Originally posted By Robert on September 12, 2019
IXL math is a site that allows students, or anyone to practice their math skills. It is built around the BC curriculum and is broken down into the different grades and learning outcomes. The BC curriculum has been changing over the last few years and while it no longer lines up perfectly it still covers all of the concepts covered.
IXL is easily accessible to mobile devices. It is easy to navigate from grade level to skill. The links are built into pictures (buttons) allowing for easy touch navigation. Answers can be inputted using the keyboard on your screen and touch. Any equations, symbols, or elements needed to answer the question are clearly shown and can be added to your answer with a touch of a button. Once an answer is inputted the user is given immediate feedback on their answer with step by step solutions provided if the question was answered wrong. All of these features allow for easy access, navigation, and use on a mobile device.
Your account logs and tracks your progress as well allowing you to pick up where you left off. The combination of being able to pick up where you left off and ease of use means that not only does IXL work well on a mobile device but fits well with the fact that many people always have their mobile device with them and pull it out when they have a few minutes to spare. This allows users to easily practice a few questions when they have only a few minutes providing more opportunities to practice, engage, learn, and retain.
Hi Ram,
I started using IXL this year in my classroom and it has helped as a good practice tool for students but I found, as you said, that it didn’t help them gain a deeper understanding of the Math. What I mean by this is that if you put the question in a different context, they didn’t know how to work through the problem. I think IXL is a great support tool for students for them to understand the steps to complete a math problem, especially since it could be something they could do at home as extra practice, but it doesn’t dive deep enough for them to get a thorough understanding of when/why it is solved in that way. I think there is a lot of room for gamification and Math to combine to help students build their Math skills and IXL is just one of the first/early examples of how it can be successful.
Hi Ram,
Our math teacher really likes to use IXL for the students to practice their math skills. In 2017 he got two certificates from IXL. The first one for outstanding completion of 300 hours of Math practice and the other one is for 200 grade 10 math skills.
I like that it will show you the correct solution if you didn’t get it right the first time, which helps build the students’ self-taught skills and self-reflection.
Other than Math, it also offers practices of language arts, social studies, science and Spanish.
The neat thing about the IXL Math website is that it is possible to see an example of the type of questions contained in the question bank. My opinion is that IXL Math is good for providing lots of practice questions to pass tests but is not necessarily helpful to prepare students for tests that require deeper analysis and reflection or assessment for understanding. The website loads pretty fast on my mobile phone, however I have a decent mobile phone and decent Internet speed. How good is it on your phone? I have not tried out the app on my mobile phone as yet since it is behind a paywall though there is a free 30-day classroom trial.
By adrian wheeler on September 13, 2019
I enjoyed reading about IXL and its integration with the B.C. curriculum. One of the key benefits I see in addition to what is already written its ability to gamify learning math. This concept has been put to great use by apps such as Duolingo (for learning a language) and I think math is a perfect fit. Features such timers, scores and question counts couples with rewards give the user incentive to continue “playing”. These same features are often found in videogames and used to add a “fun” factor not found in traditional math education.