Name: Coherence Over Complexity: Back-to-School 2026 with Renaissance
Uploaded: 2026-08-26T19:31:14.082Z
Duration: 48 min 28 s
Description: Coherence Over Complexity: Back-to-School 2026 with Renaissance

Transcript for "Coherence Over Complexity: Back-to-School 2026 with Renaissance": Welcome, everybody. We're gonna give it just a couple seconds as folks start piling in and joining on, and we'll get started in just one moment. It's back to school season all over, and I was remarking, to someone at lunch how that's really much more of a elongated pattern than it used to be, I think, when we were all kids. I know, for example, Oklahoma was in the first days of August, and I was talking with some Upstate New York people. They're like, oh, we can't go back to after Labor Day. So it's happening. For some of you, you're in. For some of you are about to go in. For some of you, you got a little bit more time, but it is that time of year. Thanks to everybody for joining. We'll go ahead and get started. My name is Gene Kearns. I have the pleasure of serving as the chief academic officer at Renaissance, and it's, an great opportunity that I have to welcome you to sort of a preview or a sneak peek. It's just an overview. That's the right word. An overview, of the latest and greatest things coming, for Renaissance products at back to school 2026. In Renaissance, we always like to acknowledge our mission, which is to accelerate learning for all. And one of the things I've often said about this mission is it could never it can never be over like anything you do. If you achieve a new rate, you could always do something more. And I think that's sort of comparable to the fact that our product development is never over. It never stops. We invest a minimum amount in product, every product, every single year to continue to add new features to it. And this year is not only no exception, but it's an incredible year, of new offerings and new opportunities and new functions and new features. So I'm gonna kick it off today, but I'm also joined by two of my esteemed colleagues, Story Sitwalla and Andy Frost from our product teams. And they're gonna extend on some things that I'll begin with and not only talk with you about what you're gonna see for back to school this year, but maybe give you a little peek, at some of the things that are beyond just over the edge over the horizon, the kind of thing that we'll be talking about next year as we come back into school. That said, we are gonna cover, a lot of ground very quickly. So I think it is very important that we frame expectations for what we are about to do. We're going to talk about features. We're gonna show some things in product. We are not, however, viewing this as training. So we're not necessarily gonna go point by click and unpack every single thing. Today's goal with you is not training. Today's goal with you is awareness. We wanna cover a wide variety of new features for back to school, and all you need to try and do is to capture the name of the individual new features you would like to know about. While we are live, people are gonna be pasting in resources where you can learn more about the things that we are talking about. And at the end, we'll point you to some additional places to go. So you do not need to try and capture, nor will we demonstrate everything you need to know to use all these features. If you simply just pay attention and you jot down the names of the new features that we're talking about, Again, we're gonna paste in some resources, and we'll tell you where to go to learn more. Because the reality of it is we couldn't train you on all our back to school stuff in one hour. It would take at least a day or more. So let's get an exciting overview of what's going on. Before I dive into any particular feature, let me show you at a very high level a theme that's kind of beginning to cut through a lot of the work we're doing. That is we're trying to support schools as they work for more coherence between the various parts of the programs that they've put together. So here's kind of what I'm talking about. Every state has its educational standards. And in working to support your students in learning those standards, schools go out and buy and build, curriculum. Now I'm gonna use textbooks as being a word that's pretty synonymous for curriculum. So I'm probably gonna say textbook more than I am going to say curriculum, and I understand that sometimes curriculum is more than that. But the whole point is up to this point, everything fits very, very nicely. If we only had to have a standards and we only had to have a textbook to follow, and that's all we ever needed to do everything we have to do for kids, we wouldn't ever be sitting here talking about coherence because, basically, you just follow the textbook and go from unit to unit. However, just having a textbook doesn't get everything done that schools need to get done. So, for example, you've got assessment requirements. Whether those things are required around MTSS or screening for characteristics of dyslexia or other policy or legislative requirements, schools have needs of assessments, and you just brought a new tool in. And so then the conversation becomes, is this tool aligned to our standards? How does it support our curriculum? If it doesn't directly support our curriculum, is it coherent, or are we getting all kinds of different information? And we're gonna talk about that. And then beyond your textbooks, many schools find and they rightly so decide that they need to buy practice products for kids, things to help kids do repetitions and develop mastery around the specific skills, particularly, in English language arts and mathematics, but it applies to all subjects. But enough practice for kids to learn, to master the skills that we are covering. And y'all, there was another webinar we did back in a few weeks ago where Megan Gurkha, Doctor Megan Gurkha, she was on with me. And one thing that she really