This is the official Tumblr for TenMarks, a FREE educational software program that helps students grades 2-12 practice + master math concepts. Come visit us at TenMarks today!
UPDATE: TenMarks users, your accounts will be accessible as usual on Saturday, April 28th. We are rescheduling our maintenance for Premium Playlist upgrades in the near future.
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After a quite a few long nights of coding, we’re ecstatic to be releasing a new-and-improved Playlist module for TenMarks Premium users this weekend. While we usually make product updates without having to take down the site, this weekend’s changers are a bit more complicated than our usual fare. In order to successfully implement the Playlist changes and migrate all premium students to our new format, TenMarks will be inaccessible to all users on Saturday, April 28th, 2012. This scheduled downtime will impact all customers, including those who use TenMarks for Families, TenMarks Premium, and the free version of TenMarks Math.
For a sneak peek at the changes that Premium users will see in their Playlists when the site returns on Sunday, April 29th, click here. If you’re a current TenMarks user who would like to know more about TenMarks premium, just click the red “Upgrade” button in your teacher account or send us an email at info@tenmarks.com.
As always, we look forward to your feedback and suggestions to help improve TenMarks for your students. Feel free to tweet us, join our Edmodo community, leave a message on our Facebook page or use our YouTube videos while the site is down for maintenence.
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
We heard a rumor that it’s National Stress Awareness Month— appropriately timed for spring standardized testing, nonetheless!— so we whipped up a little something to help teachers and students make it to the end of the month. (And the school year!) Enjoy!
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
Are you an #edchat teacher? If so, you might recognize the topic of one of our favorite Delicious stacks, Professional Development, from last night’s #edchat on Twitter.
With budget cuts stripping away resources from districts everywhere, finding the time and funding for Professional Development opportunities, even those in your backyard, can be tough. After having heard so much about the importance of PD and collaboration in the creation of a positive learning environment, we’ve even started our own Professional Development Webinar Series on a few popular topics in digital learning. Did we miss any great, reliable resources for teachers and PD? Let us know and we’ll add them to the list!
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
In anticipation of the release of “Angry Birds in Space”, we’ve updated our Delicious stack on using the game as a teaching tool in the classroom. The new Angry Birds game was created in collaboration with National Geographic and NASA, and the link we added even features video of the first-ever game of Angry Birds played by an astronaut in space! (Zero gravity = endless fun, yes?)
Filled with suggestions on teaching physics, math, engineering and science with Angry Birds, we’ve also included “Angry Verbs”, a creative vocabulary idea from 5th grade TenMarks teacher. Want to see more of the resources we’ve curated on hot topics in education? Follow us on Delicious, where we curate and update links regularly!
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
Math Madness: it’s taking over!
Since launching the Math Madness contest on Digital Learning Day, we’ve been busy crunching numbers, sorting classrooms and expanding the challenge to keep up with math mad students everywhere. We’ve seen thousands of students answer thousands of questions each day— a MILLION questions a week, total— and there’s still almost a month of competition remaining!
The positive response to the challenge has been so great that we added new prizes to the contest at its launch. In addition to each classroom being eligible to win an iPad 2, we’re awarding one classroom a week a free subscription to TenMarks Premium for the next school year! For the “Most Spirited” classes— those who share their contest spirit with pictures, stories— there’s also another opportunity to win TenMarks Premium for the next school year.
And of course, like any good “Madness” tournament happening this time of year (ahem, NCAA March Madness, anyone?!), there’s a Wildcard Challenge on the horizon. We can’t quite let the cat out of the bag yet, but this one is sure to kick the competition into a frenzy!
Do you have a class or student participating in the contest? Leave a note above in our Wallwisher Board (or leave a Facebook comment here) to cheer on your favorites! Be sure to include the class name or bib number so that students and teachers know you’re talking about them!
Wednesday, February 1, 2012
Happy Digital Learning Day, everyone! To celebrate the most wired educational awareness day ever, we’re launching Math Madness, a six week challenge to encourage students to practice and master their math skills. Would you like to prepare your students for upcoming spring testing and have a chance at winning an iPad™ for your classroom? Register here today— the contest is open to new and current TenMarks teachers!
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Digital Learning Day— Are you in?
