IXL Math is an excellent online resource that allows students to practice targeted skills in a well-organized and easy to access platform. Sites now needs to work on expanding students higher level thinking skills.

My overall opinion about this teaching resource is to avoided it at all cost unless your ok with causing your students unreasonable amount of stress and frustration which can get to the point of the students wish they were dead or have a nervous break down. (this next part is from my "how I used it"). what worked was that the wed site loads very fast but that is about. one of the largest problems is the reward and punishing systems it uses witch it only gives a little bit of smart score (the scoring systems they used) which gives lower and lower amounts for exponentially harder questions. Then when you or a student gets an answer wrong it lowers your smart score by a very large amount which it usually takes 2-3 equation to get back to your original score. Next, another horrible mistake with some questions that requires you to round, it doesn't even do the rounding correctly, an example of this when it askes you to round to the closest whole number with a number like 12.546 which if you round correctly would be 13 but it will say the correct answer is 12, which combined with the horrible reward system will make a student such as my self feel frustrated, and makes you wonder if the next question will round correctly or not. Finally, is with the solutions which you can see when you get a question wrong, It shows how to work through the question you just got wrong, the only thing wrong with this part is it can be very hard to follow the steps. This isn't only my opinion either because I have gown around my high school and asked my fellow classmates and other students about what they liked and disliked about IXL and each one said about the same thing. So if you are a teacher or apart of a schools administrations and are deciding which math program for your students to use and you are thinking about Using IXL I beg you to reconsider.

The website is laid out in an organized fashion and is easy to navigate. The home page has each grade level with each subject up for the choice of the user. Once clicked, the program directs the user right to numerous games and tests that award them for correct answers and learning! Depending on the grade level, it might create some stress with the subject tests to see poor grades or points when first learning a subject. With older grade levels it can be a motivator to continue learning a subject. When a question is answered wrong, the correct answer is shown along with the reasoning. This program is a great way to add some extracurricular learning over the summer or even during the school year for all students.

My overall opinion on this resource as a teaching tool is that it is wonderful. It turns teaching into a game, and has a bunch of different levels of math for all ages, including those in middle school and college. My only gripe is that it sometimes is so difficult, and takes so long, that students lose attention.