said was even those curricula that are rated as high quality instructional material, often they don't include enough practice of skills to support kids' mastery. And so schools come to us and other providers, and they buy tools like Freckle and Laulilo and other competitive products on the market. But, bam, now you've brought another element into your school system. How well does it fit in? Is your practice tool supporting what you're teaching right now, or is your practice tool serving up skills that may not be immediately relevant to what your kids are learning during the curriculum? And if it's not, then that wouldn't be highly coherent, and you can see how this goes. We don't even have to talk about interventions. The more things we add to our systems, the more chances there are that they might not work beautifully together. And it's not about buying the parts. It's gotta be about building a system. Here's a really simple comparison. I went to the store and I bought some screws and a screwdriver. Okay. That's wonderful. I might have a system for screwing, but if I did not think about the fact that I bought flat head screws and a Phillips screwdriver, wow, I bought the parts, but those parts don't work together coherently. This is the challenge we're trying to do. How do we help schools make all these different tools? And I've just replaced those icons for curriculum and standards and assessment and practice and intervention with these compasses because I think a lot of teachers live through a daily reality where they look at the different tools that are part of the program that they have to teach, and they say, wow. No two tools that I'm using points in exactly the same direction. It's like having a dashboard where every compass you have points in a slightly different direction. We gotta solve this problem, and that's what we're doing at Renaissance. So we've got a really cool new element to our products, and that is in many cases, you can tell us what textbook you're using and what unit you were on, and we will reorganize the renaissance world to fit your reality and make sure that everything we're offering to you is highly coherent. So it's kind of like an answer to this question. What is supplemental providers like us? What if those of us that provide the other parts of your program? What if we reorganized our content through the lens of each major textbook series? What if they did that? In that world, the world becomes far more coherent. What we're talking about is allowing you to tell us this is the book that we use, and then we will present all of our other products in a very coherent way wrapped around it so that our assessment tells you the most relevant assessment information for the unit you were teaching and the book you are using. And that our practice tools and our instructional support serve up resources that are most relevant to what you are teaching right now in your book. This is really significant. Here's the deal. The CCSSO, the Council of Chief State School Officers, they've asked schools to look at this. And one of the things they said is at an absolute minimum, supplemental materials, like many of the things that you get from us, they need to know what scope and sequence, what skills your kids are learning through, and I wanna show you what we've done. Well, I'll talk about it. Story's gonna show it to you a little bit more, but you get the idea. We are bringing into our system the ability again for you to give us such a critical piece of information. What book are you using and what unit are you on? And when we know those things, we can make everything in our system aligned to that and just make it simpler for you to do your daily work. Now both Story and I are gonna use two terms, and I wanna make sure there's a little bit of delineation between them. We're gonna talk about alignments, and we're gonna talk about our core textbook partners. Okay? Partnerships are alignment plus. So here's the deal. There are some textbook companies that are our partners. We have worked with them. There are other textbook companies that have not partnered with us, but we've done alignments to their book. The primary difference is that if you have a partner textbook that is your your part your textbook provider, and they're one of our partners, it's like not only getting the cupcake, but getting the icing and the sprinkles on top. So you're gonna be able to do everything that we can do through an alignment, which is serve up all these resources and more, including jump from our site to their site, have our tools point to their resources as well. I'm talking about it conceptually, but just a second. Story's gonna show it to you. You can see you can see what we're looking at, talking about. So do be clear. We have alignments, and then we have some partners. And if you see that your textbook is one of our partners, you get even more. You get that cupcake with the icing and with the sprinkles. That is part of our Renaissance Core Publisher Program. You can learn more by visiting renaissance.com/alignment, where there's a growing collection of resources and information there for that. And what's so incredibly important is we've got a lot of the biggest books there and even more coming in. So if you see your math textbook on the left side, they're partners. You get the cupcake with the icing. And if you see your textbook on the right side, we've done an alignment to them. So not every single functionality, but almost all of them. That's our math coverage. Here's our English language arts coverage. These are our ELA partners on the left side. Here are ELA align alignments on the right side. So if you are seeing the icon that reflects your textbook, yay, do the little happy dance because you're about to be amazed by what story is gonna show you that you will now be able to do in our products because we have these alignments or partnerships. And if you don't see your book, don't fret. Do one of two things. One, just