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: Spring 2023
We’re working on a powerful new ecosystem that connects assessment, instruction, and practice to help you provide every learner with the right support at the right time for success. In our latest Roadmap Report, Chief Product Officer Todd Brekhus shows you how we’re keeping teachers at the center of all that we do—and how we’re providing dynamic new ways to engage and empower your students.
Current update
Special Report: myON’s impact on student achievement
Data from over 440,000 myON users shows that students who read on myON experience higher levels of annual growth in general reading ability compared to students who are not using myON.
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Recent updates
New FastBridge and eduCLIMBER integration streamlines intervention and progress monitoring workflows
The new integration between FastBridge and eduCLIMBER brings a new level of efficiency to your student intervention practices and data-driven MTSS.
Introducing a category filter option in Star Phonics
A new category filter allows you to display only the phonics categories your students are actively working on and in which they’re expected to become proficient
Accelerated Reader data now available in Renaissance Analytics
Accelerated Reader customers can now get a better understanding of how Accelerated Reader is being used in their district using their Renaissance Analytics dashboards.
Announcing the Star Phonics kindergarten field test
Star Phonics is looking at expanding its grade-level coverage by adding kindergarten into the existing application via a field test.
Introducing growth indicators on the Growth Proficiency Chart
Star Assessments’ Growth Proficiency Chart provides a helpful display of performance and growth in a single view. The Chart now includes visual indicators for Low, Typical, and High Growth so you can more easily gauge how schools, classes, and individual students are performing.
FastBridge assessment data now connects with Freckle and myON
Schools and districts using FastBridge now have the option of connecting students’ assessment scores to our Freckle practice program and myON digital reading platform. This eliminates the need for students to take separate placement tests, and it helps you to more easily match each learner with the right math and ELA skills practice and engaging digital books.
New braille support in Star CBM Reading and Star CBM Math
Star CBM Reading and Star CBM Math now include braille support via downloadable .BRF files, providing the same testing opportunities for blind/visually impaired students as their sighted peers.
What’s new in myON this fall?
myON offers more than 250 new titles this fall, including decodables, chapter books, and books in Spanish. Other recent enhancements include additional support for World Languages, new myON Projects for social-emotional learning, and a new student-recorded read-aloud feature.
What’s new in Lalilo this fall?
You’ll find a number of new features in Lalilo this fall to accelerate students’ foundational literacy growth. This includes Direct Instruction lessons, new and enhanced comprehension books, expanded standards coverage, a Lalilo–Nearpod Lessons List, and more.
Easily connect assessment to skills instruction with Star Phonics and Lalilo
A new crosswalk document helps you to easily connect your students’ results in the Star Phonics assessment with the right foundational literacy lessons in Lalilo. This helps you to put your Star Phonics data into action immediately with focused practice on essential skills.
New search and filter options in Schoolzilla
Your Schoolzilla dashboards have several new features to support informed decision making, including school-level filtering, faster searching, and easier access to Metric Zoom. With these enhancements, administrators can move more quickly from reviewing student data to taking action.
Supporting social and emotional learning with myON
myON now includes SEL projects that combine tasks in reading, writing, using the graphic organizer, and more. Projects focus on essential social and emotional competencies such as self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision making.
New languages supported in myON and myON News
myON News articles are now available in Arabic and Mandarin, including natural-voice audio narration. Also, students can now view the myON interface in Portuguese, building on myON’s commitment to providing all students with access to engaging reading experiences.
Introducing the Star Student Report
The new Star Student Report enables you to easily share test results with students for early literacy, reading, or math. You can use this report during conferences with students to discuss performance and set appropriate goals.
Star CBM Reading field test: Sight and High-Frequency Words and Encoding
This school year, we’re field-testing new measures for Sight and High-Frequency Words and Encoding. If you use Star CBM Reading, you have early access to these measures, and we invite you to participate in the field test.
An easier way to enable accommodations in Star Assessments
Star Reading and Star Math in English provide a variety of accommodations, including response masking, color contrast, and zoom features. You can easily see which accommodations were enabled for which students on the Star Test Record Report, Test Activity Report, and Diagnostic Report.
Star Assessments provide new norms and benchmarks for pre-K and kindergarten students
Star Early Literacy includes new national norms for pre-K students, and Star Math includes new national norms for kindergarten students. Star Early Literacy, Star Reading, and Star Math also include new benchmark categories to help you better understand your early learners’ performance this year.
Enhanced reporting for administrators in Lalilo
Lalilo’s admin dashboards provide a variety of new metrics this year to help you monitor students’ foundational literacy practice and progress.
