i-Ready program ultimate guide and review

Both assessing students and providing individualized lessons, i-Ready is one of the most popular personalized education programs out there. Here’s why.

Teaching children the basic ropes of the English language can be just as tough as teaching them math and science. However, it’s not just the young learners who find the lesson plans confusing at times. Their teachers have a hard task as well, especially if there are individual students in the classroom who require special education due to some form of learning disability.

Yet, helping the whole class master language arts and algebraic thinking is possible with a little help from the i-Ready instruction program. Through various online lessons, assessments, and quizzes, teachers can breathe a sigh of relief. They will simultaneously up the skills of their pupils as well as monitor their growth. As such, let’s explore i-Ready and how it works.

What is the i-Ready program?

A reading and math application, i-Ready is an elementary and middle school online application designed to help both students and their teachers in education. It’s teacher-led, hence they can successfully identify their pupil’s needs and thus customize lesson plans. And while doing so, teachers can constantly track student progress throughout the entire school year.

The common core of most education programs is that they don’t just give out lessons and tests. Instead, they point out crucial data about how each student is doing so that their teachers can prepare individualized instructions to help them overcome any issue. To be able to do that, the i-Ready program is divided into two parts—Diagnostic and Personalized Instruction.

Cost, features, and lessons of the i-Ready program and diagnostic

As mentioned, i-Ready is divided into two sections. Hence, let’s check each of these out as well as some other features and important info that make it what it is, shall we?

i-Ready Diagnostic test is an assessment that modifies its questions depending on the needs of an individual student. Namely, the way it works is that it tracks responses to generate new questions. For instance, if a student takes a long time on task at hand, the i-Ready assessment will provide them with easier questions and vice versa. However, the idea behind diagnostic results isn’t to evaluate them with a scaled score like a state assessment would do. It’s to figure out the best way to conduct the individual student’s learning process.

On the other hand, we have i-Ready Personalized Instruction. This is the follow-up to the previous diagnostic feature, as it provides students with lessons tailored to their specific skill levels and learning requirements. The whole idea is to allow them to go on with their education at the speed that’s most comfortable to them, all while facing a number of lessons that are engaging.

These two are the most prominent features, as you’ll see if you visit i-Ready.com. Yet, they aren’t the only ones important for this review. i-Ready supports small group instructions and remote learning, which means that a student can interact with teacher-assigned lessons while at home. However, i-Ready can only be purchased by school districts and summer schools, so the login must be school-approved.

When it comes to the cost of i-Ready lessons, there isn’t a set price that we can list. To inform yourself about the pricing, you’ll need to contact their sales team over at their website.

A general overview of what people say about i-Ready programs and if it’s a right fit for your classroom

Like with most products out there, the i-Ready reviews are a mixed bag of both positive and negative impressions. However, none of the reviewers indicates that i-Ready is a bad program. Their issues lie with the lack of knowledge on how to properly implement it with various subjects like word problems and phonics in the language department, as well as fractions and calculations in math. Yet, one thing that seems to be praised by most reviewers is the option to monitor student growth and the overall diagnostic assessment feature that determines students’ needs.

Benefits of using a personalized learning approach for grade-level students

Using i-Ready’s online instructions and program can benefit students regardless of their abilities or disabilities. Various studies have confirmed several clear pros, including:

• Allows learners to move at the speed that suits them
• Improves students’ computer skills
• Encourages teamwork between students
• Sidesteps various issues that state standard tests include
• Encourages students to take control of their education

Help your students’ performance by making your classroom more accessible for all children

Of course, i-Ready isn’t the only personalized learning tool out there. In fact, there are many of them, some better, some worse. But we’re not going to compare it to another of its kind. Instead, we’ll focus on other tools that work differently but can be of great use, especially in terms of student performance of those with learning disabilities such as dyslexia.

Text to Speech tools for online learning

A great way to improve students’ language skills is to introduce them to text-to-speech tools. These are pieces of assistive technology, as they are designed with dyslexics in mind. One of the best examples of TTS tech is definitely Speechify.

With its fully natural AI voices, Speechify can read any text your students run through it with perfect diction, pronunciation, and phonological awareness. It also provides them with a text highlighting option that can help with high-frequency words, and the ability to read aloud more than 15 different languages, including Spanish, Italian, and French.

Speechify is great in other ways too. Namely, students can use it on all popular platforms and devices. From iPads and Android smartphones to Macs and PCs, it has a version for any of them.

Scanning pens

Similarly to text-to-speech apps, we have scanning pens. These are pen-like devices that students can slide over a line of text, which they’ll read aloud. But don’t worry. The sound coming out of these pens isn’t robotic in any way. They use natural-sounding speech with great pronunciation and overall feel, which can help students’ reading skills.

Spell checkers

Thirdly, we have spell checkers as tools to increase accessibility in a classroom. Most of us are aware of these tools as they are present even on our smartphones, let alone computers. The basic idea behind them is to correct our typos, and that’s exactly how students with dyslexia can use them, too. After making a mistake typing, the spell checker will inform them of the mistake and will correct them so that they learn from their mistakes.