chill a little bit because we're adding more. We're adding more constantly. The other thing is if you have a particular book, tell them we wanna partner with as many textbooks as possible. So if we've not partnered with them or work with them, tell them, I want you to work with Renaissance because I've seen what they're doing with some companies, and I want that for our book. You can also tell your local Renaissance rep. This is a book that is important to us. Now these alignment things, again, they're gonna change everything. Where are you gonna see these? And again, story's gonna show them to you live in just a second, but you're gonna see them in one of two places. One is the Renaissance Next interface, which is the default interface for Star and the default interface for users who subscribe to us for more than one qualifying product. So if you've got a bunch of Renaissance stuff, you've got Renaissance next. If you've got Star, you've got Renaissance next. That's one of the places that you will see these alignments. And, again, story is gonna show that to you live. The other place is in our new Renaissance Intelligence system. And, again, you're gonna get some sneak peeks at that. And I guarantee when you see it, I know you're gonna wanna learn more because it's gonna really help teachers to do more work in less time that is more targeted and more effective. So I've set the stage enough. I've talked about something you haven't seen enough, so it's time for me to to stop talking and get off the stage so that my colleague, Story, can show it to you. So with that, let me pass it over to Story. Hello, everybody, and thank you, Jean, for setting the stage for the demo, which I'm about to show you. Before I hop into this demo, what I wanted to just illuminate is that I'm going to be showing you some Renaissance Next features as Jean discussed as well as in the context of Renaissance Intelligence. So Renaissance Intelligence is our brand new education intelligence system that is designed to be a single stop for connecting assessment to practice and instruction, all in one single unified system. And this is available through three solutions, Renaissance math, Renaissance literacy, and Renaissance assessment. So if you are an educator on this call who, has access to either of those three solutions, you will have access to Renaissance Intelligence. This is live as of this year. Okay. So I'm going to jump right in here to a demo of Renaissance Intelligence. And what you'll notice here on this home page, for those of you of Renaissance Next, it looks exactly the same, and that is intentional so that we can kind of help with some of that change management and transition. I wanna pop over to another area that is shared between Renaissance Next and Renaissance Intelligence and pick up where Jean left off in talking about instructional coherence. So those publisher partners are all available here on the screen, standards and curriculum for math and for literacy. And as Jean mentioned, we connect to more than 20 different publishers and textbooks as well as more than 40 different editions, state editions, and variations of those textbooks. You'll also notice that we provide additional access points from a skill lens and a standards based lens for educators who are either looking for textbook alignments or a skills view or a standards view. I wanna go into one of these pages to show you what that looks like. So again, available both if you have Renaissance Next and Intelligence. What you'll notice here is that we've now pulled in the topics related to these textbooks. So for Envision Math, this is a publisher partner. Savvas is a publisher partner of ours. You'll notice the topic one or the first unit is understand multiplication and division of whole numbers. When I go into this system and this page, essentially this does a few things to try to weave together that instructional coherence. The first thing you will notice is that our system, based on assessment and practice data, makes recommendations for who's ready for core instruction on this topic. In addition, I also quickly get recommendations for who might need support on some of those earlier prerequisite skills that are associated with this unit. Last but not least, I'll also get some recommendations for who might be ready for enrichment as well as connections to materials. Now what's unique about Renaissance Intelligence, so all of this next information here is really about what comes through with the system, is that we have integrated in a number of resources that open directly within this experience. So unique to Renaissance Intelligence is what we're calling a knowledge check, and this is designed to be a formative assessment built on top of one of our high quality item banks that's been curated and created by our, internal content expert team. And I can go ahead and create a knowledge check related to that unit of instruction right here. I can select some standards, create this assessment, preview the items, swap out some of the items and assign these to my students. So all here within a system, I don't need to hop out to different applications to spin up that assessment. I also, through our publisher partners, have direct links out to those same resources. So again, I can align my core unit of instruction. I can do that first teach and discover additional materials. As Jean mentioned, Megan Gurkha talked about the need for practice. I have now targeted practice assignments all again within this flow aligned to this particular unit. It even preselects for me those students who might be ready for core instruction. And if I was on the prerequisite skills page, it would select for me those students who just need prerequisite support. So I'm gonna show you here also the topic bundles that we have. So if you're thinking whole class, reteach, I wanna go in and find some, supplemental materials to go at this kind of topic again. I have a number of different formats