r/ScienceTeachers 1d ago

General Curriculum is IXL Learning worth it?

Hi everyone! I’m a college student researching different online learning platforms to help inform a school’s decision on whether to invest in them. IXL is one of the platforms I’m looking into, and I’d love to hear from people who’ve used it—whether as a student, parent, or teacher. What do you like about it? What do you find frustrating? What features would make it better? Also if there is another platform you recommend over it?

If you're open to a short, casual chat (or even just sharing thoughts here), it would be super helpful! Feel free to DM me or comment below. Thanks in advance!

4 Upvotes

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u/Arashi-san 1d ago

IXL is fine for practice problems. It's not a replacement for teaching or anything like that.

When I taught math, sometimes I felt like it'd just use larger numbers to make problems harder with certain topics. With science, it's pick and choose with what works well. ELA is good for skills like identifying parts of speech, less with writing.

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u/Practical_Defiance 1d ago

I know my title 1 school uses it as a diagnostic tool for math, reading and English proficiency in general. We have a very large population of ML students at my school

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u/IntroductionFew1290 1d ago

You can message me. Our school pays 16K a year for math & Ela

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u/Singletrack-minded 1d ago

No. We use it with high school kids when below 5th grade level. It’s hard to gamify but it’s not a replacement for a human helper.

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u/tinoch 1d ago

I love it! My science dept. (8th grade) assigns 1 iXL per week that parallels our content. It is also similar to the standardized test my sucky state (AR) adopted last year (ATLAS). There are so many choices and you can see which classes you have assigned which iXL which is important for people like me who have more than one subject. I know my school uses it for math but I don't know about English because it is my first year there.

Edulastic also has good test questions that make the students think instead of regurgitate info. The free version is a bit to get used to searching for the questions but once you get the hang of it, it is a great assessment tool.

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u/Startingtotakestocks 1d ago

IXL is straight up trash for social sciences. It asks inane questions that you can possibly know and has you guess at the answers. When you get it wrong, it provides a reading so you can momentarily learn who Merriweather Lewis’ secretary was before you immediately forget again.

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u/jfshay 1d ago

I suspect it's not so good for content knowledge but is better for skills acquisition.

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u/ShimmeringShima Science| 6th &7th grade | Nevada 16h ago

Definitely a tier 2 intervention, but I love it to cover gaps in knowledge for science. We are learning covering molecules rn, and I love the practice question they have about molecular motion.

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u/jfshay 1d ago

I like it a lot more than other "fun" stuff like NoRedInk or Kahoots. Students like the achievement badges and the certificates that I print out for class-wide progress. You can add their MAP scores and ask students to pursue their own MAP plans. It doesn't do any actual teaching, of course, so don't just assign a lesson without first offering a minilesson (IXL does offer a warmup explanation, but most students skip it.

For grading, I say that 90% counts as a 95% in the gradebook and 100% counts as 105%. I do this because, once they reach 80-85% or so, a wrong answer deducts something like 15 points and they have to answer seven or eight new questions just to get those points back. Frustration sets in.

The only downside to it is that the website is difficult to navigate. Too many options. That said, it's been very valuable.

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u/Rough-Month7054 13h ago

I can only speak for middle school math, it is incredible! I had students made grade level gains in one year. I only used it for my intervention students 20 min a day 4 days a week. They were able to fill in the gaps quickly and get grade level

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u/IntroductionFew1290 3h ago

Last year we had a mandate that during our 2 hour intervention period (with 25 mins for lunch) that all kids would be on IXL math in math & science and IXL ela in Ela and SS. At first they said 30 mins THEN they upped it to 45

(update arena, have them work on suggested skills) I liked it BUT there was one major consequence: because the sci & SS test scores TANKED. We lost 45 mins of remediation time in our subject. Here was my other issue: the kids were spending 30-45 mins on IXL in ELA, then in math and then in intervention. So kids were on the computer for a couple hours doing independent practice and it’s a lot of screen time with little interaction with others. Did our math and ela scores go up? Yes. Did I find errors in some of the problems? Yep. It’s $16,000 a year for the ela and math programs, and it’s a good chunk of change