Star CBM includes two new RAN measures for grades K–3
This school year, Star CBM includes new measures of Rapid Letter Naming and Rapid Number Naming. Many states require assessment of Rapid Automatic Naming (RAN) as part of universal screening for characteristics of dyslexia in kindergarten through grade 3.
Managing reading ranges in Accelerated Reader
This school year, you can set a reading range in English and/or Spanish for each of your students. Reading range is an easier metric for younger students to understand than Average Book Level, and it gives you greater flexibility in managing and monitoring students’ independent reading practice in AR.
Introducing student-recorded read-aloud in myON
Students can now easily record themselves reading myON books out loud. They have the ability to review the recording before submitting it to their teacher. This provides new opportunities for students to build oral reading fluency and to self-assess their reading.
Accelerate instruction with the new Star Assessments to Nearpod connection
If you use Star Assessments, you now have access to the Nearpod lesson library and resources for literacy and math within Star. This helps you to more easily connect assessment to instruction and to further personalize student learning this school year.
Introducing Star CBM Lectura to support K–6 students’ literacy development in Spanish
The new Star CBM Lectura provides reliable, authentic measures that truly reflect K–6 students’ literacy development, including measures that are most predictive of learning to read in Spanish. Like Star CBM Reading, Star CBM Lectura supports in-person, remote, online, or paper assessment experiences.
Use Lexile measures in myON to guide instruction this fall
myON provides educators with two metrics for matching students with the just-right digital books and news articles: ATOS ZPD and Lexile® measures.
Introducing the Parts of Speech domain and other enhancements in Freckle for ELA
You’ll find a number of new features in Freckle for ELA for the new school year. This includes a new Targeted Grammar feature, a new Parts of Speech domain, enhancements to the ELA Report Card, and a more intuitive ELA Skills learning pathway.
What’s new in myON this summer?
myON offers more than 100 new titles this summer, including decodables, upper elementary chapter books, and books in Spanish. myON has also received recognition from Digital Promise for research-based product design.
Place students into Lalilo with Star Early Literacy
If you’re using Star Early Literacy with the premium version of Lalilo, you can now use Star Early Literacy scores to pre-place students into the Lalilo scope and sequence at the just-right level.
Introducing the Biliteracy Report in Accelerated Reader
This new report shows you important information about students' reading in Spanish and English. You’ll see the student's percent correct on AR quizzes in each language, their average book level for passed quizzes in each language, and the percentage of reading the student has done in each language.
New features and reporting in Freckle for ELA
Freckle for ELA now provides educators with session-level reports for Grammar Skills Practice and Word Study. Educators can also now preview targeted Word Study assignments. Additional enhancements are coming soon, including a new Parts of Speech domain.
What’s new in myON this spring?
This spring, you and your students will find a variety of new English and Spanish titles in the myON Core Collection. We’re also thrilled to introduce two new publisher add-on collections from Harper Collins.
Connecting to Lalilo with a QR code
You can now provide your students with a QR code to log in to Lalilo. You can easily find login QR codes for each of your classes on Lalilo’s teacher dashboard.
Supporting family engagement with Renaissance Home Connect
Using Home Connect, you can share the Star Family Report, as well as Accelerated Reader quiz results, with parents and guardians. This is a great way to support school-home communication.
Helping students learn to navigate Lalilo
The new Lalilo training lesson helps kids to better understand the Lalilo user experience. The lesson shows them the basic activities and question types they'll encounter on their learning journey.
What’s new in Accelerated Reader this spring?
Check out the latest features in AR, including streamlined goal setting, new quiz-related preferences, and additional tools to help drive reading motivation and match students with engaging authentic texts.
Linking directly to myON digital books
You can now link directly to individual myON books—and even to a specific page within a book—from Nearpod, Google Classroom, and other learning platforms. This helps you to easily integrate reading material in myON into your lessons, and to provide students with reference material.
Assessing student growth with the interactive Growth Proficiency Chart
The reimagined Growth Proficiency Chart shows you the relationship between student proficiency and student growth, based on the most recent Star Assessment taken.
What’s new in myON this winter?
Students will find more than 100 new books in the myON Core Collection this winter, along with 65 titles that are now available in Spanish translation.
More actionable data from your Star CBM results
New features and reporting options enable you to easily connect assessment scores to the specific skills students are ready to learn. You also have new options in the Data Insights Dashboard to provide a more granular view of student proficiency and growth.
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.
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.