here. I can either do a whole class reteach or I have smaller activities designed for lighter weight moments to weave into my instruction. Number of resources here. Okay. So I wanna move on now to show you some of the other features of Renaissance Intelligence. I'm gonna spend time talking about a few different areas. This is our skill proficiency page, and what the magic of this page does is this ties together multiple data streams. So if you're a teacher who's trying to understand which of my students are ready for instruction on certain standards or how are they doing on certain skills, you'll notice here that we've got standards based performance as well as insights about each of those underlying skills related to those standards. And this is pulling from our machine learning or artificial intelligence powered system based on multiple data inputs. So it's not just one system. As a teacher, I know sometimes you give an assessment over here, students are practicing over here, I've given another assessment in a different place, and it's really hard to pull together those insights to get a coherent sense of what my kids know and understand, and that is what this page does, as well as has some generated insights on top of this to help you understand where to prioritize time. So I can see here this insight says students can tile, but they're struggling to connect tiling to multiplication. So I now I have more targeted information on how to intervene. Moving on to a few different features of this system, this is our assignments and assessment page. I can manage those assignments that I assigned, I showed previously. I can also view my latest assessment results all within one system here. Again, I can view my star assessment results and create some new assignments right here from this workflow. I'm not gonna go through all of these. As Jean mentioned, this is not training, but we have a number of different assignment types related to math and literacy, for teachers to use. And then two other features here I'm actually gonna skip to. We have some generative AI tools, which we're calling our AI teacher studio. I have the ability to save any tools I've created as well as I I have access to seven different tools to support educators as they're planning, as they need to create worksheets or quizzes or differentiation such as a translator and a text leveler. Not not gonna go into detail on these here, but just know that these are available in this new system as well as that instructional piece. So I showed you how to find those lessons. Now I'm gonna stop sharing and actually kind of launch in so you can see what happens from the teacher perspective as well as the student perspective side by side. So if I go here, what you will notice is that we've got on the left hand side the teacher point of view, and on the right hand side, this is a new student homepage and experience. So as a teacher, when I go in to teach my lesson, I have the option to teach it live or assign it to students. I've already started this lesson. I didn't have time to finish it, so I'm gonna go back into it and resume this lesson the very next day. This opens up the lesson here. I'm in the middle. We're working on question one of four. What you'll notice on this right hand side of the screen, the student side experience, I now get a message that the teacher has started a lesson. Oh, and I need to log in again. Alright. I'm not gonna do that for the sake of time because it's gonna force me to look up credentials and all sorts of other things. So, essentially, though, you kind of get a sneak peek of that banner and how the teacher and student view works. Okay. So with that, this is just a sneak peek or a preview of the Renaissance Intelligence System. I'm now going to pass it over to Andy who is going to talk about what is coming in the future. Thank you, Story. It's great to be with you all. And I gotta say it's it's fun to be a Renaissance. It's also a busy time for us just like for you all, as we come back to school and as we, you know, have been working so diligently in so many different ways to bring you these updates, it's actually a real treat to be able to talk about them and and see all of the places that all of you are joining us from, from California to New York to Iowa, Wisconsin, and my own home state of Minnesota. So as as Story said, and as Jean said, actually, doctor Kern said, there's just so much to talk about. Right? And there's so much that we are making available, in this back to school session that we really can't go into all the depth that we'd like to. That's also true of the the couple of things I'm gonna share. I'm gonna start with, some updates to our EduCLIMBER platform that is primarily designed to support districts' MTSS frameworks. Then I'll talk about a new addition to the Renaissance family that we're excited about. And then, believe it or not, I'm gonna talk about next year, which is already rapidly approaching. So to start with EduCLIMBER, as I said, if if you're a user of EduCLIMBER, you're well familiar with what it does. It helps, administrators and teachers and specialists better support the needs of students in primarily the context of an MTSS framework, where you're doing screening and progress monitoring and identifying students that are, at risk and in need of intervention services. And one of the ways that EduCLIMBER helps with that is something we call students three d. So that screenshot you see to the right, is actually an animated one. I I probably should have animated it just to see all those dots come raining in. And you can click on one. You can actually see that student. You can see data about that student. So when we talk about, you know, the whole child, we try and we try and bring that to life from a data perspective by bringing in things like behavior, attendance, discipline, alongside of all of the traditional academic data, like reading and math scores from a STAR assessment and then WA MAP