This week we would like to introduce you to one of our current clients and power users: Mark Cevallos. Mark has been an educator for fifteen years. He currently teaches mathematics at Washington Middle High School in California.

Our Marketing Director, Arianna Irwin, got the opportunity to sit down with Mark and talk about his experience with Derivita, the journey to a better mathematical and educational journey for his students, and to hear his favorite math joke. 

You can watch the full video here or on our YouTube channel:

Here were some of the video interview highlights:

He “stumbled upon '' Derivita when he was teaching at a community college in Florida. He was looking for a relatively cheap product that would support their current Open Educational Resources (OER’s) and textbooks. He realized quickly that Derivita “had elements to it that no other product had”. 

After moving to California three years ago, he started working at his current high school. “This high school is a very unique type of school, where it allows the student to be enrolled as a high-school student but simultaneously taking college classes and starting as a freshman”, Mark explains. Here he had the opportunity to help build the mathematics program and now equipped with the appropriate resources he was able to implement Derivita. Mark adds, “It [Derivita] has been my core math platform from the beginning. I’ve been able to build my curriculum based on the fact that students are using it [Derivita] on a regular basis”. 

“At this point in time, I’m not only using Derivita for their homework practice. I use it for progress monitoring checks. I use it for diagnostic tests to figure out where students are. I am using it as an intervention program to help support students, who [may be] two, three, four years behind in math, and then redirect them to some content Derivita already has,” Mark describes his daily use of Derivita. Mark adds that he is “finding uses for it every day”. 

He comments on the results of using Derivita in a high-school mathematics program as well. “To see the growth my students have been able to make over the past few years has been awesome”. On average 55% of his students are coming in as freshmen at least three to four math grades below where they “should” be. “I have been able to get them from four to five years below to almost all [back] at grade level”. This a big step in the right direction, especially when you consider the additional roadblocks these students have faced with educational delays caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Mark concludes with “it's been a wonderful journey”. 

Learn more about Derivita by requesting a demo and clicking below: