Edulastic Innovator Spotlight: Jennifer Soehner

We are thrilled to introduce Edulastic Innovator Spotlight member Jennifer Soehner! Jennifer is a high school science teacher in Dayton, Ohio. She uses Edulastic to help prepare her students for the Ohio state test. We enjoyed getting to know Jennifer and hope you do too!

Get to know Jennifer Soehner

What inspired you to work in education?

I grew up always wanting to be a teacher. I can remember playing teacher as a kid and I would never let anyone else be the teacher, I was the only one who was allowed to teach. As I went through school I continued to want to be a teacher but there was one teacher that solidified that I wanted to be a science teacher. She was my science teacher for 6th, 7th and 8th grade. She made everyone love science in her class and we were always doing hands on activiites. It was at that time that I knew I wanted to be a science teacher and inspire others to love science as much as I did.

What tips do you have for teachers who are new to Edulastic?

One of the tips I have is to search through questions that have already been created. The questions that are available through Edulastic span from lower level questions (recall) to higher level questions (analyzing, applying, etc). There are so many questions and question types to choose from that it is not necessary to always make your own questions.

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

I found out about Edulastic through our instructional coach. He sent me the link and said that it would be a good resource to use for test prep. I honestly didn’t look at it until about half-way through the year. Once I started digging through the resources available on Edulastic I was instantly hooked. I created assignments that were not only easy for the kids to access but also easy for me to see and use the data that came from them. I continued to use Edulastic to help my students prepare for the Ohio State Tests. The number of released questions from the Ohio State Tests made it easy to create assessments to help the students review.

Please sum up your teaching philosophy in a few sentences?

I believe that all teaching should be student centered in order to reach all learners. Within a classroom, each student will learn in their own unique way and it is important that they all get the opportunity to learn and succeed. Within the classroom it is also important that it be a safe place for student expression and a place for students to try, fail, try again, make mistakes and in the end be successful. The classroom should be a community in which everyone works together so that everyone can be successful.

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

I love that it is easy for the students to use. They can easily access the assessments I create and they get the results right away. I also love that I get the data from the questions right away and can use that to see where the students are doing well and where they may need more work and practice. I also love that there are lots of Ohio State Test released questions I can choose from. The students get practice not only with the content but also how the questions are structured. I mostly use Edulastic for formative assesment and review in my classroom. I have only used it for test prep but plan on using it for much more this year!

Share an #EduVictory from the past year. In other words, do you have a particular success story that has happened in your classroom or school?

Using Edulastic to help review for the state tests helped increase the test scores this year!!

Fun Facts

Favorite subject to teach:

Ecology

Favorite book:

Harry Potter Series

What subjects do you use Edulastic for?

Biology

Favorite movie:

Sisters

Funniest student moment:

I teach sophomores and every year we have a fieldtrip/bonding trip to a corn maze in the fall. One year the students were jumping out and trying to scare the teachers (very unsuccessfully). A couple of the teachers decided we would try and scare the students who were trying to scare us. We hid and had another student guide them towards us and when they got to us we jumped out and truly scared them. They screamed and ran for their lives! When they saw us afterwards they tried to play it off that they were just pretending but we knew that we had actually scared them!

Must have classroom decor:

Anything colorful!! For me my must haves are real life examples. I have several shells, a horseshoe crab, snakeskins, deer skulls, deer antlers, moose antler, coral, geodes, rocks, minerals and a real human skeleton.