Teachers, did you know that the most exciting education holiday of the 21st century is just around the corner? Next Wednesday, February 1, the Alliance for Education will be kicking off the first-ever Digital Learning Day with town hall meetings, webcasts, contests, and even a special eSubscription opportunity from USA Today. From the Alliance for Education:
“Digital Learning Day is a nationwide celebration of innovative teaching and learning through digital media and technology that engages students and provides them with a rich, personalized educational experience. On Digital Learning Day, a majority of states, hundreds of school districts, thousands of teachers, and more than a million students will encourage the innovative use of technology by trying something new, showcasing success, kicking off project-based learning, or focusing on how digital tools can help improve student outcomes.”
Participating in DLDay is easy— all you have to do is try one new digital learning tool, discuss your experience with others, and showcase your digital learning success! To date, hundreds of thousands of educators and over a million students will be taking part in Digital Learning Day. If you already use TenMarks as a digital supplement to your instruction, take a look at a few favorite digital learning tools.
Edmodo, a social network for the classroom. iCreatetoEducate, a tool for students to animate complex math and science concepts. LearnBoost, an online gradebook and lesson planner. LessonPlansPage, lesson plans for teachers, by teachers. Codeacademy, author of a challenge that inspires students to learn computer codinge. BrainPOP, a provider of animated, curriculum-based content for students of all ages.
Do you have any stories of how digital learning has enhanced your teaching or positively impacted your students? Share your success stories on Facebook or Twitter under the #DLDay hashtag.
Monday, December 5, 2011
An #edutech Fairy Tale Come True…
Hi there, Jessy here! I’m the one who tweets, blogs and otherwise posts to our Edmodo, Facebook, LinkedIn pages. Over the weekend, I had a part in telling the incredible story of Professor Boyer, instructor in the Department of Geography at Virginia Tech, whose work inspired me to pursue an career in social media. When I was Professor Boyer’s student, his World Regions course wasn’t the 3,000-strong juggernaut that it is today. Nonetheless, I’m incredibly proud to share the success of a professor, my professor, who is shaking up the lecture hall and creating once-in-a-lifetime learning opportunities for his students. For me, his course was life-changing, and I can only hope that this story inspires even more educators to creatively use technology to engage their students.
Earlier this year, Skype launched “Skype in the Classroom,” a program that formally recognized (and moved to better support) something that many teachers and students were already doing: using the VOIP service to bring in virtual visitors and to connect classrooms to others all over the world. Piping in astronauts, authors, politicians, professors, and so on, Skype has helped overcome some of the geographical hurdles that prevent guest speakers from ever coming to a school.
Arguably there’s no better example of someone confined geographically than Aung San Suu Kyi.
Nobel Peace Prize winner and Burmese resistance leader, Aung San Suu Kyi has spent 15 of the last 22 years under house arrest by the Myanmar military junta. During her periods of house arrest, Suu Kyi has been banned from meeting with other pro-democracy leaders, with international visitors, or with the media. She was released from the latest house arrest in November of last year.
And tomorrow evening, she’ll join Professor John Boyer (@plaidavenger) and his Virginia Tech World Region’s class — via Skype.
Boyer’s classes are already well-known for their guest speakers. Via a YouTube video pitch, Boyer lured writer, entrepreneur and wine conneisseur Gary Vaynerchuk to talk about the Geography of Wine, and he convinced father and son actors Martin Sheen and Emilio Estevezto come to campus to talk about their new movie.
But famous guest speakers aren’t the only thing that set Boyer’s classes apart. His World Regions class is enormously popular at Virginia Tech. Enormously. Some 3000 students are currently enrolled, a size that might make you question the professor’s efficacy or the class’s value.
But as former student Jessy Irwin made it clear when she told me about tomorrow night’s guest speaker, it’s a class that effectively uses social media and tech tools — YouTube, a Twitter backchannel, blogging, chat — to help encourage engagement. It’s “a perfect example of how social media and technology integration can enhance the efforts of an effective, engaging educator and enrich student experience,” Irwin says, adding that Boyer’s class “changed my life” (she now works as a social media coordinator for the education company TenMarks).
