Enter to Win Our "College and Career Ready" Dream Board Contest!

"College and Career Ready"—how often do you use or hear these words as an educator? Have you ever paused to ask what "College and Career Ready" means to your students? For students, those words should incite visions of their future: the college or university they hope to attend, the Fortune 500 company they want to work for, or perhaps the military branch in which they'd like to serve.

Let's Get Creative! Stride™ is launching a nationwide contest that asks students to put their college and career dreams into pictures. Students will create their own "dream boards" on poster board to illustrate their future goals. Click here for details on designing a dream board! Testing season is upon us, and we know this is a challenging time for students and teachers. Let's help students find perspective for why they continue to work hard in school and prepare for their tests—with the end goal of becoming College and Career Ready!

Contest Deadline is April 7, 2017!

How Can Your School Win? Share contest details with teachers and parents. Use this handy, printable take-home sheet. The national deadline for the contest is one month away: April 7, 2017. Set a deadline for your students to submit their dream board posters to you prior to this date. When all dream boards have been completed, find a central location in your school to take a picture(s) of your boards. You could choose to display them in a hallway, foyer or cafeteria; or have students hold them up in a group picture.  Submit pictures of your dream boards, along with a list of participating students, to afrith@LTSed.com no later than 5 p.m. CST on Friday, April 7, 2017. The winner will be announced the following week. The school with the best participation and most creativity will win national recognition, a beautiful plaque to display on your campus, student certificates for every participant, and other goodies from Stride and LTS Education Systems! If you plan to participate, please RSVP at the link below so we can stay in touch as your school's dream board campaign begins to take shape!

Count me in! I plan to participate.

Share Your Dreams! Don't forget to share your school's dream boards on social media! Use hashtags: #CollegeAndCareerReady #WeAreTheFuture #DreamBoard #Stride

Check Out Stride's New Games!

Check Out Stride's New Games! Three exciting new titles to play over Spring Break!

From coast to coast, students are itching for Spring Break. Whether they're traveling or relaxing at home, your students can enjoy three new Stride games during their time off. These games are live in your Stride account today! Add, Subtract, React! Our Chemist has gone a little "mad scientist" and forgotten the formulas for his solutions. He needs assistance in Basic or Advanced mathematics. Once you've mastered making mixtures, you can move on to the Multiplied level of play. Genre: Math (Basic and Advanced) Hero: The Chemist's assistant (you!) Objectives: The Chemist is looking for a chemical with a certain number. Use the funnel to add chemicals from the passing vials to your own vial. You have three tries to successfully complete the equation. Rocket Kitty Following in the footsteps of his famous ancestor Félicette, the first cat in space, Rocket Kitty is ready to launch an expedition to the moon, Mars and beyond!  Genre: Arcade Hero: Rocket Kitty Objectives: Answer questions correctly in Stride to launch. Collect the stars to boost your journey. Avoid the enemies as you loop and dive through the obstacles!

PMA4 Starts March 6

The 4th and final Progress Monitoring Assessment begins Monday, March 6. The window ends on April 7.

You will probably want for your students to complete the Progress Monitoring Assessment as soon as possible. The sooner the assessment is complete, the sooner you have your reports.

What to do in preparation for PMA

1. When students know that the data is important to you, it will be more important to them. Run the Class PMA report and talk briefly with each student about the percentage of correct answers on each subject during PMA1, PMA2, and PMA3. Asking them to predict a score for PMA4 is a possible motivator.
2. Review test-taking strategies. Students should use scratch paper on the math problems. Trying to do calculations in one's head is a recipe for disaster. 

What to do after PMA

1. Run the Class PMA Report. You will see a list of every standard with the percentage of correct answers. Which standards were low? How will you remediate these standards before the high-stakes test?
2. Do you want to do small-group instruction based on a particularly important standard. Run the Class Grouping Report. For each standard, you will see who scored 70% or above, who scored below 50%, and who scored between 50% and 70%.

Motivational Ideas

I received this feature in an email from LTS. It highlights ideas one elementary school has implemented to motivate Stride use. Your school could be the next one featured.

Benignus Elementary is Bananas for Stride 

 Brrrrrr-ing on the Winter Frenzy at Benignus Elementary!

Nothing beats the winter fun of a good old-fashioned snowball fight!  Benignus Elementary in Spring, TX (Klein ISD)  knows this to be true. That’s why for their “Winter Frenzy” school-wide Stride contest, the Top 100 students got to toss some snow on February 20!

Students were a bit confused at first, since there was no snow on the ground. However, Benignus staff used chilled, felt balls for “snowballs.” According to Holly Mason, Assistant Principal at Benignus Elementary, “The kids loved it! It was so much fun!”

      

    …………       

Learning Fun All Year Long

Benignus has been extremely creative with their school-wide Stride contests this year. In November, they held a “Turkey Trot” contest, with the top primary and secondary class winners each receiving spirit sticks and winning a spotlight on the school-wide video announcements.

Over winter break, Benignus students competed in the “Snowflake Showdown.” This time, the winning class got to host the school-wide video announcements from their classroom, and topped off their victory with a popcorn party.

