Too Much To Do, Not Enough Time
It’s no secret that teachers are short on time. According to a recent nationwide survey, 61% of teachers said they have too many demands on their time, 53% said they don’t have enough time in the school year to pause and address issues, and 41% said they lack time in the school day. Worse yet, more than half of teachers say they don’t have time to dig into the student data they’re collecting – valuable data that should be used to shape personalized learning plans and drive decisions in the classroom. With ever-increasing teacher workloads and class sizes, none of this comes as a surprise. And when teachers burn out, students fall short of their goals, and parents grow frustrated with a lack of student achievement, no one wins.
Otus Saves Educators Time
Otus was born in a classroom; it’s made for teachers, by teachers. More than 1 in 3 of our team members are former educators. We understand what it’s like to be overworked and short on time because we’ve been there. That’s why it’s our mission to save educators time. Otus gives educators time back to focus on student growth by offering an integrated platform that supports:
- Common assessments
- Standards-based and traditional grading
- Data-driven professional learning communities
- Progress monitoring
Not only does Otus save you time with features such as automated processes and prebuilt assessments, but with platform implementation and school staff onboarding. Our team maps out a plan specific to your needs and helps you every step of the way. We know that by saving you time by eliminating tasks such as manually building, assigning and grading assessments, gathering data, and reporting results to stakeholders, you can focus more on what matters most – your students.
Getting important things done – faster
According to a recent survey of Otus users, 98% say that Otus makes them more efficient educators.
With features like prebuilt assessments, auto-grading and reporting, you’re not spending time building assessments, standing at the printer to make copies, or grading a pile of tests.
Planning time can now be for planning
In the same recent survey, Otus users indicated that the platform saves them an average of two hours per week. That means two free hours to map out the next week, catch up on tasks from the previous week, or simply catch your breath.
And while two hours may not sound like much, over the course of one year that amounts to 12 full school days – over two full workweeks of your time back.
How Otus Saves Teachers Time
Creating Assessments
Gone are the days of waiting in line at the copy machine.
- With Otus Prebuilt Assessments and our library of partner assessments, the work is done. We’ve created the questions, aligned them to standards and set the answers, so you don’t have to.
- Need custom assessments? Our team is experienced in building assessments and will be happy to create anything you need.
- All Otus assessments can be modified on your end, meaning if an assignment needs to be tweaked for a separate group of students, you can make those adjustments and even save that version of the assessment for future use.
- Sharing assessments with current and future colleagues is simple with our intuitive folder sharing structure.
- Just because you’re saving time doesn’t mean you’re sacrificing quality. Otus assessments feature a wealth of interactive questions.
Assigning and Grading Student Work
Put away the red pen and never dig through a stack of papers again.
- Assign assessments to multiple classes with one click.
- Seamlessly assign different versions of an assessment to multiple student groups.
- With the Google Drive integration and Otus rubric assessments, students know exactly what they’re being graded on, resulting in less time spent trying to understand an assignment and a higher quality of work.
- After taking an assessment, students immediately receive results including digital comments from teachers, increasing transparency and clarity for feedback.
- If a student misplaces a pencil and paper assessment, they lose valuable information such as score and teacher feedback. In Otus, students can quickly and easily return to a previous assessment at any point, view the artifacts and put that information into action.
Tracking student progress
See the whole child – not just data points.
- In the past, teachers stored some student data in their SiS, some in Google Classroom, some in NWEA and so on. With Otus, you can track all student progress in one place.
- Otus Plans allows stakeholders to monitor specific goals, how students are progressing toward them, and if the interventions are being implemented with fidelity.
Communicating with Families
With Otus, everyone is in the loop.
- As soon as a teacher grades an assessment, family members receive a notification in their Otus inbox and can immediately view the grade, standards and any high-level insights. This allows teachers to proactively communicate with parents without having to manually reach out to them via email or phone call.
- Any time teachers post updates to the class board, parents are automatically notified.
- Student portfolios give parents instant access to assessments, the student-submitted products, the results and the teacher’s feedback, all side by side. This provides a clear picture of what was expected, what was produced and what the student can improve upon going forward.
How Otus Saves Administrators Time
No more data wrangling
Spend more time analyzing the data and less time collecting it.
- Administrators have a bird’s eye view of everything that’s happening in Otus, from assessments to standards to results, for every class. Otus automatically pulls data from all sources so it can quickly and easily be filtered to disaggregate it in a meaningful way.
- Gone are the days of emailing teachers to request results from assessments or other student data. Simply navigate to analytics in Otus for seamless, natural access to everything going on in the district.
- With access to the information all in one place, administrators are able to put time into the programming, decisions and analysis, rather than the collection of data.
- Administrators can tap into instant analytics to drive decisions they’re making at the administrative level around allocations for support, staffing and classes.
