” says Contreras. “One of the major advantages of using MobyMax is the ease of differentiation. During MobyMax time, students can build on skills they still need to practice that may be below the grade level material we are covering in class, or they may accelerate into above-level content. Each subject area begins with a placement test that places a student at an appropriate level and builds on that knowledge.”

We just released a new feature: Teacher Rewards! In this module, teachers earn points when their students answer questions and pass lessons in the program. Teachers can then "spend" these points on rewards for their students. Reward students with game minutes, games, badges, Moby Friends minutes, sweepstakes tickets, or educational videos called Maxoids! We handed out a bunch of free points for you to get started - why not give rewards a try today? 

Join us for our first Twitter Party on Tuesday, June 27th at 8pm ET and use #mobychat to join the discussion! The Moby team will lead a lively conversation about classroom resources, online education, and technology in the classroom. This twitter chat is a great way to share ideas and learn about new tricks that are working for teachers and administrators around the country!

We’ll follow a standard Twitter chat structure, posting a series of open-ended discussion questions over the course of 30 minutes. Follow the discussion with the hashtag #mobychat (or by visiting us at @MobyMax). Each question will be identified as: Q1, Q2, Q3,. etc. When you tweet a comment or response, label your answer as A1, A2, A3, etc.

We look forward to chatting with you on Tuesday, June 27th! Register for the event here to be eligible to win prizes.

MobyMax Twitter Party registration link: http://bit.ly/2szAbu5

Exciting news! MobyMax has just released Social Studies for grade 7. Click on the "Library" tab to see our new lessons on Ancient Egypt, China, Greece, and Rome!