Starting to Use Otus to Create Music Assessments

My district is moving to Otus for our gradebook, and it has some great assessment and lesson features to take advantage of in the music classroom.

Today, I'm going to talk about possible uses for the music classroom.  So far, I've found it to be fairly flexible - and allows for a range of different possibilities!  Let's take a look - click read more below! ​↓

One of the things I find interesting about Otus is that you can create a bank of questions that you can duplicate and edit.  You cam then use these questions on multiple assessments.  This is pretty useful for when you do Pre-Test and Post-test.

As you see above, I have a naming system for all my questions to make it easier to find.  There are search tools at the top you can use to search once you have more than a few questions.  

(In case you are curious, the first number in 1.1 is the level/year, the second number is the unit.   PR = Pitch Routine, RR = Rhythm Routine, first number after the letters is the exercise number, and the letter is which exercise in the routine.)

You can also search by question type, content (words in the question), and whether the question is published or unpublished.

Something I always forget to do is add a title before I add content to the question.  Not doing this makes a dialog box appear when you go to save new content to the question - so its best to do this first.

---

It is located just below the back button once you enter the create area.  Its not the most visible thing on the page.
​
Once you've got your title, we're ready to start adding content to our questions.  Keep in mind that each question is a page in the assessment.  So I am mostly sticking to one assessment piece per question.

Most of the questions we will use will come from these six options.

Multiple Choice, Fill in the Blank, Classify
Fairly self-explanatory, these options are useful for terms and questions related to students identifying.  However, thanks to some of the tools we can do some creative things with it involving audio and images.  These questions can also grade themselves - which is great for assessments you can do often!  I'll do this in a different post.

Written & Recorded
This option will allow students to type out long answers and *record or upload audio*.  The second part of that is probably the most useful option in our classrooms.  Its not video, but you can have students link a video to another service like Flipgrid by adding the link as a short response. 

Highlight and Drawing
In a highlight question, you can upload an image for students to find mistakes or circle different things.  For example, you could have students look at a melody and identify an incorrect note, or ask them to find where in the example a double bar line is located.  In the drawing question, you can upload a graphic for students to draw on.  This is pretty similar to the highlight question option - just some different tools.

Other
Here you can find a spot for file uploads.  This only works for document, picture, and zip files.  If you want to have a student upload audio - you will need to choose the written and recorded option.  You could get around this by having the student zip the file up and then uploading as .zip is an option.

Let's Create an Assessment

I'm going to create an assessment asking students to record themselves performing an exercise.  So first, I'm going to go to the Written & Recorded option and select the Audio Recorder.

When working with the audio recorder, there are two options.

Block

Button

Either one works great - but I would try to stay consistent with the one you choose so the students don't need to relearn how to interact with it each time they see it.  I'm going to go with the Block format today.  Next to that is an option for the time limit.  It defaults to ten minutes.  Most of the time you won't need that long - so just update with the number of seconds.

MORE OPTIONS
The more options area has some useful features.  You can play with what the students are allowed to do with their recording like pausing it, allow them to stop once they start, allow them to play it back, etc.  

Now let's compose the question.  First time going to type out what I want the students to record.

Using the image button, I'm going to upload something I made in a program like Finale or MuseScore.  You can make this process quick on windows computers by using the snipping tool shortcut. SHIFT+Windows Key+S.

So, I've got some directions and the example.  There is, however, one more thing I want to add.  A starting pitch.  From here, I'm going to now select the Simple Feature icon.  This icon allows you to add media to questions.

I've generated some tones in Audacity to use, but you can record audio directly from this window.  So, if you have a piano handy or want to record a voice singing the pitch - you can do so from here.  For this, I tend to use the Bar option rather than button, as it takes up a lot les space.

Finally, let's preview our assignment!  Under the SAVE button, you will see this menu:

Clicking the preview option will display how the question appears to the student.  So mine looks like this:

You now have a basic idea on one method to create an assignment in Otus.  Check out other posts as they come for more in-depth ideas on ways to create new music assessments.