iSpring Suite vs. Renaissance Accelerated Math

This is one of the best authoring tools in the market. As a strong user of most of them, we ran across iSpring Suite years ago when the product was still evolving. Who would have thought that having these tools embedded inside PowerPoint would make such an impact? There is nothing I can't do with iSpring Suite that others claim is unique to their authoring products, and some things that I can do even better.

It's great for practice but not as good as other programs with lessons that support students when they get into trouble. I'd prefer a video to pop up for students to review when they bomb a particular practice. I'd like them to watch the video and then do the lesson again. After that, if they need help they should come to me. That is one thing I like better about Moby Math. I also like Moby better at identifying and providing missing skills that are below grade level. With Renaissance Accelerated Math, I have to separate students into a variety of banks. That is time-consuming and may not specifically target all the skills that a student needs or does not require.

• iSpring integrates with PowerPoint extremely well and enables the user to develop training in PowerPoint with ease.
• iSpring characters are fantastic. They continue to add more regularly features regularly.
• The voice recording and ability to integrate music is a very easy process.
• Customer service is fantastic. They are quick to respond and their training is easy to follow.

Incentivized

• “Kids don’t care what you know until they know that you care.”
• One of the very first things I learned my first five years of teaching, except that student teaching does not really prepare you, is that it is my job to help my students succeed, not to just give them a grade. In the beginning, I taught the lesson, assigned work, administered tests, and took grades. I did that because that is how we are supposed to determine efficiency. Right? No, Wrong. I learned this the hard way and, sadly and regrettably, at the expense of my students at that time. Over time, I noticed how sometimes it took re-teaching along with small group instruction and interventions for students to understand and master the concepts. Since then, I have allowed for them to fix, re-do, and re-re-do their work, as needed.
• I focus on my interventions just as much as I do my initial teaching of the objective. Making sure that they truly understand and master the content before moving on to another objective helps me just as much as it helps them. It saves me from continually re-teaching. Slow and steady does win the race. This approach allows me to help the student master objectives with more efficiency.
• Accelerated Math has allowed for me to individualize my instruction and interventions. I love this program. Truly! I have three types of students; above, on target, and below. This program allows for growth in each area. However, I have found the most growth in my bottom quartile. Why? I believe it is because I am able to recognize a problem or issue with a particular objective immediately. I, then, can address that issue immediately before the bad habits or wrong approach is repeated.
• This program is masked as a whole-group classroom approach, however, the most important components are found under the mask. One-on-one instruction is how I describe it to educators. My students are actively engaged in their own learning. They are also actively engaged in the learning of their peers, as well. I use a lot of peer tutoring techniques. They have access to knowing who is also working on mastering the same objective(s) they are working on plus they know who has already mastered said objective. This allows them to know who to go to for effective help. They are able to steer their own learning to a point. They can ask a peer or me. They can get on Accel math and look at the objective and see completed answers for a reference. This also boosts the confidence of their own understanding. They feel confident in having control of the path they want to use for gaining knowledge. Peer-tutoring and peer-discussions give them the opportunity to say out loud what they are thinking/feeling about a concept and rationalize their approach to evaluating said concept. As the teacher, I play various roles. I can teach, facilitate a small group, or just be an observer. A lot of times, I just ask open-ended questions to jump start their own questions.
• Accel Math has assisted my math classrooms with tremendous gains. My test scores have gone up significantly. My students have a greater sense of accomplishment since they have been given the "driver's seat" for their own learning. This makes my heart smile! ;)

• Adding audio narration to interactive slides is easy, but still perhaps a bit repetitive/clunky
• The way you add playlists works well, but wish it was "project/course specific", instead of carrying over from project to project. Easy to delete playlists, tho.
• If you have a common set of learner resources to make available over many courses, you must manually add the URLs and/or PDFs manually each time. Would be so nice to be able to create a "reference list" and import it to each course with a click or two. This is the most annoying thing I can think of about iSpring.

• I would like to see the standards were set up in order
• I am never sure of what standards I want to include in set up
• iReady is taking over assessment, but I think we will always include AM STAR progress monitoring

Incentivized

I would give it 10 but I also like to try new solutions.

The software integration was appealing to our department--particularly to the faculty who had not, prior to the pandemic, taught online--because it integrates with an already known entity: PowerPoint. Furthermore, iSpring's assessment builder with its wide variety of questions is extremely easy to use--basically plug and play--for any level of comfort that a faculty member has in terms of online teaching.

Incentivized

As a tech savvy person, I found Accelerated Math to be easy to learn. There are a ton of options to display your data and integrate your students learning abilities into the program. It can, however, be a little overwhelming for a tech beginner and if they don't have someone to walk them through the initial steps and get them started, I can imagine it might be difficult for them to get going.

It is consistently available with outages planned and communicated well in advance. The outages also seem to be planned to provide the least disruption to teachers.

Incentivized

It is easy to use and understand. Students have no difficulty finding their way around, and teachers easily understand the reports and data.

Incentivized

I had a difficult issue where iSpring just stopped working. It turned out to be a Microsoft Windows/Office issue. The iSpring Support team continued to contact me until we got the issue resolved. A support team that does not wait for the customer to call back is EXCEPTIONAL. I can not think of any other vendor that was this devoted to finding a solution! My compliments to "Dana" and the rest of the iSpring support teasm!

Renaissance has great videos and articles in their help section. They also have an online user community that has great discussions about using their products, access to free webinars, and great tips. They have the honor roll program/challenge to help users track their progress and talk to other users for ideas and tips. Most one-on-one help comes from our instructional facilitators in our county.

Incentivized

Therer are several other interactive video creation tools out there, such as Camtasia, Adobe Captivate and even PowerPoint on its own, but none of them come close to offering the galaxy of features that is served up by iSpring Suite, and it's the easiest to learn and use with affordable price tags

Accelerated Reading and STAR Assessments. We use all three to help prepare students for state assessments. They are all targeting a different area so one is not better than the other. We use the reading portion to help with growth in reading and the STAR Assessments to pinpoint those who struggle with reading to prepare interventions.

Incentivized

If there is going to be an outage for service, Renaissance does a great job of communicating that well in advance to allow the faculty to plan accordingly.

Incentivized

• We allow potential customers to sample training and feedback is our offerings differentiate us from our peers.
• Having the ability to offer an accessible training catalog and self-enrollment is also something our customers comment on positively.
• The training developed in iSpring has allowed our customers to prepare for further interaction with our processes and projects on their own timeline, and has positively impacted the ease with which we are able to execute project rollouts.

• Thanks to the practices, exercises, and tests, by end of year 85% of my students will be on grade level or above and those who struggle will make significant growth.
• I like that I can quickly assess and fix misconceptions with a quick print out of a couple of problems.