Product updates
Get details on new features and enhancements that support continuous student learning–no matter how you’re providing instruction. Check back often for the most up-to-date product news and insights.
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Renaissance Roadmap Report: Fall 2021
Chief Product Officer Todd Brekhus shows you how Nearpod will engage your students both in and out of the classroom. You’ll also see how Nearpod helps you to easily create interactive lessons and assessments, and how we plan to incorporate content from AR, Freckle, myON, and other Renaissance products into Nearpod.
Current update
Further support for Spanish-speaking students in Freckle
To better support students whose dominant language is Spanish, Freckle recently introduced several enhancements to improve the practice experience.
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Recent updates
Introducing the enhanced Star Family Report
The enhanced report helps parents and guardians to better understand their student’s scores—and to identify next steps in the student’s learning journey.
myON adds new “student demo” option for teachers
Now, from their very first login, teachers can quickly see what myON is all about, immediately start browsing books, and easily demo the student experience.
Subdomain and skill set scores now available in Star Early Literacy Spanish
This enhancement provides educators—especially those required by their state to screen for early indicators of dyslexia—a way to easily view student performance in all early learning subdomains and skills sets.
3 new features in the Star Record Book
The Star Record Book now shows you students’ testing time, helps you to create dynamic instructional groups, and provides several options for quickly viewing the skills your students are ready to learn.
Track Lalilo usage with new administrator dashboards and reports
Administrators can now see an in-depth overview of district, school(s), and even class details from usage to performance and growth over time. If you are already an admin user of Lalilo Premium, you will see these dashboards the next time you log in.
Introducing score projections in Star Spanish
With score projections now available in Star Assessments in Spanish, you’ll be able to make informed decisions and pivot instruction as soon as possible to get all students on the right pathway.
Announcing the field test for Star CBM Reading Español
You may already be familiar with Star CBM, which debuted during the 2020–2021 school year. Star CBM Reading Español is a new extension of this popular tool, providing insights into the reading development of emergent bilingual students.
What’s new in myON this fall?
myON continues to grow its personalized digital library to ensure that students always have new books to explore and enjoy. This includes 200 new titles in the Core Collection, along with new Classics titles and a new publisher add-on collection on activism and social justice.
New resource to support Spanish and English instruction
This school year, Star Assessments users will have access to a new instructional resource for Spanish Focus Skills, covering pre-K through grade 3.
New goal options and progress indicators in Star CBM
The new features include an off-grade checkmark indicator, a Rate of Improvement (ROI) calculation, the ability to set multiple goals for each student, and more.
Introducing AR Friends and more new goal-setting features
As we celebrate 35 years of Accelerated Reader, we’re introducing new features to further streamline the goal-setting process and boost students’ reading motivation.
Introducing new Freckle math content for high school
Freckle Math for High School includes engaging practice for Algebra 1, Geometry, and Algebra 2, and allows students to work on the content they need, in the environment that is right for them.
Focusing on the educator experience
Everything at Renaissance is meant to boost student learning, while making the lives of teachers easier. Freckle is no exception, and these updates are meant to make Freckle an even better fit for teachers everywhere. Read more to see how the teacher dashboard has been enhanced for an easy-to-navigate back-to-school.
New myON placement enhancement
Beginning in Summer 2021, students will have a better placement experience in myON.
Transitioning from the Star Enterprise Scale to the Star Unified Scale
Most districts will see the Star Unified Scale as the default scale in the software starting in the 2021–2022 school year.
Spring growth and summer fun with Freckle
This month’s blog is focused on supporting educators as the end of the school year approaches so that they are empowered to help their students grow into the next year.
Introducing the Star CBM Data Insights dashboard
The Star CBM Data Insights dashboard provides school and district administrators, along with teachers, an expedient, convenient place to track progress in Star CBM Reading and Star CBM Math.
Minimizing logistical hurdles for a seamless back to school
Enabling educators with Freckle is a key step in our mission, and this month’s changes ensure administrators find the implementation process as simple as possible.
Introducing Lalilo by Renaissance
To address the needs of these young learners, Renaissance recently added Lalilo, an online program for K–2 students for developing foundational reading skills. Lalilo is aligned to standards and supports explicit, systematic phonics instruction based on the latest research on the Science of Reading.
Teachers know best: Adjusting Freckle to your classroom
February’s Freckle upgrades bring ELA to the forefront! We’ve added improvements to the ELA Standards page, read-aloud features, assignment previews, and more.