assessment, a curriculum, I read a diagnostic assessment, what have you. What's new and exciting this year for back to school is that we are adding what we call natural language filtering to the students' three d interface. So if you're familiar with EduCLAMBER, you're kind of used to the two thirds on the the left two thirds of that screenshot. That's students' three d. The right third, or maybe it's a quarter, in the light blue is new. And that new light blue quarter of the screen, if it looks like a chatbot, it kind of is, but it's a very special kind of chatbot, It is our own Renaissance, delivered and designed intelligence so that you can simply ask a question and get an answer. Increasingly, you'll see this more and more in data, but, you know, no one wakes up in the morning and says, you know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna set these five filters with these drop downs and these check boxes, and that'll give me a question. You have to train your brain to think like that. What you really start with is how many students in the third grade are in need of intervention, for example. Let's just type that into the into the interface there, in natural language and let the AI figure it out. So that's that's exciting. That's new. For those of you that are, used to EduCLIMBER, I'm sure you'll be excited to see that. Oh, sorry. And I can't I can't get the bullets to animate. I'm sorry. I'll talk to you next about Kelvin, and then we'll come back maybe if I can get those bullets up. Kelvin Pulse has joined the Renaissance family. So Kelvin Pulse is a survey tool as you can see there, provides again, as we talk about whole child, right, as we think about serving the whole child and meeting the needs of that child, we wanna ask the child. Right? Whole student, whole child. Well, what does the child have to say? So one of the things, that Kelvin Pulse can be used really effectively for is surveying students, getting engagement. You can also survey other, stakeholders, like parents, like community members, staff. Anyone that you wanna survey, you can survey with Kelvin Pulse. And what's unique about Kelvin Pulse, comparing it to a generic survey to a Qualtrics or, you know, Google Forms, if you will. We're gonna give you or the Kellen Pulse platform offers you prebuilt surveys already relevant, already validated, already proven to work in terms of the question wording, how it's structured, and then there's some really fantastic technology that actually delivers that survey in a way that increases response rates, to the point where, you know, people that do surveys for a living kinda don't believe the response rates. They say, oh, 10 or 15% is fantastic response rate. Kelvin Pulse, not uncommon to get fifty, sixty, 70, percent response rates. So we're excited to add that to the Renaissance family. If you already know and are using Kelvin Pulse, there's a pretty good chance you're in California because where it's used most heavily. But we're excited to introduce that tool more broadly across the country. And if you have an interest in that, I'd encourage you to talk to, your local representative, from Renaissance. Next up then, next year, believe it or not. Right? For as as amazing and as chock full as this update is on all the things that we're doing this year, We also wanted to talk a little bit about what we're doing next year, and we are calling next year here at Renaissance, internally at least, quote, unquote, the year of the admin. So everything, story just shared with you, on the Renaissance Intelligence platform is focused on teachers and students, which is naturally the place we thought it made sense to start. We already had, for those of you familiar with it, Next for Teachers. So Renaissance Intelligence was the natural evolution of Next for Teachers. So we have Renaissance Intelligence for Teachers now. That provides all kinds of fantastic benefits, and yet we are just getting started. We haven't even gotten to Renaissance Intelligence for administrators and educators, which I assume describes many of the folks listening to this call. In particular, what we're excited to do is deliver a single pane of glass, as it's sometimes called, a single platform, a control center, a command center that will serve the needs of administrators across the district, and in particular, the three titles that you're seeing there on the slide. Assessment directors will have a unified view of participation, performance, and readiness for assessment. They can manage their assessment programs, including screening and progress monitoring through STAR and FastBridge, as well as common benchmark formative assessments through SchoolCity or DNA. MTSS directors, I just showed you EduCLIMBER, will be able to get back and forth from EduCLIMBER and Renaissance Intelligence, and we will serve up some of those data visualizations for the educators, and the interventionists directly in the Renaissance Intelligence interface, so that MTSS directors can monitor fidelity of implementation, surface interventions, manage their program in the same place that their colleagues, the assessment directors or the curriculum directors, also manage their programs. Now I'm also conscious that we're talking to folks probably from a wide range of districts, everything from perhaps a 500 school district to a large urban council of great city schools and everything in between. Renaissance, serves and partners with districts across the spectrum of sizes. So for some of you on on the larger end of the spectrum, you might have an assessment department and an MTSS department and a curriculum department. If you're on the smaller end, that might be one person doing all three of those jobs or anything in between. Right? And I think that really bears out why we get so excited, why I personally get so excited about the year of the admin, about the resources and the tools that Renaissance is able to offer because we can serve the needs of the assessment