Have you tried replaying student work to check for understanding? Here’s a new feature from the folks at Otus to help elevate the way you traditionally assess student learning. Formative assessment is more than a pop quiz or series of multiple choice questions. The new Assessment module from Otus gives educators lots of choices to check for understanding throughout the school day.
Earlier this year I shared the awesome learning management system Otus. It’s a powerful student performance platform that combines your favorite features from other EdTech tools. I’ve featured a few ways to use this awesome tool including 5 Tips for Creating Student Portfolios with Otus. With Otus students can access a classroom/learning management system, and teachers can assess and organize student data all in one place. They have a very cool image feature that can help capture student thinking. This gives you actionable information as you gather student assessment data during a lesson or unit of study.
Capturing Student Work
With the new Assessment module in Otus, there is now a way to authentically assess all the dynamic types of learning occurring in your classroom. The days of forcing every assessment to fit into a multiple choice format are finally gone. Otus provides teachers with dozens of assessment interactive item types – over sixty to be exact. This includes drawing, matching, fill in the blank, annotation, audio responses, image uploading, and even math and chemistry formulas.
One notable question type is called Image Highlight. This features lets students draw on a pre-existing image or create on a blank canvas. A teacher might ask students to solve a math problem and show their work (like the example below). Or they might ask students to annotate an image to demonstrate their thinking.
In a social studies classroom, a teacher might ask a student to draw the path Magellan took to circumnavigate the globe (like the example below). By highlighting an image students can show their thinking in a deeper way than a traditional multiple choice test. A physical education or science teacher might ask students to indicate the angle at which they’d hit a golf ball to score a hole-in-one.
Replaying Student Work
Asking students to show their work is great. But it isn’t always easy for students to figure out when they need extra help. It can also be tough for students to know when they made a mistake while responding to a prompt or answering a question. With the Image Highlight questions in Otus, students can sketch out their answers and a teacher reviewing their work can easily watch their progress as they annotated a picture or drew on a blank canvas. The student submission comes through as an animated image. Students and their teacher can stop and replay the image if they want to use it more than once.
If you’re a regular reader of ClassTechTips.com you know that I am a big believer in the power of digital tools to transform the way we think about formative assessment and checking for understanding in the classroom. Giving students an opportunity to capture their thinking and show what they know is just part of the puzzle. When students reflect on their work and thinking throughout the school day we can take it to a whole new level!
Get started with Otus by visiting their website to learn more about this fantastic platform and powerful assessment features like replaying student work!