Schoolzilla now supports full integration with Skyward SMS
With the latest enhancement to our Skyward SMS connector, customers with a Schoolzilla standard or professional plan can now experience full integration with their Skyward SMS system.
Record audio of Star CBM administrations
You now have the option to record the audio of a student verbally responding to a Star CBM measure when using the Online or Mixed Format of Star CBM.
Transferable skills are now identified in Star Spanish
We’re happy to announce that transferable skills are now also included on the Star Spanish Instructional Planning Reports. Transferable skills are defined as skills that can be transferred from one language to another.
Enhanced progress monitoring in Our Students dashboard
Schoolzilla customers now can compare—at a quick glance—how students progressed since the last period.
Accessibility for teachers, students, and administrators alike
At Freckle, minimizing barriers is of the utmost importance. By providing support or removing some barriers altogether, Freckle can enable teachers and students to have dynamic lessons and learning experiences.
Schoolzilla now supports standards-level analysis for Star data
Now, with the addition of standards-level data, you can dig deeper to understand how your students are performing on particular standards.
Focus Skills are now available in Spanish
Renaissance is proud to announce that Focus Skills are now available in the Star Spanish learning progression within the Star software.
Are students taking Star computer-adaptive assessments in-school or remotely?
Starting December 4, 2020, students will indicate where they are testing by simply answering one question—Are you inside your school? Adding this question before a student starts an assessment makes it much easier to capture this important information.
Manage, track, and assign with confidence
Newly added features ensure that students stay on track with their work and get the practice they need.
Star Record Book now features students’ performance across test types within screening windows
The updated Star Record Book allows you to easily see and compare student results from multiple Star Assessments—computer-adaptive and CBM—immediately after testing!
Nonfiction passages in Star CBM Reading
The Passage Oral Reading measure of Star CBM Reading has been available for grades 1–6 since Star CBM assessments were first made available in September. Now, when testing a fourth-, fifth-, or sixth-grade student, you’ll have the option to administer a nonfiction passage for field testing purposes.
No matter the starting place, a pathway to learning
Identifying student needs and giving both teachers and students a sense of direction is at the core of Freckle.
myON and Accelerated Reader together
Students can now launch myON directly from AR, encouraging students to keep reading wherever they are with helpful tools and exciting book choices.
Star CBM: New assessments provide in-depth insights
When you logged in to the Renaissance Growth Platform this September, you may have noticed that a new assessment has been added to the Star assessment suite: Star CBM. Star CBM Reading (grades K–6) and Star CBM Math (grades K–3) allow you to observe and assess students’ development so you can better target instruction and intervention to each learner’s specific needs.
Near or far, distance learning leveled up
Freckle brings an improved student experience on mobile devices, making it even easier to practice.
Star Reading Spanish and Star Math Spanish now linked to Texas STAAR Spanish
We have recently completed a statistical study that links the results from Star Reading Spanish and Star Math Spanish to the end-of-year summative assessment State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness Spanish (STAAR Spanish) in reading and mathematics for grades 3 and 4.
Support for bilingual learners with Star Spanish enhancements
Educators can now use the same reports, data, and tools for tests taken in Spanish that they already rely on when testing students in English.
Helping students with lower bandwidth internet have an optimal experience in myON
With the goal of boosting equity in mind, myON has recently added the capacity to automatically address lower bandwidths to optimize the reading experience for every student. This new feature allows titles to load up to four times faster than before.
New district-level reporting in Star Assessments
Administrators now have access to new district-wide analytics. Starting in August and continuing throughout the 2020-2021 school year, new and existing Star customers will gain access to new, interactive dashboards powered by Schoolzilla— at no extra cost.
Support for remote administration of Star Assessments
Later this fall, you’ll be able to see reporting showing if a test was taken at school or in an alternative location. With this added feature, you’ll be able to report on how students were tested and consider any adjustments to your remote testing and communication plans.
New Growth Proficiency Category displayed on the Star Growth Report
The Star Growth Report summarizes growth between two testing periods in the same school year as soon as a student has both a pretest and posttest score. Teachers can run the report for a class or specific groups of students by SGP window, and administrators can see growth for each class or grade in their schools.
New add-on publishers available for myON
Students deserve to read books that can serve as cultural mirrors. Too often, books feature children who only appear white. Or worse, non-white characters reinforce the stereotypes that fuel institutional racism and inform bigotry.