Blog Post

2025 New year update: Reflect and reimagine with Xello

Xello Team | January 28, 2025

Webinar recap

Xello began the 2025 new year by connecting with their clients through a special address led by Matt McQuillen, CEO and Co-founder and Meredith Beyer, VP, Customer Success and Adoption. This start of year webinar provided an opportunity to reflect on the achievements of 2024, while previewing exciting developments planned for 2025 and beyond.

In case you missed it, below is a recap of the webinar highlights. And, feel free to register to watch the full update.

2024 reflections

Double student engagement

One of Xello’s most ambitious goals for the 2024 year was to double student engagement. By incorporating The Feed into the Student Dashboard to deliver relevant content, Matt explained that they were hopeful that students would engage with the platform beyond completing assigned tasks and that the fresh and engaging content would encourage a sense of ownership in their exploration and planning process.

Additionally, Xello introduced several student-focused features to give students more options for post-secondary exploration.

Scholarships provides students with more options to fund their college education with an expanded national database, offering thousands of scholarships for students to access and choose from. Scholarship applications can be completed, tracked and analyzed right on the Xello platform.
Scattergrams is an interactive feature that empowers students to navigate the college application process with visual data-driven insights. They gain valuable insights into their chances at specific colleges before the application process.

Outcomes

While falling slightly short of our big, audacious goal of doubling student logins, significant progress and insights were gained from the overall increase in engagement. What did we learn? Students that interacted with The Feed logged in twice as often and students who logged in just once during the 2022/2023 school year logged in an average of eight times after engaging with The Feed.

The Scholarships feature also experienced remarkable growth, with 500% increase in usage following the expansion in May that allows students to search a database of national, statewide and local scholarship opportunities.

What’s new in 2025

The Real Game

Xello is excited to be releasing The Real Game in the 2025/2026 school year for middle and secondary schools. The Real Game is included at no extra cost with the Xello subscription. Originally developed in 1994, The Real Game Series was a pioneer in bridging the gap between classroom learning and real-world preparedness. Through gameplay, students step into adult roles and navigate the complexities of financial and career choices.

According to Gallup, 72% of Gen Z students say “making enough money to live comfortably” is one of their top three goals for the future, and nothing else comes close. At the same time, 75% of teachers feel they don’t have the resources and support they need to teach financial literacy. This is where The Real Game by Xello comes in.

Financial literacy isn’t just about balancing a checkbook—it’s about unlocking opportunities. Students who understand financial principles make smarter decisions that set them up for success in the future.

The Real Game offers real-life scenarios where students can experience the consequences of their career, education, lifestyle, and financial choices. They learn how to manage budgets and handle unexpected events like job loss or unexpected expenses.

Students can progress in their careers through interactive storylines, where the choices they make will affect their outcomes. They’ll see how their decisions impact their financial health and work-life balance. Through knowledge checks, they can earn promotions, and sometimes chance events will happen because, well, life happens.

The Real Game also includes tools for educators to create community simulations and a rich curriculum. These cover topics like credit, consumer awareness, saving for the future, and managing career changes.

Effortless planning

Xello’s goal is to help educators guide students toward success with greater clarity, structure, and accountability. The enhanced features are designed to improve reporting, streamline workflows, and empower results-driven actions to support student success.

Completion Standards will empower districts to tailor activities and tasks for each grade level. Educators will be able to:
- Prompt students to retake assessments and assign tasks to students groups for personalized and targeted development
- Benefit from a streamlined reporting interface that will let educators quickly view overall progress broken down by student, task, grade, school or group, and keep students on track with a progress tracker on their Dashboard.
- The Student Task List will help students stay organized and on track with their goals thanks to a progress tracker feature on their Dashboard

Streamlined workflows

There will be several enhancements to existing Xello tools to help educators simplify planning, stay organized, and ensure that students stay on track. Some of these include:

Xello Course Planner will be expanding from four years (grade 9-12) to six years (grade 7-12), starting in the 2025/2026 school year, to better support students as they transition from middle to high school. Upcoming updates will also empower educators with streamlined processes and ability to provide a better course planning experience to students.
Hot off the press and just in time for January’s course planning season is a new Xello Academy course planner module for high school counselors! And, yes, Xello Academy is available at no extra cost for current Xello clients.
College Planning will enable easy tracking of FAFSA and enrollment decisions. Get caught up on how Xello helps college-bound students applying for FAFSA today.
Events will simplify organizing and scheduling college visits by allowing educators to set and share schedules of available times, while colleges can request attendance and students can view and register for the visits directly in Xello.

Our long term vision

While the reporting improvements outlined above are essential, we recognize they are largely focused on tracking inputs. The real power of data is in monitoring the outputs and outcomes of the CCR programming you work so hard to put in place and improve year over year. Below are some of the outcome-focused questions we’re working on tackling this year:

How can we help track and report on a student’s intentions as they transition from middle to high school and into their senior years?
How can we help track and report on the post-secondary pathways your alumni pursue, whether they persist, and what they’re able to achieve?
How do we move towards a more evidence-based approach to preparing students for the future.

If you are an educator interested in helping shape Xello’s product roadmap, you can join the Xello Research Panel .

Helpful resources

February Complimentary Training

Xello Blog – Great reads to support you this semester

About Xello

Xello is an engaging, online program that helps K-12 students define their future goals and transform their aspirations into actionable plans for success. The program puts students at the center of their college and career planning experience. It helps them build self-knowledge, explore their options, create a plan, and develop the 21st-century skills needed to thrive in the world of work. With over 20 years of experience in EdTech, our team has helped educators across America implement Xello to prepare students for college and career success.