Below is Professor Boyer’s YouTube request to Aung San Suu Kyi:
Monday, November 21, 2011
We win! (Again!)
Last week, we were pretty excited to get the “Cool Tool” award from EdTech Digest. We’ve been longtime fans of EdTech Digest— educational technology is our thing, how could we not be?!— and we were (and are) incredibly stoked that Victor Rivero not only thought that we were cool, but that we were included in such an impressive group of educational tools that have been doing great work to make a difference in classrooms all over the country. We’re proud to be in such great company, and we love our nifty gold seal.
This week, we’re all kinds of excited all over again, and here’s why…
When we weren’t looking, District Administration named as one of their Readers’ Choice Top 100 Products for 2011. Once again, we’re in the company of some incredible educational technology products— Edmodo, for example— and we’re incredibly honored to have been acknowledged as a K12 education product that supports education innovation. To date, TenMarks is used in over 30,000 classrooms with more than 2,000,000 math problems a week answered by students everywhere. Our goal is to change the lives of 2 million students by helping them learn math, and we’re working hard to reach it— getting an award here or there definitely inspires us to work harder to try to help bridge the gap in STEM education.
Friday, November 18, 2011
Not only did they do it without Google or Wikipedia, they did it without YouTube or TenMarks to help with their math problems!
Hi there, TenMarks here! It’s no secret that we’ve been wading into the world of math and education and digital learning over on Facebook, Twitter, Edmodo and LinkedIn, but we dropped the ball on putting together our own blog. Sure, we linked our funding announcement from TechCrunch in one very small (practically microscopic!) post and we shared some delicious cupcakes from our co-founder’s birthday in another, but we’re entirely guilty of setting up this Tumblr and neglecting it without ever having written an appropriate launch post.
We’re remedying that right now.
For those of you who know us already, you know that we’re TenMarks and we’re an educational software company that helps students practice and master math concepts.You might even know that we owe our existence to a dinner table squabble between our co-founder, Rohit Agarwal, and his niece, then a seventh grader who decided she didn’t need to learn a math concept on which she had tested poorly because her class had started a new unit. For those of you who don’t know us, we could continue to tell you all about how awesome we are (we did just win an award for being cool!) but we’re pretty sure that would get old rather fast. Plus… well, we already have a pretty nifty website to do that for us.
What we really want to do here, besides kick this blog off, is say that we’ve been incredibly blown away by the work that passionate educators and thinkers are doing to improve education prepare our students for the future; we’re incredibly inspired by what we’ve seen and we want to join the wider conversation and exchange of ideas happening in the blogosphere on fixing and improving the state of education in our country. We’re in the business of changing lives by providing students with a tool with which to build a strong foundation. We believe that strong foundations lead to even stronger futures, and while we may not always blog about serious things—we’ve got a wicked sense of humor and our social media gal really loves cake, math jokes, and pretty much all of the math cover songs she finds on YouTube, okay?—we can promise that we’ll do our best to speak up and share our passion for education, STEM, and educational technology here. We’ll be sure to provide a signal boost to and throw our two cents in on great ideas and important issues whenever and however we can.
Did we mention that we’re really excited to get this thing off the ground? Yay, we’re blogging now! Can’t wait to see where this takes us!
*… And oh, yeah, extra cool points for anyone who knows to what our title is making reference.
Friday, September 23, 2011
Wishing a very happy birthday to Rohit, our co-founder! Office birthdays are the best.
We’re absolutely thrilled to have closed this round of funding, and we cannot wait to put the money to use by helping millions more students learn math!
Earlier this year, Skype launched “Skype in the Classroom,” a program that formally recognized (and moved to better support) something that many teachers and students were already doing: using the VOIP service to bring in virtual visitors and to connect classrooms to others all over the world. Piping in astronauts, authors, politicians, professors, and so on, Skype has helped overcome some of the geographical hurdles that prevent guest speakers from ever coming to a school.
Nobel Peace Prize winner and Burmese resistance leader, Aung San Suu Kyi has spent 15 of the last 22 years under house arrest by the Myanmar military junta. During her periods of house arrest, Suu Kyi has been banned from meeting with other pro-democracy leaders, with international visitors, or with the media. She was released from the latest house arrest in November of last year.
