Renaissance DnA

I've had the opportunity to use Illuminate in four different districts, one that I inherited and three more that I brought as new Illuminate customers. It is a very well-rounded, user-friendly way to assess students in any subject, whether using their item bank or their templates to create authentic assessments for students in typically non-technology assessed subjects, such as PE or electives. I've used it in different small, medium, and large urban, suburban, and rural districts to assess students in grades K-12.

Can be used in any sized school district.

It was intended to be used to evaluate teachers using standardized test data loaded into DnA to calculate SGP, however, we could not get it to work properly and found that creating customized reports was not user friendly. We thought this would be a great tool to give Administrators and eventually teachers access to a singular system of data and continuous feedback to dramatically improve student performance. It has the potential to run great reports and to build assessments.

In all fairness, we are a more complex district with both traditional and non-traditional virtual learning students. We require unconventional reports. Our biggest issue is that it was installed on a consortium server and our student data was mixed with other districts in the consortium. This software would work much much better if it were installed on a single server, single district with a traditional school district. If you use tests that they do not have templates for, it can be time consuming to strategize how you "might" want see your report BEFORE you setup your own template to import data.

We use it school-wide for assessment creation, administration and data analysis to inform instruction and personalize learning. Illuminate has the ability to generate a great level of insightful reports without great amounts of effort. When building assessments you have a couple of different options that allow for a wide variety of question types that are standards aligned.

Great for a school with dedicated IT support and technology available. Limited tech environments will find it hard to leverage the power of the tool. The data is easy to pull out and use with many reports available quickly from available options. There are additional options for building your own reports based on your own needs.

The illuminate DnA software is a student data and assessment system used by our K-12 school district. It is used across the organization by administrators, teachers, and clerical staff. It allows users to create and administer online assessments, store state and local assessment results, and create custom reports for a variety of uses.

I think it is well suited for K-12 schools, especially for tracking student growth over time. The ability to easily upload state assessment results and produce pre-built reports provides teachers actionable data. The online assessment system is more appropriate for secondary (grades 6-12) students in our district due to the types of assessments our elementary (K-5) students complete.

I have some experience with other systems and think that the illuminate software offers more flexibility in the types of data that can be stored.