We look forward to finding out what contests they will run this spring! Thank you for sharing these great contest ideas!

Weekly Incentives Motivate Students

Weekly incentives are also very successful at Benignus Elementary. On the “Stride Wall” pictured here, the Reading Specialist highlights the top class from each grade level for the week (based on Stride Reading performance).

 “Stride is hands-down the most user friendly program I have ever encountered.  The designers seem to have taken the time to see every possible challenge or question encountered by teachers.  They have created a program that fits seamlessly into our curriculum and classrooms.  Students learn while having fun, and teachers can administer prescriptive lessons or glean priceless data.” - Dede Dietzman, 1st grade Teacher, Benignus Elementary

Getting Ready for STAAR Testing

What are your strategies for using Stride to help prepare for the STAAR tests this year?

Holly Mason, M.Ed., Assistant Principal at Benignus Elementary, reports:

“As testing has gotten closer, teachers are writing TEKS-aligned quizzes and assessments. Based on in-class formative and summative assessments, teachers are also assigning specific skills in Stride to spiral back to and assist with TEKS/skill mastery.”

We Welcome Your School’s Contributions.

The everyday strides that your students and teachers are making in the classroom are the very reason Stride exists! Your ideas and achievements help us build a better program. 

PMA 3 Ends February 10

The third Progress Monitoring Assessment ends February 10.

You have the ability to run a report on PMA for both the school and the classroom level.

Running the PMA Report at the School Level:

1. Use the school administrative login to access Stride Academy.
2. Click the "Reports" tab.
3. Click the blue "Generate Real-Time Reports" button.
4. Click "View Reports."
5. From the list of reports which appears, click "School PMA Report."
6. The defaults on the next screen should be OK as is.
7. Click the red "Apply" button.

You will notice that the graph is the first page of almost two-dozen pages of data. You can click through those graphs and tables to see data for each class and data for each grade level.

My recommendation would be to share with any given teacher the data for that teacher's class and the average for the grade level as a whole. That way, each teacher gets an idea where he or stands in relationship to the rest of the pack without ranking teachers. Richard Defoor addresses this point in his PLC seminars.



Running the PMA Report at the Classroom Level:

1. Use your KCC code and password to access Stride Academy.
2. Click the "Reports" tab.
3. Click the blue "Generate Real-Time Reports" button.
4. Click "View Reports."
5. From the list of reports which appears, click "Class PMA Report."
6. The defaults on the next screen should be OK as is.
7. Click the red "Apply" button.

The resulting graph will look much the same as the school graph displayed above. Clicking through the remaining pages will reveal data on each student.

Progress Monitoring Starts January 9

The third Progress Monitoring period begins Monday, January 9th. It runs through February 10th. Of course, no teachers should ever have to worry about when the PMA period ends. Many students will have completed PMA by the end of the first week. Progress Monitoring takes only about 30 minutes per subject to complete.

As a teacher, you can always look at the Class Roster to see who has completed PMA. A capital "M" means that student has completed PMA in math. A lower-case "m" means the student has begun the PMA. When you see "MR" (or "MRS" for grade levels that have science) up and down the page, you are finished.

At the administrative level, the default screen you see when logging in shows you the progress each class is making towards completing PMA.

A capital letter means all students have completed PMA in that subject. A lower-case letter means there is more to do. In parentheses, you see how many students are in progress followed by how many students have completed PMA in that subject. When you see all capital letters up and down the page, your school has completed progress monitoring.

When we get well into the PMA period and many students have not completed it, it tells us one thing...that class is not using the program. Since Stride automatically serves up PMA questions until PMA is complete, if a student has not completed PMA, he or she has also not done any other work in the program during school hours.

If you do not already have it on the calendar, the final PMA for this school year is March 6th through April 7th.

PMA Ends December 2

The second Progress Monitoring Assessment ends December 2.

You have the ability to run a report on PMA for both the school and the classroom level.

Running the PMA Report at the School Level:

1. Use the school administrative login to access Stride Academy.
2. Click the "Reports" tab.
3. Click the blue "Generate Real-Time Reports" button.
4. Click "View Reports."
5. From the list of reports which appears, click "School PMA Report."
6. The defaults on the next screen should be OK as is.
7. Click the red "Apply" button.

You will notice that the graph is the first page of almost two-dozen pages of data. You can click through those graphs and tables to see data for each class and data for each grade level.

My recommendation would be to share with any given teacher the data for that teacher's class and the average for the grade level as a whole. That way, each teacher gets an idea where he or stands in relationship to the rest of the pack without ranking teachers. Richard Defoor addresses this point in his PLC seminars.



Running the PMA Report at the Classroom Level:

1. Use your KCC code and password to access Stride Academy.
2. Click the "Reports" tab.
3. Click the blue "Generate Real-Time Reports" button.
4. Click "View Reports."
5. From the list of reports which appears, click "Class PMA Report."
6. The defaults on the next screen should be OK as is.
7. Click the red "Apply" button.

The resulting graph will look much the same as the school graph displayed above. Clicking through the remaining pages will reveal data on each student.