director or the assessment department. Right? The MTSS director or the MTSS department, the curriculum director or the curriculum department, the chief academic officer, the assistant superintendent for teaching and learning. Right? We can go on and on and on and on and on and all the different titles. All of those educators, all those administrators will be able to manage their assessment, their MTSS, and their curriculum programs, their schedules, their calendars. All those things will happen in Renaissance Intelligence, for administrators. So as you can tell by my tone of voice and my volume here, we are thrilled to, be working on that. You know, no rest for the the wicked or no rest for the weary, as they say, on the heels of delivering all this great stuff that you've seen today for back to school 2026. We're already looking ahead to to back to school 2027. I would make one invitation, before I turn it back over to doctor Kearns. If you see yourself in this slide, if your title is anything like assessment director or MTSS director or curriculum director, and you'd like to get a sneak peek at what we're building and provide us some feedback, we want that. I want that. If nothing else, you can email me, andy.frost@renaissance.com, and let me know that you'd be interested in participating in the beta. We are gonna launch a beta before the end of this year. If you'd like to see some of the the prototypes we're building, we'd love to show them to you. We'd love to get your feedback. Would love to have you involved in that way. So reach out to your your local Renaissance representative or just come straight to me, andy.frost@renaissance.com. Okay. With that, I'm gonna turn it back over to doctor Kearns, for what I lovingly call the Ginsu knives section of our, presentation, which is but wait. There's more. Thanks, Andy. Yeah. Great segue there, because there is more. So I Andy kinda took my line a little bit because I'm I'm the one that did the slides. So, this is where we kinda say, okay. We've given you the largest, like, the most significant, like, big shifts in our products, but there's still all kinds of other wonderful features. So we're gonna go just kinda very quickly through some things here. So here's some of the other things to be aware of. Every year when we do those back to school webinars, there's two things that are always there. One is updates to learning progressions and another one is update to state test. Why is that always there? Because states keep updating their standards and changing their tests sometimes. So, for these states, we have updated, learning progressions this year. So you can see the states listed on the screen there. Some for reading, some for math, some for both. In the case of Texas, it was just that they added some standards around lecturer or the Spanish reading content as well. But if you've have new standards that have gone online, every year, we update our learning progressions. We follow all those developments, and these are the states that have made changes or additions this year. And these learning progressions are already alive now working in product. So you have total assurance that the skills being assessed in star are lining up exactly with your standards even if those standards are relatively newly deployed. Again, the other thing is that, states make tweaks and changes and modifications or complete reworks to their state tests. And one of the things that you ask us to do is to, do linking studies between our assessments and your tests so that we can make some projections around estimated proficiency. And so these similarly are the states for which we have new or updated linking studies. Sometimes there's not a new test, but sometimes we just got access to more data, which can help us refine the numbers. So you may be saying, yeah. I have a new test. Oh, great. That that's there. Or you may be saying, I don't have a new test. Why is my state listed there? If you don't have a new test and your state is listed there, it's just that we got additional data to refine those linkings as well. So these are the states for whom we have updated linking studies. And again, these things are live in product now in STAR. Couple other features here, for our STAR CDMs or curriculum based measures. We know that passage oral reading fluency is very widely used. It is very popular and we've added a new feature called score assist. And basically that allows our technology to to do a a read of a student reading aloud and give you an analysis of their fluency. This has been possible, through LALilo, the LALILO fluency analyzers. LALILO came into our family as a product a couple years ago. They've done some really advanced work on speech recognition, and so that work has now been embedded into star CBMs. So you can take a look at that feature as we encourage you, to to try this out. If you're using passage role reading fluency, try out, the scoring assist feature and see how it does in evaluating how your students are reading and offering you some feedback about their level of fluency on their texts. Star preschool, another big area for us. The star preschool product has been out for a while, but we've added to it for this year. Those additions are primarily focused in two areas. One is additional numeracy content. The other is additional content related to whole child considerations. So, if you are a user of STAR Preschool, be aware you will see more assessment feedback, more options in there for you, more information coming back off of your students using, STAR Preschool, particularly in these areas of numeracy, and the whole child kind of perspective there. The other element, vocabulary, which came over to Renaissance as part of our acquisition of the Nearpod family as well. Vocabulary, if you've not seen it, I think about it this way. For any of us that knew Schoolhouse Rock, this is Schoolhouse Rock updated and contextualized currently. So it uses hip hop, to teach vocabulary and