8 Reasons You'll Love Our New Teacher Dashboard
Audiobooks are a fantastic tool for widening young people’s access to literature, and for engaging students who might typically feel excluded from reading, such as those who:
- Have learning disabilities, dyslexia or attention deficit disorders
- Are experiencing mental health struggles
- Have a physical disability which makes it harder to see or hold a book
- Spend lots of time in hospital
That’s why Listening Books have been proudly supporting schools with our audiobook lending service for over 20 years!
Our collection boasts thousands of fantastic audiobooks for children and teens, such as David Walliams' stories, Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson series and Derek Landy's Skulduggery Pleasant books. We also offer a huge range of educational fiction and non-fiction, such as Terry Deary's Horrible Histories books, CGP Study Guides and J. B. Priestley's An Inspector Calls.
But did you know that we have recently improved our offer for schools? We’ve built a brand-new teacher dashboard, filled with fantastic resources to get your students listening to more stories. Read on for the best bits of what you can now achieve thanks to this exciting update.
1. Easily view your students’ details and account settings
Now when you log in on our website and head to your School Dashboard, you’re greeted with a neatly laid-out list of all the students you currently have signed up to our service. This allows you to quickly view important information such as membership expiry dates and pupils’ login details - no more need to despair when your students forget their password for the umpteenth time!
2. See which audiobooks your students have borrowed
This new dashboard layout also allows you to keep an eye on the titles your students are listening to from our wide range of children’s and young adult fiction, and educational Sound Learning titles. This will allow you to maximise your pupils’ use of our service by checking if they’re listening at home, and easily suggest other audiobooks they might enjoy based on their interests.
3. Ensure your students only have access to age-appropriate content
Another brilliant function of our new dashboard is the ability to automatically limit the content that children can access based on their date of birth. Young people under the limits of 12 and 16 years of age are only able to listen to audiobooks suitable for their respective age ranges, so you can have confidence that the material your students have access to is safe and appropriate.
4. Give your students access to thousands of magazines, comic books and newspapers
Thanks to our partnership with PressReader, teachers now have the option to give pupils digital access to popular publications such as The Beano, Girls’ World, 110% Gaming Magazine, The Week Junior, and many more! This service can be reached through the Listening Books website, and allows users to listen and read along with ease.
5. Change who can access the service with ease
If a child isn’t taking advantage of our audiobook service, leaves the school or is no longer eligible for membership, our new dashboard gives you the complete freedom to remove them from your list of logins and add another student in their place. You can do this as many times as you like over the course of your school’s membership with us.
6. Send letters out to parents and carers using our pre-made template
To make it as easy for you as possible to get kids using the service, we’ve also included a helpful letter template. This lets parents and carers know what their children will be able to access through our service, and gives a handy step-by-step guide to listening to audiobooks on a computer, smartphone or tablet. Simply visit School Resources, download the template, add your student’s unique username and password, and you can get your students listening at home as well as at school!
7. Award certificates to students for finishing audiobooks
Another fantastic feature to be found under School Resources are our lovely certificate templates, which you can give to your students for reaching listening milestones, such as the completion of their 1st, 5th, 10th and 20th audiobook. This gives pupils a goal to work towards, as well as a real sense of achievement for working on their literacy skills.
![Certificate reads: Listening Books Certificate of Achievement. This is to certify that [student's name] has successfully completed the audiobook [audiobook's title]. Spaces for teacher to sign and date the certificate. Listening Books logo and purple and blue decorations at either side of the certificate](https://listeningbooks.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/public/content/1652374270_ITcwm9d8NJ_TD7.jpg)
8. Receive extra stats on your students’ listening
At the end of the year, we can also provide you with overall statistics on how many audiobooks have been borrowed by your pupils in total, and which titles they have been listening to, at your request. You may find this is an excellent opportunity to set a target number of completed books which your students can work to reach as a group during the year - in this way you can be at the centre of helping your students to develop meaningful relationships with one another, based on their love for listening!
A Listening Books membership for your school will help your students with print disabilities to whizz through reading material, deepen comprehension and build analytical skills! To find out more about the benefits of our audiobook service for your students, please click here.
Author: Emily Pye
