What’s new on IXL – January 2025

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 start of 2025, including IXL Focus Zone, emailing reports to families directly from Teacher Analytics, translation support for more than 80 languages, and more! To stay current with our latest updates, follow IXL on Facebook, Instagram, X, and LinkedIn.

Table of contents:

Major releases

IXL Focus Zone

Teachers can now easily help their students stay on task with IXL Focus Zone! When teachers set up a Focus Zone session, they choose which subjects and grade levels of skills they want to allow students to practice for the duration. This gives teachers greater control over what students spend their class time working on.

To create and launch a Focus Zone, teachers can go to the Engagement tools section of their My IXL tab and click “Focus Zone”. Once they launch the Focus Zone, students can only access skills from the grades and subjects selected. If a student is working on or selects a skill that is outside the scope of the Focus Zone, they will receive a pop-up message redirecting them to the grade landing page for a grade that is included in the Focus Zone.

Focus Zone sessions are intended to be used as temporary blocks of focus time while in the classroom, so the maximum duration of a Focus Zone is three hours. IXL Focus Zone is available on all English-language editions of the IXL website.

The Focus Zone landing page. A menu lets teachers select students, allowed subject, and allowed grades for the Focus Zone, as well as an end time.

Feature updates

Email reports to families from Teacher Analytics

Teachers can now email updates on students’ progress to parents and guardians directly from Teacher Analytics. By emailing PDFs of the Student Summary report, Diagnostic Action Plan, and LevelUp Action Plan right to families’ inboxes, teachers have a quick new way to keep families informed about how their children are doing.

To email a Student Summary PDF, select the new letter icon button at the top of the Student Summary report. To email a Diagnostic or LevelUp Action Plan, select the “Share with family” button at the bottom of the Assessment tab. After selecting one of these buttons, teachers will see a menu for additional options such as entering a personal message or sending a copy of the PDF to themselves before sending the email.

This update is available in all English-language editions of IXL.

The bottom of the IXL assessment tab with a new button that says "Share with family" next to the "Print action plan" button.

Translation support expanded to 80+ languages

IXL now provides language support in over 80 languages! This enables all students to make progress in essential skills, even if they are still building their English language abilities.

Newly added languages include:

  • Albanian
  • Assamese
  • Bosnian
  • Bulgarian
  • Cebuano
  • Danish
  • Guarani
  • Indonesian
  • Malayalam
  • Myanmar (Burmese)
  • Odia (Oriya)
  • Sepedi
  • Sesotho
  • Sindhi
  • Slovak
  • Te Reo Māori
  • Tsonga
  • Tswana
  • Uzbek
  • Xhosa
  • Zulu

Language translation for all English editions

Speaking of translation, we’ve brought translation support to all English-language editions of IXL, including for the US, UK, Canada, and Australia! This will help students across the globe practice IXL skills in their preferred language, supporting their academic growth while they are acquiring their English language skills.

Student-level data in LevelUp Assessment report

In the LevelUp Assessment Results report, school and district administrators can now see LevelUp Math Benchmark Assessment performance data organized by student in a data chart. Previously, that data was only accessible by exporting the report.

This change will make it easier for administrators to identify intervention needs and make informed decisions about students. Administrators can select ‘Student’ as the data table’s ‘View by’ option to view this data.

The LevelUp Assessment Results report. The data table below the report is sorted by student.

IXL LevelUp Benchmark Assessment in IXL Android app

Students can now access the IXL LevelUp Math Benchmark Assessment on the IXL app for Android tablets, Android phones, and Amazon Fire tablets.

The Assessment tab of the IXL tablet app for Android. There

Student proficiency metrics in Skills Practiced and Student Summary reports

Skill proficiency (SmartScore of 80+) is an important metric that many teachers use to set goals for students. To streamline the process of tracking student proficiency, the Skills Practiced and Student Summary teacher reports now feature proficiency metrics.

The Skills Practiced report has a new “Proficient” category in the skill progress breakdown. In the Student Summary report, there’s now a total count of skills a student has reached proficiency in and mastered, helping teachers recognize student achievement on IXL.

The Skills Practiced report. A skill is unfurled showing how students are doing on it. Between "Mastered" and "Practicing", there

New IXL Badge: Weekly Streak

Teachers have a new type of IXL Badge they can earn—Weekly Streak! These new badges celebrate consistent use of IXL, motivating teachers to encourage student practice to keep their streak up.

Teachers earn Weekly Streak badges for consecutive weeks where at least half of their students meet these practice or assessment goals:

Teacher notifications for Common Assessments

Teachers now receive notifications for Common Assessments. These notifications inform teachers of when Common Assessments are coming and for which students.

