TOS Review - IXL.com

What Is It?

IXL.com is a website that offers math and language arts practice for grades K-12.  Each grade level is adjusted to meet state standards making it easy to ensure your student is getting practice in the areas that they need to.  The website lists each skill very specifically so that you can pick the topics you would like them to work on.  They also offer detailed reports on how the student is progressing.

For this review, we were given a one year subscription to the website.

How We Used It:

Josie was too young for the language arts portion of the IXL website, so we focused on the math section.

The program doesn't actually teach them, so I chose to use it as reenforcement of her math lessons.  A few times a week, I logged her in and chose the section that went along with what she was learning that week in her math program.  All of the sections in IXL are broken down very well, so it was easy to find the corresponding lesson.

There is a button she could push to have the directions read to her.  This was helpful for the word problems.  It was nice that she could work on this without me sitting right next to her.  For simple number equations it told her what skill to perform ("add" or "subtract").  There is also a timer on the side that kept up with how long she had been practicing.  I shot for 15 to 20 minutes a session and that seemed to work well.

As she got more answers right, she earned ribbons.  These ribbons earned her "stickers" on a reward board.  The more she got right, the more stickers she got.  This wasn't a huge motivator for her, but she did like seeing how many she could get at a time.

There aren't any bells and whistles on the site.  I liked this.  I think that a lot of educational websites have way too much going on and that it makes it difficult to concentrate on the problem.  As you can see in the photo above, the page is mostly white with the equation in the upper left hand corner.

My Opinion:

I think that this is a neat program if you are needing some extra practice in math.  The math portion was very straight forward, just equations on the page.  This isn't like a game at all so if you're looking for something fun for practice, this wouldn't be that.  However, if you need drills that your student can do in a format other then paper and pencil, this program is just right.

We will continue to use this as a review for the chapter she does in her math curriculum.

Since we weren't able to review the language arts portion, I suggest you read some other reviews on that.  From what I saw, it looks like a great way to reenforce skills.

Product Details:

www.IXL.com
Monthly Subscription: $9.95
Yearly Subscription: $79.00