Illuminate Blog
Follow our latest stories on educators, students and classroom technology
Setting Goals That Matter for Students With Dyslexia
Dyslexia is a widely-recognized reading disorder that affects both learning-to-read and reading skills over one’s lifespan. Individuals with dyslexia can learn to read, although it often requires additional intensive instruction. Once dyslexia is diagnosed, a treatment plan that includes direct and systematic instruction of the major components of reading is needed. Alongside the treatment plan,…
Illuminator Spotlight: Marisol Lopez
This Illuminator Spotlight blog features Marisol Lopez, a 4th grade teacher from Rosedale Elementary in Chico Unified School District (CA). Marisol impactfully uses assessment in many ways. She uses it to check if her students understood the day’s lesson, to identify students who need additional support, to gauge content mastery with standards-aligned tests, and to…
10 Persistent Progress Monitoring Myths Debunked
Progress monitoring is a widespread practice in K-12 schools across the country and for good reason! By collecting frequent data about a student’s progress toward a specific learning goal, teachers can keep tabs on how well an intervention is working and make changes as needed. However, despite the widespread acceptance and general use of progress…
BI Tool: Acadience Pathways Report
This month, Illuminate’s BI Tool Blog highlights Salt Lake City School District’s “Acadience Pathways” report, created by Brittany Dimick. Just like David Jansson’s “A-G Tracker” report, the focus of last month’s post, Brittany’s report uses conditional styling to make the most important data pop off the screen (or the page, for us dinosaurs who still…
Maximizing Tier 2 & Tier 3 Data: Progress Monitoring, Intervention Fidelity, and Intervention Effectiveness
As educators, we’re typically really good at determining when a student has a need—largely because of our experience and because of our interest in the well-being of our students. And as we increase our data literacy and invest in excellent data analysis tools, we become better and faster at identifying the student’s specific need and…
How to Use Quality Assessment Content to Build Assessment and Data Literacy
If you’re like most educators, your credentialing program focused on two main things: teaching strategies and classroom management. Information about how to assess and understand data is lacking in many of these programs today. To fill that gap, districts are now working to build assessment and data literacy through professional development (PD). But many districts…
Five Outstanding Educators Honored at Illuminate’s Colorado User Conference
Last week, we were thrilled to honor five outstanding educators for their leadership in using data to increase the power of teaching and the delight of learning. Honorees were recognized at Illuminate Education’s 2019 Annual National Data Conference in Aurora, CO. The conference brought together educators from across the nation for two days of professional…
Turning Tier 1 Universal Data into Action
In a previous post, we briefly discussed the importance of monitoring our Tier 1 Universal instruction. But many districts struggle with creating a plan of what to do—or with how to turn their findings to action. If there’s a Tier 1 issue, where exactly is it? What do we do about it? Let’s take a…
BI Tool: A-G Tracker
The Illuminate BI Tool Blog is back! We hope everyone had a wonderful summer and is at least surviving the start of the new school year. It’s a hectic time of year for educators, including us at Illuminate, to put it mildly. I believe deeply in the power of technology to help solve problems, but…
MTSS Tiers & MTSS Interventions 101
This article was co-written with Lynn Ehlers Interventions aren’t new to education—they’re a long-time component of good instructional practices. But as districts implement multi-tiered systems of support (MTSS) and response to intervention (RtI), interventions are being tracked, monitored, and tied to program evaluation in a way that is new to many. It’s also brought some…