Notifications will appear:

  • 24 hours before a Common Assessment is scheduled to begin
  • Right as a Common Assessment begins
  • After a Common Assessment ends (if administrators have turned on visibility for Common Assessment results

Clicking on the notification will take the teacher to their Dashboard for upcoming and active Common Assessments, or to Analytics for past Common Assessments (if results are visible for teachers).

More noticeable video tutorials

Video tutorials are a great resource for students who may be struggling with a skill to pause and deepen their understanding of a topic.

To encourage students to take advantage of video tutorials, we’ve given them a new icon and an animation when a mouse cursor hovers over the “Watch a video” button. Additionally, when a student uses “Learn with an example” to see a walkthrough of a sample question, the video tutorial will show up below the walkthrough.

Skill plan updates and new skills

New math skills

We’ve released several new math skills for elementary school:

New science skills

We’ve added a new high school biology skill How can group behavior affect survival? Identify evidence to support a claim. In it, students read a passage about an animal population and develop a scientific claim about how a group behavior of that population, like cooperative hunting, increases its likelihood of survival. Then, students articulate how their claim is supported by a specific piece of evidence from the passage.

New textbook skill plans

We’ve released skill plans for the following textbooks:

Math:

ELA:

We’ve also released skill plans for Summer Bridge Activities (2025) grades PK-9. The Summer Bridge Activities workbooks are published by Carson Dellosa, part of the IXL family of brands.

New standards skill plan

We’ve released skill plans for grades 4-8 of Colorado Extended Evidence Outcomes (EEO) for ELA. Our skill plans now cover ELA grades K-8 for these alternate academic standards, which apply to students with significant cognitive disabilities.

Each skill plan includes a mix of on-grade-level and prior-grade-level skills to support special and general education teachers with finding the best skills for this group of students.

New test prep skill plans

We’ve released new skill plans for the following state assessments:

We’ve also updated our Minnesota MCA plans for grades 5 and 8 for Spring 2025 testing.

Additional releases

New math and ELA video tutorials

We’ve released 28 new math video tutorials in kindergarten through Precalculus! The math videos in this release cover topics such as comparison statements with numerical expressions and proving triangles are congruent using rigid motions.

We’ve also released 12 new ELA videos for grades 3-5! The ELA videos in this release cover topics such as commas review and using adjectives to compare.

Additionally, we’ve released four new math videos for IXL Canada in grades 4 through 11.

All Takeoff K-5 units released

We’ve released new Takeoff by IXL units in Kindergarten and Grade 1. This completes our full Takeoff K-5 curriculum!

  • In Kindergarten Unit 10: Three-dimensional shapes, students identify and describe three-dimensional shapes. They also build models of shapes, join simple shapes to create more complex figures, and describe the position of shapes in the environment.
  • In Kindergarten Unit 11: Measurement, students learn that they can measure the length, height, width, area, volume, capacity, and weight of objects. They compare two objects by length, height, width, area, volume, capacity, or weight.
  • In Grade 1 Unit 12: Geometry, students describe and draw two- and three-dimensional shapes given defining attributes. They also compose and decompose two- and three-dimensional shapes.
  • In Grade 1 Unit 13: Fractions, students identify and create equal parts, including halves and fourths, in circles and rectangles. They learn that the number of equal parts impacts both the size of each part and the number of parts needed to make a whole.

Expanded Spanish support for Takeoff by IXL

We’ve released Spanish translation support for 10 additional Takeoff units!

  • Kindergarten – Units 6, 7, 8, and 9
  • Grade 1 – Units 8 and 9
  • Grade 2 – Units 10 and 11
  • Grade 3 – Units 9 and 10

These units now have Spanish translations available for the student workbook PDFs, independent practice PDFs, mid-unit check-ins, and unit tests.

New math skills for Australia

We’ve released a few new Foundation math skills for Australia! In the skills, students use cubes to help model and solve problems involving addition. One has them using cubes to make a number several different ways, while the other has them build cube trains to solve addition word problems.

New science skills for Canada, the UK, and Australia

We’ve released a new grade 3 science skill for Canada, Evaluate multiple design solutions to prevent erosion.

Additionally, we’ve released the science skill How do magnets push and pull each other? for years 1-3 in the UK and F-2 in Australia.

New skills and curriculum skill plans for New Zealand

We’ve released alignments to the latest New Zealand Curriculum for maths years 1-8 and English years 1-6, which is being implemented this school year.

For maths, we’ve also made significant changes to our skills to reflect updates to the New Zealand national curriculum. We’ve added over 125 new skills, revised many existing skills, and reorganized the grade level landing pages across years 1-8. These updates will help administrators, teachers, and students transition to using the new curriculum this school year.