At IXL, we strive to keep our teaching and learning platform in line and up to date with students’ evolving needs. That’s why we compile a list of our top new features to help you—as a learner, educator, or parent—get the most out of IXL.
Keep reading below for a roundup of releases from the past month, including school-wide IXL Leaderboards, randomized question order for IXL Quizzes, test prep plans for the GED, and more! To stay current with our latest updates, follow IXL on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.
Table of contents
Major releases
A new type of IXL Leaderboard lets classes compete against other classes in the same school! Admins can create these school-wide Leaderboards to encourage friendly competition between classes and motivate student learning.
When admins set up a school-wide Leaderboard, they’ll be able to select which classes they want to participate. They can also choose whether they want students to compete individually, as part of their class, or both. Leaderboards with both types of competitions include a toggle to switch between viewing student and class rankings. Teachers are not able to create school-wide Leaderboards.
Each class in the Leaderboard will be given a randomly generated fun team name! Teachers and admins can view actual class names along with the team names, but students will only be able to see the team names.
Feature updates
Randomize question order on quizzes
Teachers now have the option to randomize the question order in IXL Quizzes! When a teacher selects this option, students will still answer the same set of questions in the quiz, but each student will see the questions in a different order. Teachers can use this feature to discourage students from looking at each other’s screens while taking a quiz.
Now, there’s an additional way for teachers to share IXL Quizzes with their students! Teachers can easily copy a quiz URL to their clipboard by clicking the three dots on an active quiz and selecting “Copy link.” Teachers can then share that link with their students, who can use it to jump right into the quiz.
Each quiz URL will only work for students who have been assigned the quiz — users trying to visit the URL who haven’t been assigned the quiz will not be able to access it.
Scratchpad drawing and highlighting tools are now available in IXL Quizzes! As students move back and forth between questions while taking a quiz, their Scratchpad markings are stored so that they can check their work. Scratchpad markings are not saved once the student submits their quiz, so the markings will not appear in any reports.
Group Jams and IXL Quizzes in Live School reports
The Live School report in School Analytics allows administrators to see what students are working on in real time, and now it shows when students are working in a Group Jam or a quiz. This gives school administrators more visibility into students who are taking advantage of some of IXL’s newer features.
In-progress Snapshots appear in district Diagnostic reports
Three district-level Diagnostic reports — Diagnostic Levels, Diagnostic Tier Analysis, and Diagnostic Strands — now allow district administrators to select an open Snapshot and see live Snapshot data, rather than just data from past Snapshots. With this update, administrators will be able to better track Snapshot completion and determine next steps for their districts.
Administrators will still select Snapshots through the “Data time frame” filter on these three reports, which will now also show open Snapshot and screener-to-Snapshot windows.
New teacher notification when ending a Group Jam
Teachers will now receive a notification when they end a Group Jam. The notification links directly to the Group Jam summary, which will be helpful if teachers want to review how students performed and take next steps.
Skill plan updates and new skills
New test prep plans: GED for Math and ELA
We’ve added math and English language arts skill plans for the GED! Students and adult learners can use these plans as they prepare for their high school equivalency test. The plans are organized by score level, so learners can use their practice test scores to find skills at exactly the right level for them as they get ready for the test.
We have added a new topic to ELA called Letters, which includes all of IXL’s letter identification skills and letter-sound correspondence skills. This update will allow teachers and parents to easily find all of our skills that cover letter names and letter sounds.
We’ve added the following new math skill plans:
- Progress in Mathematics Grades 2 and 4
- Saxon Math Grade 3 (Hake)
- Inside Algebra
- Digits Texas Grade 6
- Big Ideas Math FL B.E.S.T. Grade 8
We’ve also updated the Geometry and Algebra 2 skill plans for Eureka Math and EngageNY to include many skills specifically tailored to the curriculum.
We added the following new ELA skill plans:
- CKLA Grade 2 units 1-7
- English 3D Course A
We also updated the following skill plan to showcase some of our newest skills:
- ReadyGEN Grade 4
We’ve added the following new science skill plans:
- Elevate Science Grades 2 to 5
- Indiana Academic Standards Grades 2 to 8
New 6th grade ELA informational text skill
We’ve released a new 6th grade ELA skill: Read passages about business and technology. This is part of our series of informational text reading skills, and it includes engaging passages and colorful images to build students’ world knowledge and spark their curiosity. The skill’s multi-part problems allow students to engage deeply with texts as they make inferences, use context clues to deduce the meaning of new words, analyze specific choices made by the author, and more.
More letter-sound correspondence skills
We created 6 new letter-sound correspondence skills for pre-kindergarten and kindergarten, such as Choose the letter that matches the consonant sound: b, d, j, k, p, t, v, z. These targeted skills each focus on a small set of letter-sound correspondences, and help young readers learn the relationship between the letters of the alphabet and the sounds they produce.
We’ve released a handful of new math skills, involving topics such as identifying graphs that represent word problems and using ten to subtract.
Additional releases
We’ve released 36 new grade 3 math videos, 16 new geometry videos, three new grade 4 videos, and three more grade 6 videos to expand our coverage in those grades! These videos cover topics such as finding fractions of a whole in word problems and rotational symmetry.
Canada edition math video tutorials for grades 7 and 8
Math video tutorials are now available for grades 7 and 8 in the Canada edition of IXL! This initial release features over 300 videos in grade 7, covering more than 90% of the skills, and over 200 videos in grade 8, covering over 75% of the skills. We will be adding even more videos to the Canada edition in the coming months.
Teacher Resources page for UK and Australian editions
A Teacher Resources tab has been added to the UK and Australian editions of IXL. The Resources section contains printables, inspiration, and professional development resources to both help teachers use IXL more effectively and keep their students motivated!
More math skills with Spanish support
We’ve expanded our Spanish-language support to include a few dozen new math skills in grades 3 through Geometry. These newly supported skills include geometry Checkpoints about density and equations of parabolas.
Want to stay up to date on all of IXL’s latest updates? Follow IXL on your favorite social media platforms, including LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest.