Edulastic Innovator Spotlight: Duane Runyan

We are proud to introduce Edulastic Innovator Spotlight member Duane Runyan! Duane is a middle school math teacher in Gardland, Utah. He has been teaching for 24 years, and he loves incorporating new technology into his classroom. We enjoyed getting to know Duane and hope you do too!

Get to know Duane Runyan

What inspired you to work in education?

My inspiration for working in education is based on a strong desire to help kids prepare to be great.

What do you love about Edulastic? How do you use it in your classroom?

As a math teacher, I love how Edulastic allows my students to show their understanding through a variety of ways. In particular I use equation, numeric, multi-part, and graphing tools. I use Edulastic for both summative and formative assessment.

How did you learn about Edulastic? What is your Edulastic story?

Many years ago I transferred to my current teaching assignment – teaching math to 120+ students each day. My department and I were looking for a method to assess student progress in an effective and efficient way. We wanted an assessment tool that would gather and report how well our students understand the material. We knew from long experience that multiple choice tests are not very effective at evaluating upper level understanding. It is very frustrating that nearly all online tools primarily use that method. What we wanted, was a tool that would provide more and better ways to assess student understanding. We found most of what we were looking for in Edulastic.

Additionally, we found the reports to help modify our teaching practices and thus provide improved education experiences for our students.

Please sum up your teaching philosophy in a few sentences:

Educators are at school to facilitate learning. Everything that is taught should inspire students to learn more. Students should gain the ability to take what has been learned in class and apply it to life-long learning opportunities.

Share an #EduVictory from the past year:

Three days before the end of the school year I was called in for a IEP (Individual Education Plan) meeting. An IEP meeting is usually called for the purpose to establish modifications and methods to help a student overcome disabilities that affect poor educational experiences. In this case, we were trying to prepare notations in the student file for the next year.

Fortunately, I had an entire year of Edulastic assessment data for this individual. In minutes I was able to bring up the data and show which areas the student understood and which he did not. Comparing the assessment data to the student’s schedule we were able to determine a course of action to improve his experience in the future.