Derivita Power User Stories: Empowering Students, Parents, + Teachers

In April, our Marketing Director, Arianna Irwin, had the opportunity to speak with Rachel Marshall, Canyons School District's Middle School Math Specialist. When Rachel Marshall, Middle School Math Specialist for Utah’s Canyons School District, first encountered Derivita during a virtual Utah conference in the early days of the pandemic, she knew it could solve a major issue her staff and students faced: teaching and learning math in the Canvas LMS.

Watch her full video interview on YouTube.

About Canyons School District

Canyons School District is a newer, mid-size district in Sandy, Utah. Canyons was founded in 2009 and currently serves eight diverse middle schools with students from a wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds.

The Initial Problem

“Math in Canvas was the problem,” Rachel recalled. “Parents were complaining that right answers were being marked wrong because Canvas didn’t recognize '2.0' and the answer should have been '2.'.. We saw that Derivita was recognizing that. The teachers really loved it.”

Since then, Derivita has become a core part of the district’s instructional approach, especially thanks to its immediate feedback for students.

“They [Parents] didn’t know how to help their students at home, and they didn’t know if their students got the right answer,” Rachel explained. “Now they’re [the students] getting that feedback… and they know—I got it wrong, I know what I need to do, I can try again.”

Introducing a New EdTech Tool District-Wide

Rachel emphasized that rolling out a new tool districtwide takes thoughtful planning. She used regular district collaboration days to introduce Derivita and leaned on required common assessments to ensure consistent usage. “

Even if they didn’t use it for anything else except that, then they realized—wait a minute, I actually kind of like this.”

Another way Rachel has been able to encourage usage throughout her middle schools is to point her teaching staff towards Derivita’s Analytics.  This access to real-time data has helped establish Canyons' professional learning communities (PLCs) into powerful, data-driven collaboration hubs.

“They’re having conversations like, ‘Your kids did better on number seven than my kids. Why?’… That’s been a really powerful tool to model what a PLC should really look like.”

Some Parting Advice

Her advice to others rolling out new EdTech tools: “Find something in common that they all can use... Whether it’s once a month or once a quarter, that kind of forces them into it—and then they can see how to use it in a lower-stakes environment.”

Ready to start your own Derivita journey?

Request a demo in your preferred LMS with a Derivita expert today!