Do You IXL? {A Series of Posts - Post 4 - The Final Post}

THE YEAR IS DONE. Oh, my golly. What a year. But, the growth of my students is what made me so happy about this program.

But I'm not going to give you JUST the roses of IXL. This post is also going to include the thorns, too.

So let's talk. Let's get down to the nitty gritty and talk about the pros and cons of IXL throughout this past year.

-provides interactive practice on those tough skills beyond passing out worksheets to complete

-gets students motivated to work on hard skills such as language topics or math topics

-includes a variety of reports to support your data across a variety of topics

-ability to practice specific skills to fit your students' needs

-makes a great center during your reading group time

-incentives for student achievements (badges)

-can utilize the program at home or at school

-building of classroom communities

-aligned to the Common Core

-students spend a lot of time on "badges" and looking at their progress instead of working on developing skills

-glitches on the website have questions repeat sometimes, which leads to less "true" practice

-skewed data within some reports

As you can see, there's QUITE a few more pros about the program than there are cons. Can you see that I have a loving relationship towards IXL?! Can you also see that my STUDENTS have a loving relationship with IXL, too??

They love to hear that IXL is on the agenda and they actually LOVE to explore and love the time when I say - "EXPLORE!" They do the standards and skills THEY have interests in, which then provokes me as the teacher to give them more exposure to THOSE standards.

LOVED having IXL this year. One of the best things I could have possibly EVER used with my kiddos this year and cannot WAIT to use it next year!!

Would YOU use IXL with your kiddos? Why or why not?

Do You IXL? {A Series of Posts - Post 3}

WE'RE ALMOST THERE!!! Just a little over a month and this school year will be dooooooone!!

But I digress.

IXL. It has worked wonders for my kiddos. We took our standardized tests, and their practice definitely paid off. They were all about it and loved the fact that they KNEW stuff and were able to refer back to IXL as their source of success.

Now, we wait for our testing reports come June! YAY.

But let's talk about the final year reports. I love this "overall performance by student" report that happens.

I again left the names off, but you can get the idea from this report. The performance stats represent the following:

green - excellent and mastered

blue - good

yellow - satisfactory

red - needs improvement

If you see, my top student has done excellent in a majority of standards practiced. The only thing about this that's misleading is that that needs improvement group could be either A) they truly need improvement in the skill OR B) they had started the skill and just didn't finish it. This makes for a little bit of skewed data.

That's the ONLY misleading issue that I have with this program.

But I love looking at this report because it gives me an idea of how many skills overall have been practiced, how many are mastered overall, and so on.

This report - what are your thoughts? Would you use it? If so, how would you use this report?

Do You IXL? {A Series of Posts - Post 2}

OH. MY. GOSH. I cannot tell you all the great things about IXL in just a few short posts… it's THAT good.

We are getting ready to take our standardized tests here shortly and I just have to say that THIS site is going to help my kiddos ROCK the SOCKS off that test.

Seriously.

If I looked at the reports right now, the amount that these kiddos have grown is astounding.

Speaking of reports, IXL does this AWESOME thing where you get a "weekly report." In this short weekly report, the following items are portrayed to you as the teacher.

It includes the amount of problems attempted within that last week, and then overall for the school year so far.

It also tells you how many skills are practiced - same as above - including how many were practiced for the last week + the entire school year.

Finally, it shows the time spent for the last week + time spent for the school year.

The really cool thing is if I click that "view report" button next to it, it'll take me to the reports and I can see who practiced what and how much they practiced. I chose to look at the problems attempted report for Language Arts. Here's a glimpse…

It tells me what skills were practiced, how long was spent on each skill, how many problems were attempted, and the number of students that practiced those skills. 

THEN I can go even further and click on a specific skill. For example, I clicked on "AA.2 Use coordinating conjunctions (Third grade)" to get the following report…

 {NAMES HAVE BEEN CUT OUT FOR PRIVACY PURPOSES}

The best thing about this individualized report is that the students names are listed over to the left. Then, it tells you their "SmartScore" {which means how much they've mastered of the skill}. After that, you've got time spent, how many problems correct, missed, and then in all, then a few other columns.

The BEST thing about this is that you can honestly see who is struggling with what skill. For example, you can see that my student who had 51 correct and then 9 incorrect, all in 16 minutes - this student might have been rushing or struggling a little bit. Granted, the grade is an 85% overall, BUT that means this student has got room for improvement!

I LOVE THESE THINGS. Seriously.

Where do you see in your curriculum that IXL could be used?? Let's talk about it!