Blog Post 6: Dreambox

https://www.dreambox.com/

       

This post is about Dreambox, a tool found in Dr. Wang's T3PP powerpoint in the list of top 15 tools used by Elementary teachers. Dreambox is an online tool for kindergarten through 12th grader ELA learning. It also has an additional math feature for kindergarten through 8th grade. It is a pay-for-service that must be bought by districts or schools. It is an adaptive site that adjusts to the level of the student in reading fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, and math skills. In Dreambox, the teacher has an online classroom where students work to pass levels and earn tokens by completing activities. The teacher can monitor student's progress, and students can work at their own pace and level. Dreambox tracks student growth and achievement in both math and reading.

    

    For ease of use, it is simple for both students and teachers. Students have a home page of a map, where they click an activity and begin it. When they have finished the activity, it reports their score and moves on either to the next topic or gives the student more practice on the current topic if necessary. The teacher dashboard is also easy to use. Teachers can view all their students and look into each of their progress, as well as assign certain areas for students to learn or practice. This site works for pretty much all ages. It gets more complex as the age of students increases, which is a nice feature. 

        When it comes to versatility, Dreambox excels. Students can do both math and reading work. There are a variety of activities for students to do in both with different types of matching games, reading problems, listening tasks, and more. In addition, it is adaptive, so it meets the student where they are at. The student must prove proficiency with a topic before moving on to the next. This means each student can go at their own pace, which is great for all levels of students. 

        For the overall likelihood of using this in my future classroom, I think it would depend on the

technology used by the school I teach in. If my school did use Dreambox, I would happily do so as I think it is a great tool for students to use. I like its adaptiveness and interactiveness. The strength of this comes in its interactiveness, which relates to the PICRAT model of technology use. Dreambox transforms the way reading and math can be taught, as many of the activities can only be done digitally. And, it is extremely interactive which makes it rank pretty high on the PICRAT model. This shows me that this is a tool that could be very useful in my teaching and that students could be engaged in.