knowledge to kids. And coming to vocabulary this year are two new features. One is a writing lab. The other is a rap battle. So in the writing lab, it's really a separate standalone writing environment for students to do more work around both creative and more structured writing. It's gonna allow students or allow teachers to have the ability to assign, different assignments rather flexibly. And and really what it's designed to do is to encourage your kids to do more writing practice beyond just the traditional lessons you're doing. And we know that writing is like everything else. To get good at it, you have to practice it. So the intention of this particular feature is to help kids get more practice with their writing. The other thing I think kids will really, really like, because there's always been the ability in there to go into the studio and record your own hip hop raps, around terms. But now we built into vocabulary an opportunity for a rap battle. So an interface where students can compete to create the strongest rhyming lines. We feel like this is gonna encourage creativity, vocabulary development, and writing fluency. And I don't know if everybody's ever thought about this, but if you do a language analysis of the average hip hop song, they are very complex in terms of language. It is full of advanced vocabulary, and that's kind of the magic of using hip hop to teach things to kids is you are drawing in them them into something that they really like engaging with, and it's a very complex text for them. And so it introduces them to new words, and that's a wonderful, wonderful thing. So these are some of the additions coming into Flocabulary. In the case of Nearpod, we wanna highlight a couple of things there. One is we know that there's a lot of, you know, consideration about technology and appropriate digital digital citizenship. So we wanted to highlight the 148 different lessons that come into Nearpod through common sense media. So their digital citizenship content, that content is in Nearpod. So if you're looking for lessons to support your students in developing their skills and their knowledge around digital citizenship, it is there. There's also a new feature in Nearpod of a reading level adjuster. So it allows you to create different versions of the same Nearpod lessons without starting from scratch. You can tell that adjuster to make things more complex or nextcom or less complex depending upon student needs. Again, making it a whole lot easier to adapt things as necessary than it ever would have been before. And the final main new feature in Nearpod, another one here is teacher notes. You know, if you've worked with Nearpod a lot, you can build your lessons in there. In many ways, it kinda looks like Google Slides or PowerPoint. And you know that one of the features, particularly in PowerPoint, is that notes tab where you can have the notes that you see as a teacher that are not projected out there to your audience. And so we brought a very similar feature into Nearpod where teachers have a space where they can put their notes, their reminders, and their details just to help them as they make their way through teaching those lessons. And these are in a place where the teachers see them, but the kids don't necessarily see them while the teacher is working through there. So just another way to support teachers in making their work easy. Now two things. Number one, a lot of these features, And I told you when we started, awareness not training. So you may now have jotted down the name of one or two enhancements that you didn't know about. I know my colleagues have been pasting things in there, but the other thing is for some of these enhancements, you might want some professional development that could take a variety of forms from someone coming on-site to someone just working with you for a short period of time remotely. Y'all listen to what I'm saying. The research is clear. Even a tiny amount of professional development on certain key features makes a big difference in the level of usage of your programs and the resulting growth that your kids get. So if we talked about a new feature, we would also love to talk with you about someone coming on-site or just doing an hour remote with you to work you through that new feature and answer and answer product questions that you have. So we're gonna be providing information, regarding, professional development opportunities, and we haven't covered everything. We did the big rocks of what's going on. I just did the Ginsu knives, the but wait. There's more kind of thing than Andy said. But we don't have time to cover every single update that we're doing. And, y'all, it's also not just back to school where updates occur. Updates occur throughout the year. So you're always able to follow along. We have this this little brochure prepared for you this year that highlights all of the features that we've talked about. So I know my colleagues are gonna be pasting the link to it in there. It kinda parallels what we're talking about. But just keep your heads up because, again, it's not just back to school when new stuff comes out. It comes out all year long because we're always working to make our products more effective, easier for you to use, more options for kids. That said, we could use your help with something. And we've asked this for the last couple years, and you have always responded. People keep asking for more CDMs or curriculum based measures. So part of that process is when items are developed for new measures, we need real kids to interact with them. So this year, we are working to add a variety of new CBMs, particularly for math and reading. So is the Spanish version, of our our star assessment for reading. That is one of the areas where we're looking for things. So you see some particular skills listed there. The identification of letters in Spanish, the segmentation of syllables in Spanish, division from 100 in math, mixed multiplication and