This week our Marketing Director, Arianna Irwin, got to talk to high-school teacher and Derivita Power User: Terra Whitlock. 

Terra teaches Algebra at Eagle Ridge High School in Southern Oregon. She discovered Derivita on her own in 2020 after researching solutions to help her restructure her math courses to be more distance-learning friendly with the existing help of the Canvas Learning Management System (LMS). 

You can watch her full video interview below or on our YouTube channel. You can also read some of her story highlights detailed below the video.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Terra utilized the Canvas LMS mostly “as a gradebook online and all my actual assignments were on paper, almost exclusively”. However, paper in-class assignments were not going to fit the remote style of learning the pandemic required in 2020, when everything became as Terra described it, “crazy and hard”. She explains, “I was scanning worksheets to put them on Canvas and it was not ideal. I had a class learning how to graph quadratics and I searched and searched and couldn’t find a way to have them [the students] actually graph online and the best solution I could find I came up with was making multiple choice questions and they would choose the correct graph and I thought this is not great”. Terra did some more research and stumbled upon Derivita. “I pitched it to my boss and said this would be really helpful” and the rest is history.

Terra details more of her initial experience with, “I almost felt a little guilty talking to my colleagues in other content areas because you know my assignments are auto-graded for me. It’s really great I can just look at the summary and get all the data I need to know how my students are doing without literally dealing with a stack of papers”.

Terra describes the Derivita platform as having “a really friendly user interface,” she adds, “I can customize everything, I can choose exactly what problems and how many and I can create my own assignments”.

Terra and Eagle Ridge went from fully remote teaching learning in 2020 to a mix of online, hybrid, and in-person learning in 2021 and 2022. Now they are transitioning back to a “new normal” with primarily in-person learning. However, these shifts aren’t changing Terra’s approach to her classes with Derivita, “I am still completely using it and I don’t anticipate that changing because it's just really flexible and so convenient”. 

When asked about Derivita and its part in her day-to-day life, Terra says she will create Derivita assignments and use them as her “primary, assessable piece of each learning target”.  With these assignments each student leaves the assignment and comes back where they left off, can get multiple attempts to respond to the question, and by putting the minimal amount of effort the student can likely receive a 100% on that assignment. Terra details, “it catches errors, so if you have a typo, it catches it for you and it gives you an explanation if you max out on your number of attempts - and you can keep trying until you get it. The students appreciate that”.

Terra admits that one of her students’ favorite parts about the platform, as well as is one of her favorite parts, is that the “it [the assignment] automatically goes into Canvas Gradebook- and they don’t have to wait around for me to get around grading it and that’s good for everyone”. If a student would prefer a paper assignment, Terra says she can simply print out the same assignment for that particular student.

But Terra’s favorite Derivita feature? “To be honest, as far as teacher sanity, the fact that it auto-grades is truly a sanity saver. I’m never behind. I’m never bringing things home on the weekends to grade. It changed my life”. 

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