What’s new on IXL – February 2024

At Home, In the Classroom, IXL Updates

At IXL, we never stop adding new features and skills to our award-winning teaching and learning platform, so you can always trust we’re on pace 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 a new collection of videos for teachers, norming data in analytics, answer keys for the Takeoff curriculum, and more! To stay current with our latest updates, follow IXL on Facebook, Instagram, X, and LinkedIn.

Table of contents:

Major releases

IXL Minis️: New videos for teachers

Meet IXL Minis! This collection of bite-sized videos provides teachers with instant insight into everything IXL has to offer, and it’s included with all bulk and site licenses. 

Created by IXL’s education experts, these fun videos are packed with information to give teachers confidence enhancing instruction, diving into students’ data, energizing class time, and more.

So far we’ve released 27 videos with teacher-approved strategies, quick tips, and fun ideas to maximize your IXL subscription. Stay tuned for more as we continue to add new videos!

To find IXL Minis on a teacher account, look under “Resources” in the “My IXL” tab. For administrators, IXL Minis are located under “Professional development” in the “Resources” tab. Individual IXL Minis can be shared with a unique link and are included with all bulk and site licenses to IXL for the US edition.

New units and answer keys for Takeoff by IXL Math™

We’ve released Takeoff by IXL Math™ Unit 8 grades 4 and 5, as well as answer keys for independent practice activities!

Takeoff by IXL Math™ units provide everything 2nd-5th grade teachers need for their daily math instruction, personalized to meet the needs of each student, including:

  • Detailed day-by-day lesson plans
  • Differentiated support and enrichment resources
  • Print and online learning activities
  • Built-in unit assessments with personalized next steps

Unit 8 covers the following topics:

To help teachers support students using Takeoff, we’ve also released answer keys for the Takeoff curriculum’s independent practice in grades 3–5. The answer keys are easily printable PDFs that can be found under the “Materials” section at the beginning of a unit. Units in grade 2 do not have independent practice sheets.

National norming data on school and district assessment reports

IXL’s Real-Time Diagnostic is a nationally normed assessment tool, proven to precisely measure student understanding and strongly predict their performance on standardized assessments. IXL’s national norms provide a broader context into students’ progress on IXL against their peers across the country. 

Assessment reports for school and district administrators now feature nationally normed percentile data alongside assessment scores, making it easier to contextualize student learning. This data can also be exported to a CSV file for even more customization.

National norming data is available on the following reports:

IXL District Diagnostic Levels report filtered for National norms data

Feature updates

Updates to the Diagnostic Levels report 

Administrators can now export all strand levels at once, as well as see if students are On/Above, Below, or Far Below their grade level on school and district Diagnostic Levels reports. 

This gives administrators more flexibility when viewing and analyzing students’ Diagnostic data.

In the Diagnostic Levels data table, students’ data will now feature a colored dot to indicate their grade level performance. Administrators can also hover over the “Level” cell to see student grade level performance, and the data will be included in CSV exports. To export strand data, administrators can select to download all strands or only the strand they are viewing from a pop-up window.

Course filtering in district and school analytics

We’ve released the ability to filter and group by courses in several district and school analytics reports. Select administrator reports now support:

  • Filtering by courses: Limit data to only display students enrolled in a specific set of courses
  • Group by courses: Group filtered data using up to three criteria including grade, school, course, and demographics (This is currently only available in district analytics)
  • Export course data: In the export, students’ course data will appear in a new column that shows all the courses they’re enrolled in

Course filtering is available in the following district reports:

Course filtering is available in the following school reports:

This makes it easier for middle and high school administrators to track all students in a course (such as all Algebra students) regardless of their grade. Now, educators can make more informed instructional decisions with a clear picture of where students are supposed to be relative to their expected subject level, rather than by grade level.

This update only applies to US edition site licenses.

Duplicate Leaderboards

Leaderboards can now be easily duplicated on IXL, saving educators time when setting up recurring competitions to keep students motivated all year long!

To duplicate the Leaderboard, teachers and administrators can click the “Duplicate leaderboard” button for any of their previously created Leaderboards, including completed, active, and drafted Leaderboards. 

When they click this button, they’ll be taken to the Leaderboard creation form with all fields pre-filled, making it easier to create new Leaderboards that are similar or identical to previous ones!

This update affects Leaderboards for both bulk and site accounts on all English editions.

Skill plan updates and new skills

New and improved math skills

We’ve released a handful of math skills:

And updated the following skills:

We’ve also released Sort two-dimensional shapes (Year 3) in the United Kingdom, and 4 new Calculus skills for Australia Year 12, United Kingdom Year 13, and Canada Calculus!

New and updated ELA skills

We’ve reorganized our Grade 2 digraph and blend skills to improve teachers’ ability to provide scaffolded, targeted skills for students at this level. The reorganization included grouping common digraphs together (sh, ch, th, ph, wh), introducing dedicated qu and x skills, and adding additional review skills. We’ve also refreshed the illustrations in all of the skills in the Blending and Segmenting category across Pre-K through 2nd grade to give them a more modern look.

The following phonics skills were also added:

And, we’ve added two new novel study skills for high school:

New science skills

We’ve released 5 new science skills:

New social studies skills

We’ve released 2 new social studies skills:

New Virginia Checkpoint skills

We’ve created Checkpoints aligned to Virginia’s 2023 Standards of Learning in Grade 8, Algebra I, and Geometry. Teachers and students in Virginia can access these Checkpoints directly from their state standards skill plan. If teachers have pinned the skill plan, they can use the Checkpoint Performance report in IXL Analytics to evaluate student readiness.

New textbook skill plans

We’ve released new skill plans for the following textbooks:

Math

English language arts

Science

We also refreshed our existing skill plan for ReadyGEN ELA for Kindergarten to include some of our newest skills.

New standards skill plans

We’ve released skill plans for these newly-adopted standards in the US and Canada:

New test prep skill plans

We’ve added new test prep skill plans and expanded coverage for existing plans:

We also updated our current skill plan for the Algebra 1 New York Regents Exam to reflect changes to the test.

Additional releases

New math and ELA videos

We’ve released 78 new math videos from Grade 2 through Algebra 2 to expand our coverage! This includes 23 new videos for Grade 2, and 5 new Algebra 2 videos. The videos in this release cover topics such as:

And, 5 new localized math videos for Canada in Grades 6-8. 

We’ve also released 27 new phonics and middle school ELA videos, and 121 phonics sight word skill plan videos, to expand our coverage in existing grades. The videos in this release cover topics such as:

In addition, we added Spanish captions to over half of grade 3 math skills and 55 more videos in other grades. Like translated skills, translated captions are available to users with Spanish support enabled. We also added Spanish subtitles to more videos in grades 4 through Algebra 1 in this release, and we’ll continue to release more math videos with subtitles in Spanish in the coming months.

With this release, we now have over 3,000 unique videos on IXL.com!

More math skills with Spanish support

We’ve expanded our Spanish-language support to include a handful of new skills in elementary school. These newly-supported skills include adding and subtracting multi-digit numbers, comparing fractions with like denominators, using models to represent addition and multiplication word problems, and describing the relationship between place values.