division in math, and oral language. If those are areas that, you know, your kids are working with regularly, we would love you to be using these items when you see them appear in product. Some of these things are out right now. That oral language piece is gonna appear in the fall. These items will be out for field testing. The more of you that use it, the better we can do in taking this into its final form. If you were using it in field testing, it's gonna be a very similar experience to any other item that has been fully developed. There simply won't be some of the higher level reports. So there's a notation there. The reporting will be limited to the classroom views only while these items are in field testing, but they've been a lot of development already. There's been a lot of testing to them already, so you're not using something that's not been proven in any way. We just need more real kids to use these so that we can do the final steps in refining them. So if you see them and they're appropriate to your kids, please use them. And that's why I have this barn raising picture because it takes a village to raise a child, and it takes field testing to raise a new item or create a new CBM or new assessment option there. So, we'd appreciate your help in the field testing of those items. So we're doing pretty well on time. I'd love to hear for just a second. We'll get ready to to wrap things up here, but we've covered a lot of things. I would love to hear from you about what new product enhancement excites you and why. As I said in the very beginning, I'm really excited with these textbook alignments because it changes absolutely everything. If you think about it this way, all we could ever do is produce a general instructional instructional planning report for you before. But now when you log in to STAR, if you tell us what unit you're doing and what textbook you're using, we can tailor that information and say, If you're doing that unit with these kids, then here's the most effective or the most meaningful information for you. So I see some folks in there who are echoing my idea. Chanel also says, you know, with those vocabulary updates, yeah, kids love vocabulary. So I think they were already competing to do raps. Let's make it a more formal contest. I think they will love it. And, again, more writing practice is always a really, really big thing. The ongoing plan, Carrie says, to align with our school textbooks. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. The books that are in there now are the ones that we have now, but that doesn't mean that we are done with every passing day. We are having conversations about doing our own alignments to more textbooks, and we are having conversations right now with other textbook companies who are working through the process to become our partners as well. So you're gonna see more and more alignments and partnerships coming in. And, again, you can get a constant read on the latest and greatest around that by visiting renaissance.com/alignment, where you will see everything that's going on there, and all those types of things. And and and again, those alignments. If if you're not seeing a book that you use, let your publisher know. We wanna we're we're kinda like the Switzerland of educational content. We wanna work with as many people as possible. So if you have a book that you went in there, one of the great things you can do is to tell your textbook representative, hey, I know Renaissance will work with partners to bring information about our textbook series into their platforms, work with them, partner with them. We'd appreciate you kind of offering that there. So, wow, a lot's going on. It's that season. It's back to school. There's some exciting stuff. And, again, it just never never stops. We appreciate you. Anybody that's on this line this time of year, you have taken time out from a million other competing priorities to be here. And so we wanna express our thanks to you, not just at back to school, but for all year long because you, just like the textbook companies, you are our partners as well, and we are continually working to serve you better. Again, if you need more, if you want more, let us know. Let us know what new features. Reach out to Andy about the year of the administrator for those of you. And it was wonderful because I saw someone in there. I think it was Chanel saying, I wanna know more about MTSS directors. It was right as Andy, like, gave out his email saying, like, email me. Ask about it. Again, it's exciting time. I don't know if I said this in the beginning, so I might be repeating. I've gotten this a couple of times, but, y'all, I've been here twenty years. I'm probably more excited right now about where we're going and what we're doing than I have been in the past two decades. I've always been excited, but we are doing some amazing stuff right now. These alignments change everything. What's coming into Renaissance Intelligence, that new system. And and listen, if you got multiple products from us, if you have more than one Renaissance product and the term Renaissance Intelligence is foreign to you, you've not seen that reach out to our representatives and say, hey, what's that Renaissance Intelligence thing they were talking about on that back to school webinar? If you've already gotten multiple products from us, man, you wanna see Roninissance Intelligence. You can see how we can make those things sing together. And even if you don't have multiple products, if you've got just one, let us show you what we're doing because we're gonna make everything work together so simply and beautifully and elegantly that our belief is it will serve teachers in making their daily work easier. And if teachers' daily work is made easier and more effective than our mission to accelerate learning is achieved. With that, we wish you the very best for the year, and we offer you a million thanks for your continued partnerships with us. Thank you so much.